Kaiser Chiefs

Tue 19th Jul, 2011 in Features

Exploding out Britain in the mid 2000’s, Kaiser Chiefs won over fans with a trio of tongue in cheek indie rock records and an electrifying live show. Soon after they were announced to play Splendour In the Grass speculation of a new album heated up, but no one was prepared for the surprise announcement on the 3rd of June when they announced their new album, The Future Is Medieval ,was up online and you could pick the track listing and art work yourself.

FL caught up with Nick Baines, better known as Peanut, from the band to talk about their new album, releasing an album in the digital age and their upcoming Australian tour.

Your newest release kind of took everyone by surprise, people knew you had something coming out soon and then suddenly it just hit the web. What was the decision behind springing it on everyone like that?
If you do a traditional CD release it’ll get leaked by somebody. We’re a big band, when somebody sees the CD in the pressing plant they’re going to nick it and put it on the computer, it just happens. It’s fair enough it happens, but it’s very frustrating for the artist because you’ve worked hard writing all these songs and people are just going to hear drips and drabs of it. One song or another song here and they won’t even see the artwork, they’re not going to hear it in proper quality, so that was kind of part of the idea and part of the concept was we were just going to launch it unannounced; put a single out on the Monday, send it to the radio, no other news and on Friday the 20th the songs go on the website.

I’ve got your press release here, it’s dated two days before you released the album and there’s not mention of it. Was it really satisfying to beat the leak?
Yes, totally! It’s important for a band to be motivated to still make music and we definitely were motivated to still be in a band, but at the time we needed to not just do another standard CD release because of the problems I was describing and the frustration of having to describe your record to people three months before it comes out to journalists. That’s the way things go at the moment, but we were keen to show, “Here’s another way to do this, let the music speak for itself.” That’s why we launched the website unannounced and then it was just like everyone was scrabbling for pens and pencils and Dictaphones thinking “Jesus I’ve got to talk to these guys, got to find out what’s going on, what are they doing.” It feels good to do something a bit different and actually make it work, it feels great.

Bands like Radiohead and NIN have done big surprise online releases before, were you inspired by them to try and do something bigger?
They all did their own thing, digital music is becoming the future but it’s not quite fully there yet. Obviously there’s still reason to release CDs and art and that sort of stuff. No disrespect to the ideas that you listed, because they were good ideas for ways to try and do something with digital music, but what we were trying to do was try and put the value back into music as opposed to giving it away for free. It still costs us to make an album; physical costs as well as emotional time put into the album and it’s important to make people realise that downloading music isn’t free, it’s not some click and it disappears into the abyss of 40,000 mp3s you’ve got on your computer. Digital music is the new way of distributing the traditional album. An album is a thought process, it is a creative work, so we let people choose any of the 20 tracks, we say we’re proud of all 20 of these, any ten you choose we’re happy for you to call that The Future is Medieval.

We had to write 20 songs that stood up on their own, rather than write b-sides and album tracks, every song has got to be brilliant. And then it was just a case of trying to think of what else would it worthwhile for people to pay £7.50 for an album. So we thought, you can pick the running order, you can design your own artwork so every time you play your mp3 the artwork comes up and you can say “I made that record, that’s mine. Not only is the playlist mine but the artwork as well.” And in digital download that’s what you get, an mp3 and an artwork, so at least you give the fans control over both of those.