Making music for the future

KASABIAN’S Sergio Pizzorno doesn’t care what the hipsters think.

“Everyone has an opinion,” says the musician, at his home studio in Leicester. “Maybe we will surprise a few people. There are often misconceptions about big bands.”

He is speaking ahead of the English rockers’ headline date at the Forbidden Fruit festival in Dublin. Forbidden Fruit has a tradition of showcasing avant-garde music. Some regular attendees see Kasabian’s presence on the bill as a betrayal and have taken to the internet to vent.

Pizzorno wasn’t aware of the controversy. Now that he knows, he doesn’t really care.

“You have to use these gigs to show people that you ain’t what they think you are,” he says. “You use whatever energy that is out that and give it back to the audience.”

For years Pizzorno and his bandmates have been pilloried in the media as the personification of boorish lad rock. Oasis without the charm and the swagger. They couldn’t give a hoot what the detractors say. In the long run, Pizzorno believes their music will have the final say.

“It’s not about now,” he says. “It’s about 10, 20 years time. When everyone is looking back. No one is going to remember what a journalist wrote or what someone said on the internet. They’re going to listen to the tunes, look at the album covers, and watch footage of the gigs. So it’s not a problem. We’ll see who’s right two decades from now.”

Pizzorno has been working on the group’s fifth album, the follow-up to 2011’s rollicking Velociraptor!. It is very early days and he is reluctant to say too much lest fans form the wrong impression. There are quotes floating around the web to the effect that Kasabian are planning a dance record. That’s far too simplistic.

“My description is ‘future psychedelia’,” says Pizzorno. “I’ve not gone too far into it yet. However, I do feel we need to look forward in rock’n’roll rather than staring at the past all of the time. We need a ‘future’ music. I’m going to try and create it.”

Onstage, guitarist Pizzorno and singer Tom Meighan are extremely intense, playing every gig as if it is their last. What are they like in the studio? “Everyone is on the same page,” says Pizzorno. “There are never any spanners in the works. In terms of music, Kasabian is a very direct thing. We never deviate from the path. We’re all behind it.”

They may be a smoothly functioning machine today but that wasn’t always the case. Early on, Kasabian were constantly lurching from crisis to crisis. Four working-class lads from the Leicester suburbs, when success came they were determined to live up to the cliché of debauched rockers. It’s a miracle they’re here to tell the tale, Pizzorno believes. “Around our first two LPs it was simply insane,” says Pizzorno. “It got too big. I didn’t think we’d make it past two weeks, let alone the best part of ten years. I can’t believe we actually managed to make one album.

“Eventually we had a wake-up moment,” says Pizzorno. “We thought, right, either we become fuck-ups and piss it all away or we go and make good records. We decided we would concentrate on music. Once you get out of that ‘warp zone’ and focus on the albums, it’s okay. We had a good crack at living the rock’n’roll lifestyle.”

Kasabian’s origins go back to 1999. School friends Pizzorno and Chris Edwards started playing gigs around Leicester, with the reclusive Pizzorno reluctantly taking vocal duties. In 2002, they randomly came upon Meighan singing outside a city centre pub. He was making a spectacle of himself but visibly enjoyed the attention. Edwards and Pizzorno stopped in their tracks and looked at one another: they had found their frontman.

If they have anything in common with Oasis it is probably their love of an old-fashioned rock feud. Kasabian publicly dismissed the late emo group My Chemical Romance as ‘clowns’ specialising in ‘ventriloquist’ music and had a backstage stand-off with Kaiser Chiefs at Oxegen. There have been some awkward consequences — once they found themselves seated opposite the aforementioned My Chemical Romance on a transatlantic flight, making for five and a half hours of uncomfortable silence. Such antics have generated negative publicity. However, it would be short-sighted to write off Kasabian as no-brainer rockers, perpetually looking for a fight. A lot is going on in their music.

Their Mercury-nominated 2009 album West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum was a meditation on the relationship between art and madness. Velociraptor! had songs about absinthe-drinking in Paris and the onset of early middle age.

“We are not a meat and veg outfit,” says Pizzorno. “We put a lot of thought into our gigs. We want people to come to our concerts and lose their minds and feel 50 feet tall. You work all week at your job and save up for your ticket. We are determined to put on a show and not take anyone for granted. And we know our fans will appreciate those little moments where we make them stop in their tracks and think for a second.”

Next year marks the tenth anniversary of their debut album, Kasabian. “We’ve going to celebrate in a massive way,” says Pizzorno. “It is an achievement in this day and age. Most bands don’t last very long. All the groups that started out the same time as us are gone. To be still here is a feat. We are immensely proud of what we’ve done.”

* Kasabian headline Forbidden Fruit, Kilmainham, Dublin, on Saturday.