‘Hopes And Fears’: Keane Arrive With A Chart-Topping Debut
It took time to hone, but once perfected, the U.K. trio’s surging, piano-driven sound had a universal appeal.
When Keane’s debut album Hopes And Fears topped the U.K. album chart in the summer of 2004, it seemed like the band’s success had come from nowhere. Such assumptions couldn’t have been further from the truth. In reality, vocalist Tom Chaplin, keyboardist/ primary songsmith Tim Rice-Oxley, and drummer Richard Hughes first performed live in 1998 and collectively struggled through five years of failures and false starts before hitting on a winning formula.
Keane’s original lineup featured guitarist Dominic Scott and was generally more rock-oriented. However, Scott’s departure in the summer of 2001 inadvertently offered the band a new direction. Newly-penned songs developed with Rice-Oxley’s piano becoming increasingly dominant. “Tim’s great skill at that point was to write songs that had a universality to them,” Chaplin noted in a 2023 NME interview. “During those years, my voice also began to grow and I wasn’t trying to copy people anymore. I began to sing in my own voice.”
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Hopes And Fears immediately stood apart as it was essentially rock music, yet entirely devoid of guitars. Nonetheless, its best songs – “Bend And Break,” “Bedshaped,” the surging “Somewhere Only We Know,” and the chromatic “Everybody’s Changing” – sounded arena-sized thanks to Chaplin’s emotive vocals, as well as Rice-Oxley’s innovative, layered piano arrangements and his skill in simultaneously playing synthesized basslines. As producer/engineer Andy Green put it, “the way Tim plays the bass is like an extension of his piano playing, and it seemed to glue the songs together.”
The public rapidly took the record’s succession of soaring anthems to heart. As “Somewhere Only We Know,” “Everybody’s Changing,” “Bedshaped,” and the strident “This Is The Last Time” all strode into the U.K. Top 20, Hopes And Fears took up the baton – not only topping the U.K. charts, but also becoming the nation’s second-biggest album of 2004 after the Scissor Sisters’ self-titled debut. Thrusting the self-effacing Sussex trio into the heart of U.K. pop’s mainstream, the record also built the band’s profile in the U.S., reaching the Top 50 on the Billboard charts.
“The release of this album was the point at which all our lives changed very dramatically,” Tom Chaplin reflected in 2023. “But I still feel very connected to all its songs. When I sing them live, they still surprise me and something will hit me that hadn’t hit me before – like a new way of hearing the song.”
