First among sequels

I have to congratulate you,” Kaiser Chiefs drummer Nick Hodgson says as I’m getting up to leave.

“How’s that?”
“You’re the first guy today who didn’t use the word ‘pressure’.”
There goes that trusty difficult second album angle then. Kaiser Chiefs’ Yours Truly, Angry Mob takes up exactly where its million-plus selling predecessor Employment left off. Stephen Street’s back behind the desk at Oxfordshire’s Hook End Manor, and there’s a noticeable absence of free jazz odysseys or excursions into Romanian folk music, just more hi-octane tunes that manage to satirise boot-boy herd mentalities (and mentallers) while co-opting terrace slogans.
Case in point: the default title track’s refrain of “We are the angry mob/We read the papers every day/We like who we like/We hate who we hate/But we’re also easily swayed”. The Leeds band have been chewing on the same irony tablets Nirvana ingested on ‘In Bloom’ and spewing out infectious tunes tailor cut for the kind of goons who might previously have kicked their authors heads in of a Friday night. And, it must be said, the Kaisers do weekend rumble scenarios exceedingly well: their minor classic ‘I Predict A Riot’, all ? & The Mysterians organ and shouty Sham 69 vocals, was arguably the finest song about urban aggro since The Jam’s ‘Down In The Tube Station At Midnight’.
That said, even their most downbeat lyrics ( ‘Everything Is Average Nowadays’) are borne aloft by gung-ho melodies. This writer loves Unknown Pleasures and The Holy Bible as much as the next runny-mascara’d basket case, but there’s something to be said for pop music that makes you feel like getting out of bed rather than hiding under it. Life’s hard enough without consumptive poet laureates picking at the bellybutton fluff of the soul in order to determine the precise colour of their pain.
“Too right,’ Hodgson says. “I was just reading a Bloc Party interview on the way over here. It made me feel gloomy!”
Hodgson is not your regular drummer. For a start, he writes the band’s material. And he looks more like a willowy front man than a beefy beatkeeper: cute, pale, floppy-fringed, and with plenty to say for himself.
“Everyone knows that the world is in trouble,” he continues, “that’s why Newsnight is on. We’re not avoiding these subjects, ’cos they’re in there, it influences what we’re writing, but you don’t want to just write a blog about horrible everything is.”
But, as with all bands whose quintessentially English roots show up under the spotlight, one wonders how Kaiser Chiefs translate in America, a continent that has had a schizophrenic history of relationships with limey acts, given to falling head over heels for Morrissey but not The Smiths, Coldplay but not Pulp.
“All the radio stations are turning to talk radio, so there’s no rock radio left in New York, which is weird,” Nick says. “And the stuff you do hear is middle of the road American stuff, Goo Goo Dolls sort of thing. Mind-numbing. So I’m not sure how they get the Englishness.”
Still, it looked like they were having ball on the American Live 8 date a couple of years back.
“We had 15 minutes and three songs, the biggest gig in the world. The thing is, I was most nervous about the fact that the DVD of Live 8 is probably going to get released at some point, it’s going to be on there forever, so if you mess up… the more pressure you put yourself under at that point, the more panicky you get.”
Such experiences may have had a profound impact on the band, but you’d never know it from the new songs. The subject matter remains largely localised and Leeds-centric. According to Hodgson, the runaway success of Employment didn’t have any significant long term effects on how they go about their business.
“At the beginning, when we first started, we’d get excited about everything,” he concedes. “And as more and more things happen…. For example, getting a song on the radio used to be an excuse to have a day off. And then, when we got into 2006, after a year and a half of being on the radio, that doesn’t get you anymore. Although when ‘Ruby’ came on the radio, that got me excited in the same way. I suppose it always will when it’s a new song.”
Kaiser Chiefs could conceivably have stayed on the road for years flogging that first album in an attempt to push sales up to the three or four million mark, probably to the detriment of their sanity and songwriting. Was there a point where they decided enough’s enough?
“Yeah, we didn’t even announce it; it was just obvious that was what we’d do. We did 2005 and stopped touring. People think we toured all the time in 2006 but we didn’t, we just did a tour of the UK for two weeks, Europe, did a week in Japan, and it makes you look like you’ve been everywhere. People go, ‘It’s non-stop – how do you get time to write?’ and you go, ‘I’ve just been home for eight weeks!’”
The classic trap is that bands become institutionalised after a year on the road and can’t feed themselves or get to bed without the help of the tour manager.
“Or they can’t go to bed without being pissed.”
Was the atmosphere different when they reconvened to write the songs for Angry Mob? New suits and panties? Platters of coke, fire eaters and troupes of burlesque artists?
“Not at all. We booked into the same room that we were always in, set up our gear exactly the same way. I mean, we had better stuff, but not really that much better. I think we’re just older. We’ve been going ten years this month really. We didn’t have any success until about six years in, we were 26, 27 when we started getting any success. You’re much more grateful at that age I think.
“If we were 20 and working on our second album, then we’d be different people. If we jumped in time from January 2003 to January 2006, the difference would be mega, you couldn’t understand it. But every day became an extra step up a very, very big ladder. You work out how you do photo shoots, and how quickly you can do them, how it’s not something you prepare for for a week. In 2003, we’d start working on what we were going to wear for a month! But it’s nice to have success, because it makes you feel like you don’t have to desperately prove yourself, which is what we were doing. So we can handle it.”
He pauses for effect.
“I don’t even know what we’re trying to handle really!”
Your's Truly, Angry Mob is out now on Universal.