Fans are the future for Kaiser Chiefs (From The Northern Echo)

Fans are the future for Kaiser Chiefs

5:23pm Friday 10th February 2012 in Music By Matt Westcott

When the Kaiser Chiefs launched their latest album it came with a twist. Matt Westcott speaks to keyboard player Peanut about the innovative approach to The Future Is Medieval ahead of their O2 Academy gig in Newcastle next week.

"WE were working on The Future Is Medieval for about a year, the website, the concept and the way of people downloading it. It was a little bit like Christmas really, we couldn’t tell anybody about it, because of the whole nature of the stuff,” says Peanut, keyboard player with the Leeds’ rockers, the Kaiser Chiefs.

“As we got closer and closer to the launch date we were getting more and more apprehensive – would it be leaked on the internet? Would people find out? The nature of it made it different from any of the other three albums we had released and we were just chuffed that it worked.”

Putting 20 tracks on a website and allowing fans to choose their favourite ten has not been done before.

Not only that, customers could also choose the cover design. All for the princely sum of £7.50. Fans who came late to the party then had the opportunity to buy albums that had already been compiled.

“The idea came from (lead singer) Ricky (Wilson). He was having fish and chips with his mate, who was working in advertising and the creative industry,” says Peanut, aka Nick Baines, a former student of Newcastle University. “They were talking about their frustrations at releasing a CD now and how you have to prepromote it months before and then it’s leaked on the internet, half the songs get out there and half don’t and it becomes not what you intended it to be.

“His mate had this idea of fans designing bespoke albums. So then the two ideas sort of met and that’s the idea for The Future is Medieval.

After three years in the shadows, following the release of the album Off With Their Heads, this was just what was needed to thrust the band firmly back into the spotlight. While the publicity was welcome, it was the reaction from fans that was most anticipated.

“The curiosity and the way people spent so much time on the website, that was the weird thing,” says Peanut. “People were spending 45 minutes to an hour on the site, listening to all the songs, trying all the arrangements, trying all the different artwork possibilities. It’s using a difficult thing to keep people on any website. We realised that if you give the fans a choice like this, as a result of our little project, they do want to try something different.”

THE end result is a closeness between a band and its fans that few others can lay claim to.

“It started a new level of dialogue between us and the fans. We invited them in and got them involved. They are involved in every gig that we do, so why not be involved in the final steps of the album process?,” says Peanut.

“It’s our fans that buy the record that enable us to become successful, so it’s nice to give them a little bit of control in the process.”

Now able to rest on their laurels for a little while, bringing the idea to fruition wasn’t without its worries.

“In the days leading up to the launch we were thinking, ‘Oh, God, what if someone else has thought of this?’,” says Peanut. “And then when it comes out you get people going ‘Oh yeah, me and my mate had an idea like that’ and we were like ‘No you didn’t, because if you had you would have done it by now’.

“Maybe people were thinking on the same lines, but didn’t think it was possible to do and that’s why we persevered with it – the endless meetings and the legal nonsense and the red tape. We got there in the end and showed there was more than one way to skin a cat. As for what we want to do next, we have to think quite carefully about it. You don’t just want to stick to this system. It’s nice to innovate and inspire people to think differently.”

And that brings us neatly to the Kaiser Chief’s visit to the O2 Academy in Newcastle on Tuesday.

“We have spent a while out of the UK. We did a few festivals and a couple of one off gigs, but normally when we release a record we do a UK tour first and then we go away, this time we did it differently,” says Peanut.

“You forget that a lot of the fans here won’t have seen us since we were last on tour in 2009. It’s exciting, there’s something different about your hometown crowds. Crowds are generally great across the world, but when you get back home you realise that this is something extra special.”