Listen to the Kaiser Chiefs

Among the impressive array of German hardware parked on the street outside a Leeds rehearsal studio, an altogether more humble vehicle strikes an incongruous note. Ricky Wilson’s Mini is squeezed between his bandmates’ Teutonic performance cars. It is a model from the 1980s, when the Mini brand was on its last legs, long before BMW relaunched the car.

Cruel folk might seek to draw a parallel here with Wilson’s band, Kaiser Chiefs, a group detractors dismiss as old-timers peddling a nostalgic rehash, but never quite hitting the marque. Yet, if Wilson really was a keen-to-be-cool party-crasher, as critics of his band accuse them of being, he would surely be driving a 1960s original. The fact that, on the car’s back seat, a catalogue about garden sheds is clearly visible seems to confirm the singer’s couldn’t-care-less attitude. This impression is only strengthened when Wilson enters the rehearsal complex clutching the catalogue and enthuses about the gazebo-style construction he has his eye on, saying: “This is what it’s about. It’s all been leading to this.”

Yet they do care, deeply — just not about being cool. What bothers them is when their music and their motives for making it are either belittled or misinterpreted. When, over drinks at their local pub, I say that I love their new album, Off with Their Heads, Wilson says: “Well, can you write that? Chris Martin texted me to say he thinks our new single is great, but he doesn’t go on the radio and say, ‘I’ll tell you who my favourite British band is: Kaiser Chiefs.’ ” On the table between us is a copy of a review of Off with Their Heads that gives the album four stars. “But it reads like a five,” Wilson quips. “They should put that on the posters: ‘Four stars, but reads like a five.’ ” His characteristically dry humour cannot entirely mask an irritation that the band weren’t given top marks; later, he will colour in the white outline where a fifth star would have been.

The reviewer’s reason for omitting it is hinted at in the barb: “The speedy arrival of their third album. . . compounds the sense of a band unwilling to let success slip from their fingers.” “What,” Wilson says, an edge to his voice, “we’re rushing one out while we’ve still got the support of the fans? We’re releasing the record because we’ve finished it and we don’t want to put it on the shelf.”

Qualified praise and lingering suspicion have dogged the Yorkshire five-piece from the start. The fact that, in their original incarnation as Parva, the band were dropped by their record label and came back with a new name and a new sound led some to view them as chancers. Their relatively advanced years, by pop standards, also aroused suspicion. Perhaps there was a slight deflation in learning, after first being exposed to the sheer sonic thrill of their breakthrough single, I Predict a Riot, that Kaiser Chiefs weren’t the teen tearaways the song made them sound like. On the other hand, as they have proved time and time again, the immediacy, the undislodgeability, of their music overrode such pointless concerns. The public certainly seemed unbothered: the band’s debut album, Employment, sold 1.8m copies in this country; its follow-up, Yours Truly, Angry Mob, was the fourth most successful pop/rock album in Britain last year. With those statistics in mind, ascribing the band’s decision to release a third album so soon after their second to panic seems perverse. Where among the facts and figures are there signs of a group in a commercial tail spin?

In fact, the album wasn’t meant to be made at all. “This year,” says the band’s bassist, Simon Rix, almost ruefully, “we were going to do a few festivals, then have six months off. Somehow we ended up in the studio.” They had written a couple of songs to bolster their live set, and had vague thoughts of making an EP. Then they learnt that Amy Winehouse’s producer, Mark Ronson, had expressed an interest in recording with them (his own album, Version, had featured a cover of their song Oh My God, sung by Lily Allen). “If you’ve got a producer who wants to work with you,” Wilson says, “and is actually actively seeking you out, and the man’s winning Grammys, I mean, you’d be daft not to.”

Fan message boards quickly clogged up with expressions of anxiety about the collaboration. Wilson didn’t share their concern. “He hasn’t made a lot of records with trumpets,” he says. “It’s just that those are the ones he’s famous for, so he gets pigeonholed as being in love with brass. Same with us. We’ve only made three records, two that people have heard, and one song that everybody probably knows: Ruby. Most people in this pub, if they were to come up to us and say ‘Who are you?’, and we said ‘We’re Kaiser Chiefs’, they’d sing Ruby at us. For us, it’s just one of the songs in the set. One of the most popular ones, mind.”

At this point, Nick Hodgson, the band’s drummer and principal songwriter, put in a call to their record label. “I remember speaking to them in January,” he recalls, “ saying: ‘Just let us do this one.’ And we can’t blame anyone else other than ourselves now if it doesn’t work. But that’s great: I prefer being in that position. That’s what it was like when we started the band. And because it was so long between having any success and us starting out, we have got this thing completely ingrained in us now that we are the only people that can do it — that everyone else will somehow get it wrong.”

Kaiser Chiefs contra mundum, then. As an attitude, it has served them well. But does it still have relevance to a multiplatinum band who are one of Britain’s biggest live acts? We come back to Ruby. Melodically and lyrically one of the Kaisers’ least interesting songs, it nonetheless became their biggest hit and was for month after excruciating month unavoidable on radio. Yet its success proved a mixed blessing: it may have been their first No 1, but it overshadowed the rest of Yours Truly, Angry Mob and, for many, turned the group from novelty to irritant.

Addressing this, Wilson is defiant: “I think we wrote much better songs on the second record than on the first, but with the second one, it was the only time we had this moment where we went, right, we have to start making an album now.” Unable to resist a little dig, he adds: “First time round, we were just writing songs to support the Ordinary Boys with.” Later, Hodgson hints at misgivings about their second album, saying: “We wanted the new record to have more of a band sound. That’s what we hear live or in the rehearsal room, this whole band racket. We wanted more of a focus on the music and the feel of a song, not just bobbing your head to every line like a karaoke bore.” “Ricky-oke,” Wilson suggests.

On their new record, the band meld the berserk social-observation pop of Employment with the demotic, terrace-chant catchiness of Yours Truly. To this mix, they add traces of late-1970s Bowie — the spiky guitar part on their new single, Never Miss a Beat, is pure Scary Monsters, and is yet another reminder of how brilliant and underrated their guitarist, Andrew White, is — and the tinny keyboard sheen of Blondie (courtesy of their keyboardist, Nick “Peanut” Baines). Of horns, however, there are none, though you will, if you listen very carefully, hear Allen and New Young Pony Club on backing vocals, while a string arrangement by the James Bond composer David Arnold graces the track Like It Too Much. The album may lack a Ruby, but maybe that’s a good thing, if it means songs as beautifully crafted and pop-perfect as Tomato in the Rain and Always Happens Like That get the attention they deserve.

It would be mad to suggest that the band don’t care how the record performs, but their enduring cussedness armours them against most scenarios. “Me, Simon and Peanut have known each other for 20 years,” Hodgson says. “And Ricky and Whitey have known each other for 12. Plus, if you’ve had your years of struggle, that’s a big bond. Most bands haven’t had that. We had seven years of struggle; most bands get two, tops.” They seem, still, vexed about that fifth star. At the foot of the review is an “If You Like This” recommendation, citing Blondie’s

Parallel Lines, rated with the full five. Rix is looking quizzical. “Did Parallel Lines get five stars when it came out?,” he asks. “That’s a good point,” Wilson adds. “Will we get the extra star in 30 years’ time?”

Off with Their Heads is released on B-Unique/Polydor on October 20

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