I'M JUST NOT KEANE

Trying to find alliances through music at my age is like trying to wear a new t-shirt and thinking you're cool.
It just doesn't work anymore. There are more important things in life.
So I hope that even regular readers of this blog won't mind if I say that I think Keane are a bunch of cunts.
I met the lead singer, about six months before the launch of their first album, in a bar in the Kings Road, Chelsea, through a girl that was, at the time, thinking of working with them.
I wouldn't include that meeting in a "you wouldn't think I've met them but I have" piece, because, well, I hate them too much to include it, and the meeting was brief, unlike the rest of those posts which have been fairly genuine extended one-on-ones, even if I haven't given away too much in this blog.
I'd heard a four-track demo of Keane's debut album, and to be honest knew it was commercial enough to be a hit. I thought it was a bit the same as everything else, on one hearing, but none the less my advice to the girl was that they would be more than just another band, and that if she liked them, she should go with it.
As it was, she didn't get the choice, as the band decided that her work wasn't for them.
Fair enough. She was a bit common like me, after all.
But when I did meet him, I felt slightly sick at the thought that people like this were making semi-indie music these days.
A posh, cynical public schoolboy. The David Cameron of Indie Music.
Not that that should exclude him from the possibility of being a nice guy (even I'm not that shallow) or that their music might not be any good (though there was something moany, twee and ultimately stuck up that I hated about it from the one listen I had had).
So, we fast forward some three years or so, and Keane have sold 7 million albums worldwide. A journalist I know and love dearly, called Michael, coined the phrase in a review that Keane had "countryside faces", and indeed they do.
I think he mis-spelt it though.
If I could add to that description, it would be this:
As unfit as a butchers dog that's eaten too many pork chops.
Better suited to milking a cow than to the record buying public.
Like it's been hit by a tractor.
Like their fathers and mothers already had a bloodline.
You get the idea.
So anyway, very very recently, I hear gossip of a session that Keane are doing to promote their much anticipated 2nd album.
By all accounts, it's a bit more of a "difficult" album than the first. Meaning it's either shite, or shite, or shite, or just possibly, given a chance and several listens to, shite.
But anyway, that's not the story.
I didn't like the first one, and I am pretty sure I would hate the second.
Piano playing bunch of upper class cunts in my book. But then no one bought my book, and 7 million bought their album. So like I said, it doesn't matter whether I like the music or not.
So at the very recent session we have this series of events:
* Keane send in their security guard to check out their dressing room in which they shall be sitting before the session. The security guard walks into the room, which is, a room. "Where will they be sitting?" asks the security guard. "In the... er, chairs," says my friend, slightly confused. The security guard tries out the chairs. "Yeah," he says slightly hesitantly, "I guess these will be ok."
* Then at the soundcheck, their public schoolboy cuntryside-faced manager, insists that everyone, all crew, leave. This is, remember, a soundcheck for the people recording the session that the sound is ok. Not just the band. What they sound like doesnt matter if the recording stuff isn't levelled out properly. No band ever makes the crew leave. It's pointless. It suddenly becomes not a soundcheck.
* Anyway, after realising that the knobbish snobbishness of the band members extends to their assistant who says, in a very posh voice "the boys aren't gonna like this," a lot, the final straw comes with the filming of the session itself.
Fairly typical of this kind of recording, there are three cameras, one at the front, and one at either side.
The manager, barely out of riding jodphurs, looks sternly at the director and producer. "Are you going to film him from this angle?"
"Er, you mean from the front and from the side?"
"Yes," he says, still looking concerned at the camera placing.
"Er, yes. It's the way we usually do it."
After some frowning, and shaking of head...
"It's not his best angle you know."
"Oh."
Despite not offering a solution to how you could film someone from a better angle than either front or side, the manager walks off, shaking his head.
While most chubby performers of little note (Robbie Williams, George Michael, etc) find a gym and or a personal trainer when fame and a few million quid with six months off hit them, it appears the same is not true of the lead singer of Keane.
"The cameraman had to step back a few paces," says E.R.'s source, "when he moved to the side to play the piano. We suddenly realised about what he meant by not his best angle when he bent over to play the keyboard."
* And the final straw? "They want shower gel," says the unassisting assistant.
Now don't get me wrong, if you want shower gel, you want shower gel. Especially if you're a sweaty posh bastard that's gonna let Chris Martin sniff your crotch later on that evening while he cooks tofu sausages and pours champagne for you and the rest of your gang.
But like, if you are a multi millionaire with a security guard and an alleged "assistant" who both will run around all day sorting out everything including shifting the craggy shit that left between your bumcheeks when you do a crap, do you not think that they might, like the rest of us, have a fucking washbag between the bunch of useless shit-music making cunts that they are?
Of course not.
Send for the shower gel.
Let's hope for the love of God they are just another Travis.
And we can all wash the stench of Keane from our lives with a shit second album that will see them disappear into over-produced posh-music hell.
I'm just not Keane.