“We’re a wake up call to British music. Big time! British music needs a kick up the arse and Britain needs a new band to breathe life into the British people again. We’ll blow a hole in rock’n’roll. We’re the saviours of a nation’s music” Kasabian
Named after Charles Manson’s pregnant get getaway driver, Linda Kasabian, the moniker is also Armenian for ‘butcher’ – appropriate for a band who work with a cut-and-paste collage of sound. It’s also fitting for a gang with ambitions to cut the pap out of pop.
Kasabian grew up in Leicester, a city hidden in a sprawl of suburbs. The kind of place where you listen to music, watch football, get drunk and wander the street at night singing, because there’s nothing else to do. Kasabian were 17 when they began making music seriously. The Brit-Pop boom gave them the impetus to form a band, but it was their love of Hardcore electronica that led them to buy a computer. “You need to play with music a bit and that’s what we did. We got the computer and we cut rock ‘n’ roll up, because there’s no point in going back to how it was. It’s all about new ideas and creativity.
Over the past year Kasabian have attracted fans as disparate as Noel Gallagher to Arnold Schwarzenegger, who recently announced that he likes to work out to their music. The band enjoyed a hugely successful festival season. Their celebrated Glastonbury performance saw sales of their double platinum debut album rocket 200%, propelling the record from Number 76 to Number 27. Kasabian also collected reverential critical accolades for their headline slots at Reading/Leeds, Wireless (Hyde Park), T in The Park and Oxygen.
Kasabian recently toured with Oasis in the US, where sales of their album have exceeded 200,000 since its release last Spring. Their debut US single ‘Club Foot’ was play-listed at over 40 Modern Rock radio stations and the band have appeared on various TV shows, including Letterman, Jimmy Kimmel and The Late Late Show. Tracks from their album have also featured on episodes of ‘Desperate Housewives’, ‘The OC’ and ‘C.S.I’.
Currently working on their new album, due out later this year, how will Kasabian top the last twelve months? A year, in which, they conquered Glastonbury, stole the show at Reading/Leeds and blazed a trail across America with Oasis. “Our next record is gonna be a million times better than the first record” says Tom Meighan. “We just wanna make that classic British album like ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’. It’s rock ‘n’ roll, it’s sexy and it’s good and dirty”
It’s gonna be intelligent as well” adds Serge Pizzorno. “We’ve never been a pub rock band, I know people like to put us in a fuckin box as these lads that ‘ave it, and we do enjoy ourselves, but we’re fuckin serious about the music we make. We’re so excited, now’s the time to stand up and be counted. If we really are the band we say we are, which I do believe, we’ll be there and we’ll still be around in years to come!!”
