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Kaiser Chiefs Tickets

Would Kaiser Chiefs be fans of Kaiser Chiefs if they weren't members of Kaiser Chiefs? "That's a bloody good question," chuckles Ricky Wilson, pondering the decade of drama, departures, success and sadness that he and his band have experienced together. "It's also very hard to answer..."

As Wilson leans back on his chair and rubs his flatcap in thought, bassist Simon Rix tackles the question and he has a pretty succinct line of thinking when it comes to this sort of thing. 

"I'd like us because we're a good band, but I don't know if we'd be our favourite band - that is my honest answer," he smiles. "I don't love every one of our songs but that's because there's a fair amount of democracy in our writing."

Wilson returns to the table, ready to respond: "It's hard to answer because there's so much baggage around the band and the way that people perceive it.

"I'm obviously influenced by my favourite bands so if we're an amalgamation of everything I love then we would have to be my favourite band - but that's ignoring any baggage of things like how daft I've looked on magazines in 2007 or the fact that the lead singer is on The Voice - ignore that and let it boil down to the records and we would be my favourite band, and this would be my favourite album."

And of course, this is not just ANOTHER Kaiser Chiefs album. Their upcoming fifth LP (Education, Education, Education And War) was not so much the record that nearly broke the band - but the one that saw them born again, the one that gave them a reason to keep on keeping on as Kaiser Chiefs. The Phoenix had to rise from the ashes when drummer, founding member and key songwriter Nick Hodgson left the band in a temporary state of freefall when he decided to quit in 2012. 

Photo: Gigwise/Richard Gray

"It was hard, it was well hard," sighs Wilson. "We were a man down. Even Nick with his new stuff (new band Albert Albert), it doesn't sound like the same Nick who wrote with us. He's moved on now, but we haven't had the opportunity to evolve as much because we've taken a backseat to his leadership over the last five or so years.

"When we got in a room again it did feel a lot like it was in the beginning. It felt like our first record because we didn't know where it was going, we didn't know if we had an audience, all we wanted to do was sit down and make music together."

Simon continues: "We had to make an album that sounded like Kaiser Chiefs in 2014, there was no going back - but like the first album, there just weren't that many people that wanted to hear new music from Kaiser Chiefs. We had to make an album that made everyone sit up and listen. We had to be twice as good as everybody else to get noticed. We were the underdogs once again. We're not saying we're twice as good as anyone, we're just saying we've worked twice as hard as we ever had. You've got to believe in your band more than any other band."

So how were the first rehearsals without stalwart Nick behind the kit? 

"At first I was a bit hurt," admits Simon. "He still wanted to be in a band, but why wasn't it my band? He just wants to be in a band that doesn't really matter. He loves playing, but he doesn't have any ambition for them. I'm sure he'd like them to go far, but that's not the goal. I've been good friends with him for three decades and hopefully always will. Everyone's just happier now, even when he was in the band we were sort of a man down because he wasn't totally into it."

Listen to the Education, Education & War album sampler below

It's fair to say that the returning Kaiser Chiefs of 2014 would be a very different band indeed had Hodgson stuck around. For instance, would Wilson still be a judge on BBC's The Voice had Hodgson had any say?

"No," replies Wilson, before Simon interjects: "I don't know, y'know. As soon as Ricky got announced for The Voice, I got a text from Nick saying that he thought it was great for the band, but if he was in the band still I don't know if he'd have that opinion. It's a really weird situation."

Ricky returns: "We're an alternative band and we worry about everything - we worry about everything that can go wrong. You concentrate so much on that but you forget that it's such a big thing for the profile of the band."

If there's one thing that Kaiser Chiefs have always been accutely aware of, it's their profile. They have never had any shame about confessing their ambitions to be massive, nor should they - especially for a band whose debut rose to wordwide attention when it wasn't unusual for a guitar to shift millions of albums. 

"Nowadays It's unusual for anyone to sell a million records, let alone two like we did," shrugs Wilson. "The biggest album of last year didn't scrape a million, but things change. I'm sure that Lady Gaga makes more money from perfume that from records, but that's great for her. You have to find different ways of doing things - the survivors will find another way. There's no point in complaining that no one is buying records, you do something about it. Its like Jurassic Park - life will find a way."

He adds: "The first record sold over 2million copies, but then you can't sit around for the rest of your life saying 'why aren't we selling 2million records?' because no one is. It's about people hearing what you made, and we're more excited about that than the figures. Fuck it, of course we'd love people to buy a million records, but it's not the world we live in. It's asking for the impossible, but it's not going to stop us."

Returning to the barracks to take their approach to their audience back to basics, Kaiser Chiefs also found themselves singing about ideas and feelings a lot closer to home, shaking themselves free of the 'nonsense' of their last few releases. 

"On our first record we weren't even writing about our city, it was our street and sometimes our living room," remembers Ricky. "Now we've travelled the world so our horizons have broadened a little bit, but it's about trying to write that 'universal song'.

"If we'd have tried to write 'Coming Home' just because everyone likes coming home then it wouldn't have been very good. For me personally, I thought it was more metaphorical. It was more about one of the first times me and Simon went to Leeds Festival and ended up on the first bus home at like 6 in the morning on the day after, and my friend Lee was on the bus on his way to work. It was my first festival and I thought to myself 'I don't ever want to be on that side of the barrier again, I want to be on stage, and I don't want to be on this bus on my way to work'. My idea of 'Coming Home' is about being in a band and making records."

Photo: Gigwise/Richard Gray

So, you've already shifted millions of albums, headlined festivals, sold out stadiums, helped to shape and define a genre for a generation, nearly imploded and then come back from more. What can Kaiser Chiefs possibly have left on their bucketlist in the years ahead? 

"I don't feel like I've done the thing I'm supposed to do yet, which is a good feeling to have," smiles Wilson. "It would be awful if I had already had the best day of my life - that would be really shitty, but I do feel like it's somewhere on the horizon and it feels like we're getting closer to it."

We put it to Wilson that it's equivalent of asking Neil Armstrong if he wants to go bowling after returning from the moon. 

"Aye, that's good - but I'm sure that until the day he dies he'll believe there's something else, and it's a good feeling to have."

Kaiser Chiefs release new album Education, Education and War on 31 March, 2014. 

As well as being confirmed for V Festival and T In The Park, Kaiser Chiefs will also be performing at the opening of the British Grand Prix at Silverstone on Thursday July 3. Visit Gigwise Gig Tickets for more information.

Below: 19 exclusive photos of Kaiser Chiefs at The Scala, London