It’s about 9.30pm in the Dalby Forest, in deepest north Yorkshire, when Ricky Wilson says it.
“I want you people over there to be one side” he says, gesticulating from the stage on which the Kaiser Chiefs are playing, ”and you lot over there to be the other. But don’t worry, we’re not here to divide you like some sort of Brexit”.
At the uttering of the ‘B’ word the crowd goes silent for a moment, each punter looking ruefully round at the other as if trying to suss out who voted what. Many of them were clearly wrestling with the concept. The Kaiser Chiefs? Dividing us? These were the people after all we’d grown up with, from running around doused in chip fat to eating crisps for tea, a band who soundtracked our house warming, who were playing quietly beneath the moans in the car on the way to the delivery suite, who cared so much they even gently chided us when we become pocket vigilantes.
Band and crowd recovered of course, but it was a reminder that theirs has been a career which hasn’t always been plain sailing; as the noughties ended their fourth album The Future Is Medieval proved to be ironically an exercise in democracy too far, to be followed by the departure of the band’s long time centrifuge Nick Hodgson. Despite the recruitment of drummer VJ Mistry to replace him, rumours of a break up were rife, mostly fuelled by Wilson’s apparent defection to become a talent show mogul on The Voice, a decision which he later revealed had been made partially to raise their profile in an industry which has the collective memory of a goldfish.
All this meant that against the received wisdom 2014’s Education, Education Education and War was an experience far less awkward than the title, its sociable socialism cloaked thoughtfully with compassion and a baked in hum of people doing what they do best, in the process the quintet becoming known quantities again.
The problem with being a known quantity however is that it becomes a straitjacket for the restless. Wilson’s up close brush with pop’s apparatus had given him an insight into the form neither he nor his bandmates previously considered, opening them up to the idea of writing not just for the Angry Mob but their daughters, aunties and cousins. Invigorated by the possibilities, they brought in Xenomania lynchpin and sometime Westlife producer Brian Higgins – and Stay Together is the result.
Dealing with the obvious first, it’s still patently a Kaiser Chiefs album; there’s no Bon Iver-style complete rejection of the past. That opener We Stay Together, with its deftly chopped guitar, rolling cantina piano and Bee Gees harmonies is a departure will be obvious to regular listeners, but Wilson’s vocal is as down the line as ever, just sounding now more cocktail than Tetley Bitter.
You sense that once this deep breath has been exhaled the temptation to just go with it was too strong. Higgins is also most obviously at work on the next two songs – Hole In My Soul and Parachute – on which the big synths and nothing-left-in-the-locker choruses prove to be as universal as they’re definitively hummable. To complement this, there’s a shift in songwriting focus too, therefore gone are the hardy idioms of their agit prop and no more are rednecks and bobbies figures of disrepute, replaced (of course) by the roller-coaster sketches of L.O.V.E.
Change is in the air, but every craftsman has a favourite tool: the old ways are not ghosts, but remain as a chassis, the eager mania of Why Do You Do It To Me? and Happen In a Heartbeat‘s crisp directness both long relied upon qualities which have served KC well since their formative days and do so again. The new tricks reach an apex on Press Rewind, a more than competent take on loveless finesse of last twentieth century New Order or the Pet Shop Boys, a track which perhaps remarkably could land them in clubs for the first time, as opposed to stag and hen parties.
The shift doesn’t always work – High Society sounds laboured and there’s a tendency to forget that this is a trope that relies on brevity – but if the collective fear was of ending up like dinosaurs it’s a fate that is at least for the time being skilfully avoided.
Strangely Stay Together’s high concept has attracted criticism, and yet the Kaiser Chiefs have always been a band who love and want to be loved in return. Rather, it’s an act of bravery; having looked inside the inner workings of a hit factory to allow yourself to be transformed by it when the status quo could’ve carried on making you a living is a remarkable feat for a group widely perceived to be as contemporary as Arkwright’s till.
Quite a few people won’t like it either, but then again these will be probably be the same critics who never cared for them anyway: this is a record which leaves both the converted and the agnostic to their own devices, it’s creators tilting at new windmills, hostages to nothing from now on but their own journey.
