HOWZAT

Certainly, Keane have reason to be enjoying a buoyant, chemical-free buzz in autumn 2008. Perfect Symmetry is a glorious album. Rice-Oxley’s solid-gold songwriting skills are shinier still. The first single proper, The Lovers Are Losing, is a soaring, singalong triumph. The title track is a rafter-rattling anthem worthy of U2. The band, whose USP was that – gasp – they didn’t use guitars, are now knocking out meaty six-string riffs all over the shop. More broadly, an Eighties pop-influenced exuberance has replaced the piano-ballad melancholy that suffused Keane’s earlier work, when the pressure of fame and workload bore down on the old friends.

The tensions within Keane were evident in the songs that Rice-Oxley wrote for Under the Iron Sea. Some were indirect attacks on the rock star that Chaplin had become; others were direct. “Fool, I wonder if you know yourself at all?” was a lyric in Hamburg Song. Was Chaplin happy singing songs that were being rude about him?

“Eh… I don’t know,” says Rice-Oxley, falteringly. “I don’t think it was a particularly pleasant process for him. It wasn’t a very pleasant process for any of us, really. My main memory of making Under the Iron Sea was that Tom wasn’t particularly engaged.”

Chaplin wasn’t “engaged” because he was increasingly more interested in drinking and taking drugs. “That was part of the problem,” says Rice-Oxley. “But I think that stemmed from the fact that he wanted to get away from being in the band. Just to have a break from it. We hadn’t stopped at all. We were just burnt out; we should have had a bit of a holiday, really.” But instead, Keane kept working. Or trying to. When Chaplin didn’t show for a Times interview in 2006, his bandmates covered for him, saying he had a stomach bug. “Well, that stuff was happening a lot, all the time. It was definitely…” Rice-Oxley is talking in staccato grunts now. “I dunno – what else can you do? We wanted to protect him, I suppose.

“It’s a cliché you always see in films, someone saying it’s the lying that hurts. But it is really. Trust is so important.”

For Chaplin, the healing began in a Tokyo hotel room in August 2006. Under the Iron Sea had been out for barely two months, but already the singer had had enough. He was miles from home, alone and desperate. “I felt appalling,” he admits. “It had been brewing that whole tour; I just knew it was coming.”

The afternoon before the GQ performance, I meet Chaplin in a deserted room in the Royal Opera House. The singer forswears a coffee (“I had one earlier on”) and, with some prompting, recalls how he checked himself out of that Tokyo hotel and, without telling anyone, booked himself an immediate flight home. “I was the only person in first class. I just sat there on my own thinking, ‘Well, this is it, the band is finished. And that’s a good thing.’”

He talks, without resorting too much to therapy-speak, about how, since he was a teenager, he’s been prone to wild mood swings. “I’m either absurdly optimistic or depressingly pessimistic in very short bursts. And I know when it’s coming – I get more and more manic. More and more annoying!” he laughs forcefully. “Louder and louder, and then suddenly – whoosh. It’s a bit like a sugar crash.”

This, he reflects, is another example of how public school “has not really had a positive or supportive impact on me. I think I was far too sensitive for where I was.” And Chaplin says this as someone steeped in the world of private education: his dad was the headmaster of Vinehall, his mum a teacher there, too.

He’s said previously that he was taking cocaine around the time of Keane’s first single, Call Me What You Like, in 2000, but now admits, “I started doing those things when lots of people my age were doing them. And I often think, if it hadn’t been for the band, it would have made such a mess.” How did he perform on cocaine?

“I never did. I never did,” he repeats. “But there were certainly times when I hadn’t had any sleep. And was probably still steaming from the night before when we were doing things. And gigs suffered.”

Finally, in Japan, after Keane had motored straight from one hit album into the making and promoting of another, Chaplin hit the wall. He flew home, spoke to his dad, and checked himself into the Priory. Within two months he was clean, sober and back on the road. Initially Keane had a “no booze on the rider” rule, and Chaplin still won’t drink on tour, although it seems a social drink or two is allowed. There’s certainly no hint of holier-than-thou reformed addict about him. Just the calm demeanour of a clever, well brought-up young man in a band with his two best mates; someone who realised how close he’d come to throwing it all away.

“My questions to myself these days are: ‘Have you got your ­priorities straight?’” says a sanguine Chaplin, readily admitting he prefers the quietude of the Sussex cottage he shares with his girlfriend to the hurly-burly of London life (although he still has a “bolt-hole” in Covent Garden). “‘What are you doing tomorrow or next week? What do you have to be sorted and ready and organised for?’ And I really feel that I do prioritise in my life now, which is great.”

At the GQ event that night, Keane are a hit. The first public outing for their colourful and excitable new direction is greeted by much jewellery-rattling from the gathered celebocracy. When he steps up to collect his award, two years late, Tom Chaplin is blushingly grateful. He thanks his band, and he means it sincerely. Richard Hughes and Tim Rice-Oxley applaud him right back. Having almost lost it, they had their band back. “If there’s a unifying lyrical theme,” says Rice-Oxley, “it’s that people could do better, be better.” Chaplin, meanwhile, is ready to take on the world again. “It’s so exciting. I feel like a small child with a Christmas present.”

Perfect Symmetry is out on October 13; the single The Lovers Are Losing follows on October 20. Further details: www.keanemusic.com

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