All Hail The Kaiser Chiefs
by Fiona Wilson | 00.00.0000

RICKY WILSON is freezing, and he’s also nervous as hell. In fact, he’s “absolutely shitting himself.” He’s standing outside on a cold Glasgow street in late December, and soon he will head in for tonight’s soundcheck, for a show which he and his Leeds bred band, the Kaiser Chiefs, will, in support of Franz Ferdinand, play for nine thousand people.

In a minute he’ll return to the warmth and the excited
frenzy of his new life, but right now he’s grateful for a
moment of cold—a waking pause in this breathless pace
he’s been living, to realize how they got here, opening for
their “older brothers” Ferdinand, who were essentially
2004’s U.K. Kings of Indie Rock. In 10 days it’ll be 2005,
and, by the way it’s looking, this could be the Kaiser's year.

You could say Wilson has a gift for predictions. On
the heels of the American and U.K. success of the band’s
first single "I Predict a Riot,” you could even call him a
clairvoyant, but the last thing you could call him is a rockstar,
at least not in the affected, overstyled sense that we’ve
come to know them today. He is much more reminiscient
of a musician from the ‘60s, when having a popular music
career was still something to be excited about and nothing
to take for granted. Talking with him, he reminds you
of that grainy black and white Beatles interview footage,
when they were still sweet-faced, polite boys from
Liverpool, so amazed to be playing rock and roll and being
paid for it, long before the cost of freakish, extraodinary
fame took its toll. There are many indications that he is
not a modern day rockstar, the first being that he’s thanking
me for my time—a lot. (“Cheers, I’ve enjoyed this
very much, thank you,” he tells me graciously.) The second
is that he is not playing his music for the adoration of
girls and promise of sex and drugs and cash, instead, he is
hoping to make his parents proud.

None of this is very rock. But that’s not something
that matters to him anymore, because Wilson and his
bandmates broke up with “cool” about a year and a half
ago, when they formed the Kaisers. They had to ignore
“cool” completely, in fact, in order to break any new
ground to get where they were going.

“The thing is, in bands before we always tried to be
something we’re not,” he explains. The five friends from
Leeds, vocalist Ricy Wilson, guitarist Andrew White,
bassist Simon Rix, keyboardist Nick Baines, and drummer
Nick Hodgson have been together for eight years, but were
playing different music under different names until the fall
of 2003. Before then, they were continually following the
lastest trends in music, emulating other acts that were
finding success. “We basically just wanted to be famous!”
he laughs.

Nearly three years ago, they had hopped on the
Whites Stripes wagon of American garage rock under a
band name of Pavor. “I used to find writing lyrics the hardest
thing in the world. I was writing about like, working on
the railroad and walking down Venice beach. I was this
pale little kid from Leeds. That was never gonna work.”
Actually, it did, but only for a second, when Pavor landed
possibly one of the briefest record deals in history. “The
company went bust, like literally two days before they were
going to give us the second part of our advance,” he recalls.
“We had spent every bit and we were left with bills for
about a year. It was horrible, it was really, really depressing.
So for that year we all just wrote really sad songs.”

But they didn’t give up then, they just stopped following,
stopped running, and gave it one more shot. “I
thought F-that.’ I’m just going to be myself and write
something about living in Britain and things I understand.
Things I can get across. Now the writing just comes really
easily, cuz it’s stuff I know. So we got back on our feet.
We thought, ‘Right, we’ll just scrap everything, do something
new, something positive, just start again and be the
best band in the world.’ And that’s the day we started the
Kaiser Chiefs.” The songs were about growing up in
Leeds, rowdy nights out at clubs, heartbreak, and whatever else he experienced. They sounded a bit like everything
they loved—Beach Boys, Blur, the Kinks, Roxy Music—
but also like nothing no one had ever heard.

Essentially, they shut out the trends, the style over
substance, and went back to the music that inspired them
in the first place. They remembered that rock music is
designed to remove listeners from a reality that burdens,
not pull them further into its limitations and restrictions.
In the way that Arcade Fire sounds like Bowie and
Television and Talking Heads and then awe-inspiring and
unfamiliar, the Kaisers do something similar. (Although
when I mention this to Wilson, he asks, “Who? The
Arcade is on Fire?”) They make the belovedly familiar
fresh and officially divorce themselves from everyone
else’s concept of “cool.”

On the "Everyday I Love You Less and Less.” He
sings, “Everyday I love you less and less/ it’s good to see
that you’ve become obsessed/ oh, ah/ My parents love me/
oh, ah/My girlfriend loves me,” and proudly realizes that
the love he already has is more than enough. Like the
push and pull that exists in all relationships, once he frees
himself from his desire to be validated by the person or
thing he could never please, he woke up, stopped struggling,
and walked away. The further away he got, the less
he could recall why he ever sought that validation in the
first place. But now it’s seeming, in typical fashion, that
“cool” is calling after the Kaisers to give them another
chance. This time, it means it.

On October of 2003, when Franz Ferdinand chose
them as openers at the Cockpit in Leeds, Wilson’s mother
and father watched him play with his old bandmates in
their brand new band. Wilson’s “mum was in tears,” and
his father in a stiff leather jacket, back in the shadows
against the wall, trying to blend into his son’s world. “Of
course the jacket made him stick out even worse,” Wilson
laughs. He remembers it all so fondly, because that was
the night he finally made his parents proud.

“My parents know how much it means to me. And
now it’s finally happening. For a long time they were kind
of going ‘What are you doing? You’re not going to get anything
done with your life, you’re not going to get a proper
job and settle down.’ They’re more proud of the fact that
even though against all odds, I actually proved them wrong.
Now, hopefully I’ll be able to pay them back one day.”

Things happened very quickly for the Kaisers in
2004. They landed a record deal after their first selfreleased
seven-inch single “Oh My God” charted in the
U.K. and went into the studio to record their debut album,
Employment. They worked with renowned producers Steve
Harris (Dave Matthews, U2) and Stephen Street (Blur, the
Smiths) and the motorcycle of Wilson’s idol (former Blur
guitarist Graham Coxon), even made a guest appearance on
the record. “We really wanted the sound of an engine
revving on the beginning of ‘Saturday Night.’” Street
remembered Coxon had a bike, and the next day he
appeared at the studio. “I was like, ‘Oh my god it’s Graham
Coxon,’” he says. “He’s a real hero of me and Nick’s.
Graham was listening to the song, and he turns around and
he goes ‘Ah this one’s gonna be a biggie innit?’”

Of course, it would be hard to be bigger than “I
Predict a Riot,” that irrepressible track with a chorus that
marries the Beach Boys and the Ramones, and is essentially
the most infectious pop song to come out of the
U.K. since, well, “Take Me Out.” Lyrically, Wilson recreates
the end of drunken night in Leeds, as kids tumble out
of the clubs. “There’s the boys for whom basically the
night hasn’t been any success unless they get in a fight and
get arrested, and all the girls walking home holding their
shoes in one hand and a bag of chips in the other.”

On the strength of that song alone, the Kaisers landed
the opening slot on a European tour supporting for the
Killers, Franz Ferdinand, Bloc Party and the Futureheads,
which is remarkable for a band without a proper full-length
yet. Fortunately for Wilson, a future filled with
endless touring excites him. “I don’t ever know where
we’re going,” he says. “We just get in the van and I shout
at night. I quite like it, it’s like a free holiday, where you
get to do karaoke every night. My life is turning into a
proper dream. Sometimes you wake and you go ‘Oh that
was a great dream!’ but you can’t remember anything
about it. But this is the kind I love, one where you’re
allowed to remember. This is the one where you’re just
desperate to tell everything to the first person you see in
the morning.”

There’s a moment in J.D. Salinger’s Franny and
Zooey, when Franny is explaining to Lane why she quit acting.
“Just because I’m so horribly conditioned to accept
everybody else’s values and just because I like applause
and people to rave about me, doesn’t make it right. I’m
ashamed of it. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of not having the
courage to be an absolute nobody,” she says.

Maybe if one of his other bands had been the one
to make it, he would have had to live the lie of being
someone else, someone cooler, and the exhaustion of
keeping the illusion alive would have burned out the
band. The Kaisers were also tired of being conditioned to
accept everyone else’s values, and when their pursuit of
fame turned on them and failed them, they were sick of
that too. Fortunately they made it as themselves, and as
they continue to evolve, so will their music, which
already ranges far and wide enough across generations
and genres to escape the danger of being part of some
fleeting, temporary trend.When they were finally not
afraid anymore of becoming nobodies, they became
somebodies after all. F