-S: This Saturday Keane plays in Madrid.
B: (with an unfamiliar look on his face) Who?
S: Keane. K, E, A, N, E.
B: I don't know who he is.
-S: Yes man yes, the British band that took the 2000s by storm.
B: No idea. Sing a song.
S: (starts singing):
And if you have a minute, why don't we go
Talk about it somewhere only we know?
This could be the end of everything
So why don't we go
Somewhere only we know?
B: Oh yes, of course I know them. So why don't we go. Somewhere only we know?
Since I found out a couple of months ago that I was going to see Keane this Saturday July 20 at the festival Noches del Botánico (and to take my best friend as a surprise), I could not resist the urge to share with people of my generation the passion that this band has always awakened in me. I would go for a beer with any friend and I would not take long to comment that my concert of the summer was coming, assuming that anyone would immediately empathize with my emotion.
To my surprise, the above conversation has been the common tone of all my encounters. Only after humming 2-3 songs did I get my interlocutor to tune into adolescence and understand the magic of the moment. It turns out that Keane, either because of his name that doesn't match his pronunciation for a español or because of the passing of the years, has become a vague memory. How could something like this happen?!
10 May 2004 saw the birth of "Hopes and Fears", the band's first album and still today one of the 40 best-selling albums in UK history with nearly 3 million copies and 9 platinum records (some sources talk about 6 million). Keane won two BRIT Awards in 2005 for "Best British Album" and "British breakthrough act", closed a tour of more than 200 concerts around the world and the BBC called the group to become the most successful band of the decade.
Singles like "Somewhere Only We Know", "Everybody's Changing", "Bend & Break", "This Is the Last Time" or "Bedshaped" (all part of the album "Hopes and Fears") then became iconic Britpop hits that were played on the radio every time we went to school, to the supermarket, on a trip to the beach, and so on. The piano fingers of keyboardist and composer Tom Rice-Oxley (whom Chris Martin tried to tempt in the early days of Coldplay) or singer Tom Chaplin could be heard, and we all knew it was Keane and his piano rock.
Hopes and Fears" was followed by 4 more studio albums with increasingly moderate success, but which left hits such as "Is It Any Wonder" (part of Under The Iron Sea, 2006), "Spiralling" (part of Perfect Symmetry, 2008) or "Sovereign Light Café" and "Silenced By The Night" (part of Strangeland, 2012).
In 2014 the band entered a "hiatus" or discontinuous period of 5 years. 5 years of transcendental change in the industry towards a world in which we no longer buy records, we no longer have a discman, mp3 or 4 or iPod. Perhaps this is the reason why people have forgotten about the band that accompanied us in so many traffic jams for 10 uninterrupted years.
Three years ago I was in tears watching the film "Un monstruo viene a verme" (J. A. Bayona, 2016) not only because of the story but also because the plot was accompanied by a wonderful original song composed by Keane ("Tear Up This Town") that I ask you to listen to. I went back to listen to all of Keane's songs, dreaming that maybe they would come back and I could see them live with a couple of thousand spectators who, like me, have been listening to Keane in private for several years.
The dream has come true. The band from Battle (East Sussex) have decided to return to the stage with their single "The Way I Feel" (the full album will be released in September this year) and their "Cause and Effect Tour", which already has around 30 concerts confirmed in Europe, the United States and Latin America. Hopefully we will witness the rebirth of the band.
Madrid has hung the Sold Out sign but there are still tickets left in Valencia on Sunday for the more adventurous. I'm going to see them on Saturday to travel back in time, to look into the audience's eyes and understand if my nostalgia is a shared madness, but above all to enjoy giving a great surprise to my best friend, with whom I've sung Keane at the top of my lungs so many times. Long live the 2000s!
Nicolas Fernandez
