Kasabian - In love with the psych-rock

The origins

Long before Claudio Ranieri's side turned a football fairytale into the vehicle that carried its name to every corner of the globe, the hard-working city of Leicester could already boast being the birthplace of what was, and still is, the most celebrated English rock band of this early stretch of the third millennium: Kasabian. A title earned on the pitch, to keep the football metaphor going, in an era that was hardly a golden age for Her Majesty's music scene: the early 2000s paled in comparison to the Nineties, the decade in which Kasabian themselves first cut their teeth. In 1997, when Tom Meighan and co. were putting together their earliest attempts, britpop was at the peak of its media exposure, and it seemed as though there wasn't a single twenty-year-old in England who wasn't trying to crack the charts at home and abroad. It's the year Blur released their self-titled album, Oasis answered back with "Be Here Now", and Verve broke through with "Urban Hymns" - just to throw out three names at random (so to speak).

Kasabian - though not yet self-proclaimed as such - came together back in secondary school. In that same 1997, multi-instrumentalist Sergio Pizzorno, of unmistakably Italian stock, was seventeen, as was bassist Chris Edwards. Tom Meighan, dreaming of becoming a frontman, was just sixteen. Rounding out the line-up was guitarist Christopher Karloff, who would take charge of writing and arranging the band's earliest material. A drummer, in truth, was missing, and would officially remain so until 2005, when Ian Matthews - a decade older than the rest - joined the fold for good, having already been working unofficially with the four since 2001.
The band, initially going by the name Saracuse, chose to strike out on a different path from the one most of their contemporaries were following. While everyone else scrambled to fit themselves into the trajectory of a britpop movement that was by then naturally running out of steam, Pizzorno and his bandmates preferred to look back to the genre's deeper roots - namely that "Madchester" sound which, amid acid-tinged atmospheres and baggy swagger, had cradled the new British invasion of the Western charts. For their part, Kasabian simply added a dash of Eastern-flavoured psychedelia and spacey atmospheres to the recipe, just to make it more palatable for the times.

The early days: from the Ep to Kasabian

Kasabian's first recorded effort (still going by Saracuse at the time) was a self-produced Ep, recorded live, released between late 1998 and early the following year, and it revealed straight away the young band's love for the purest strain of "Madchesterism", with clear echoes of Stone Roses and Happy Mondays reverberating through the three tracks on offer ("What's Going On", "Life Of Luxury" and "Shine On"). The start was promising enough that the band - which had meanwhile borrowed its name from Linda Kasabian, one of the members of Charles Manson's "family" - got signed to Bmg, reportedly winning out at the last minute in a head-to-head with Emi.

Whether or not that story is true, the band now had all the means and time it needed to work at its best on the debut album Kasabian, which wouldn't actually see the light of day until September 2004. The release of the self-titled album was preceded by no fewer than three singles that came out that same year. The first, in February, was "Reason Is Treason". A track that already reveals every essential ingredient of the Kasabian sound: a catchy, uptempo motorik groove onto which the scratchy guitars of the Pizzorno-Karloff duo and Meighan's lyrics are grafted, interspersed with the kind of chants often deployed to lend the whole thing a more lysergic edge. May brought "Club Foot", destined to become the opening track of the tracklist. It's the Leicester outfit's first direct hit, a danceable track equally at ease mixing electro-rock with an idea of pop that's as muscular as it is brazen. Even better is "L.S.F.", short for Lost Souls Forever, released in August 2004 and destined to become one of the English band's defining anthems. Or rather, an anti-anthem for a generation doomed to lose from the start ("Ah, oh come on! We got our backs to the wall/ Get on, and watch out, saying yer gonna kill us all"), which turns into an indolent, blatantly baggy trip in the vein of a resurrected Shaun Ryder, but with radio-friendly appeal polished to a shine.
The run of singles is rounded out by the fourth, "Processed Beats", released alongside the album, which plays its cards with an instantly catchy but ultimately bland psychedelic funk, and by the poor "Cutt Off", an urban crossover that tries to push its hip-hop component to win over a more straightforwardly pop audience. Faring rather better are the space-rock of "I.D.", the vaguely freakish pop-rock of "Running Battle" and "Test Transmission", the hidden gem of this flawed but far from unworthy debut.
The British public, for its part, showed immediate appreciation, enough to secure fourth place on the Uk Album Chart.

Nailing the style: Empire and West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum

Exactly two years after the release of their debut, Empire showed Kasabian's determination to raise the bar and become something better, and something different, from the many bands crowding Albion's pop-rock scene in the first decade of the new millennium. Two significant changes had affected the band's line-up in the short time that had passed: Karloff had jumped ship, no small matter given that up to that point he had been the band's principal songwriter (the three tracks he contributed to the tracklist would be his final legacy to the group). His place was taken by Jay Mehler. Meanwhile, drummer Ian Matthews had officially come on board, though he'd already featured on the "Live From Brixton Academy" release in 2005 and on the tour that saw our heroes supporting Oasis in a kind of changing of the guard. And indeed, the Leicester dinghy was about to become a luxury yacht, as confirmed in early June 2006, when Empire went straight to number one on the British charts.
In a post-britpop decade full of highs and lows for the English scene, Kasabian rose to the role of new standard-bearers of Her Majesty's sound. Which doesn't mean the album won everyone over - quite the opposite: the public's enthusiasm, as so often happens, was not matched by the words of the specialist press.
The crown jewel of Empire - a word used in the band's internal slang to denote something significant - is without doubt "Shoot The Runner", a track that instantly became one of the band's all-time classics. Not least because it perfectly sums up the sound of early Kasabian: a psychedelic, driving uptempo number, vaguely bluesy and broadly epic - a perfect stadium anthem, of the kind they were already planning to fill venues with. Also notable is the stylistic exercise "Me Plus One", indebted to Sixties British rock but with an orchestral grandiosity that takes over in the track's closing section. The pompous "Empire" is, unwittingly, a foretaste of the solutions the British combo would deploy in far heavier doses almost ten years later.
Even more significant is the album's middle section, where Kasabian abandon the rock blueprint altogether to dive headlong into electronics. "Apnoea" opens the curtain on a synthetic, feral world, clearly indebted to the lessons of Prodigy and Chemical Brothers. The tight groove of "Stuntman", one of the tracks co-written by Karloff and Pizzorno, projects itself into an imaginary Mancunian dancefloor, as if trying to recapture the thrill of knowing what it felt like to spend a night at the Hacienda. "British Legion" is, finally, the progenitor of a long line of saccharine lighters-up torch songs.
Empire marks Kasabian's definitive breakthrough into the hearts of millions of fans, powered by a British imaginary that layers its influences into a new and recognisable sound. But the best was yet to come.

Karloff's departure effectively crowned Serge Pizzorno as Kasabian's sole helmsman: the weight of writing all the music, and consequently of charting the band's sonic course, now fell almost entirely on his shoulders. The result of this "assumption of responsibility" had thoroughly personal consequences, because West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum is, by any measure, the finest fruit of the Italian-British musician's eccentric mind, aided behind the mixing desk by a guru like Dan the Automator (already at work with Gorillaz): psychedelic to the point of being downright dazed - Pizzorno's touchstone here is Syd Barrett, of all people - yet sharp and incisive as it would never be again across Kasabian's trajectory.
Even though things seem, in a sense, to grow more complicated, at times becoming introverted and sophisticated (but not overly so), "West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum" is above all Kasabian's stylistic manifesto: the most inspired album in terms of ideas, the most varied stylistically, the most incisive sonically. It's no coincidence that pretty much every song sounds like a potential single. The Eastern-tinged languor of "Underdog", halfway between Oasis-style melodies (Meighan as a latter-day Gallagher) and a mild funk à la Kula Shaker, is the gateway into the surreal world built by Pizzorno and co.
"Vlad The Impaler", complete with an enjoyable video, is an almost tongue-in-cheek manifesto, but a manifesto nonetheless, one that stakes a claim to Kasabian's supposed leading role within the musical landscape, not without a certain thinly-veiled bravado: "We need to raise the dead/ We need to raise the people" [...] "We are the last beatniks/ The lost heretics!". The building, psychedelic blues of "Fire", one of the best songs the band ever wrote, instead conjures up a vision of America straight out of a Western film, seen through a distorting mirror.
While the obligatory slow numbers are present and accounted for (the syrupy "Ladies And Gentlemen (Roll The Dice)", the closing "Happiness"), it's in the many uptempo tracks populating the running order that Kasabian prove themselves a perfectly well-oiled machine: "Where Did All The Love Go?" and "Fast Fuse" send the metronome racing without sacrificing either the melodic precision that spills over into irresistible choruses, or the interlocking of electronic textures and orchestral arrangements.
The range on offer, though, is considerable: "Swarfiga" is a purely instrumental synth interlude, "Take Aim" and "Thick As Thieves" are two off-kilter funk numbers built from acoustic guitar, while the title track is a barely sketched-out blues that is, in fact, the closest thing here to the lesson Pizzorno learned at the feet of Oxford's "mad hatter".
Visionary, seemingly disjointed and chaotic, yet in fact meticulously architected, West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum is the stylistic and conceptual peak of Kasabian. The nomination for best album at the Mercury Prize and the win at the Nme Awards attest not only to its success with the public, but also with a specialist press that had traditionally been rather cool towards the band.

Global success

A success that, inevitably, is amplified two years later with Velociraptor!, an album that, unlike its predecessor, does absolutely nothing to hide its increasingly mainstream ambitions. Quite the opposite, in fact. Where "West Ryder…" had bizarreness and a multiplicity of approaches, here the counterpoint is a more polished, hypertrophic sound, aimed at making every melody memorable (even when it isn't) and celebrating the band's own grandeur, now basking under ever more mammoth stage lights. Kasabian call themselves the biggest band on the planet, like latter-day Gallaghers, and it's no surprise the music moves accordingly.
That's how the Primal Scream-schooled lead single "Days Are Forgotten" ends up, as if at the end of a long journey, as epic in spirit as it is opulent in form. The cinematic, retro ambitions of "La Fée verte" and "Let's Roll Just Like We Used To" lend the band a classicist image, perhaps in the wake of the Last Shadow Puppets, the Turner-Kane project (maybe even to draw a plausible parallel with other "champions" of contemporary British sound?).
The usual dose of syrup is provided instead by "Goodbye Kiss", which, to be fair, is probably the best ballad the Leicester combo has ever produced — and perhaps the only one that doesn't turn sickly after a second listen. "Acid Turkish Bath (Shelter From The Storm)" adds a touch more exoticism to the formula, while the mandatory uptempo number comes courtesy of the amphetamine-fuelled "Velociraptor!", without doubt one of the best tracks in the set.
The strangest chapter, furthest from the band's usual premises, is the kraut-influenced "I Hear Voices", while "Switchblade Smiles" pays homage, a bit more discreetly than usual, to the Madchester school.
Dan the Automator's production steers Kasabian toward ever more commercial, plasticky shores (this album too debuted at number one on the UK charts), perhaps distorting their vision in part, or perhaps, instead, fully grasping their real ambition: not to become an alternative band, but to finally embrace the masses once and for all. In that sense, Velociraptor!, so streamlined and focused, does the job perfectly. And the records that followed would prove, in all likelihood, that this is exactly how things stood.

With the band's name still doing the rounds between festivals and flamboyant posturing, three years later, in the spring of 2014, 48:13 seems to finally cross the thin line between their rock heritage and their new role as champions of the global charts. All of it, naturally, handled with the band's trademark arrogance, arm in arm with a parade of singles as plasticky and baroque as they are, for the most part, damn effective.
Serge Pizzorno's ego leads him this time to do everything himself, production included; at most, Tom Meighan offers some "in-house" support on the songwriting side. The watchword is grandiosity: everything has to look bigger than it actually is. In other words, Kasabian have put together another blockbuster for the masses. There's no other way to explain the amphetamine-fuelled electro-rock bacchanal of "Bumblebee", the freak wave that opens the album, folding in rock impulses, disco swagger and third-millennium rereadings of Madchester. It's an operation that doesn't achieve the same result on "Doomsday", a sonic cauldron that, oddly enough, struggles to catch fire despite trying every trick in the book: a frantic metronome, large-scale deployment of backing vocals and winks that try to disguise the song's thin substance. For every failed attempt there's a successful one: "Eez-eh" instantly hooks you with its irresistible dance groove borrowed from the Chemical Brothers.
The rest of the long tracklist (a full fifteen songs) likewise wavers between highs and lows: the gradual build of "Clouds" opens into a compelling riff and a chorus worth framing. The best track of the bunch, as far as we're concerned. Also notable is "Stevie", with its souped-up pop-rock, once again framed by a sumptuous, hummable chorus (there's even an orchestral backing).
By contrast, the pulsing electro-rock of "Treat" and "Explodes" and the lysergic waters of "Glass" pass by harmlessly, raising the suspicion that they're rehashing, with less expressive force, ideas already well explored before. That suspicion is confirmed by "Bow", pretty uninspired and consequently quite useless in the album's economy. The closing credits go to the placid acoustic drift of "S.p.s.", not far from the Gallagher brothers' playbook.
With 48:13, Kasabian finally drop the mask once and for all: the intent, now more than obvious, is to climb the charts of popular approval with their usual ease (and equally usual arrogance), leaving open once again the debate over the substance of a talent that many would rather see devoted to a repertoire of altogether different weight. To the delight of the public and the eternal frustration of critics.

That doesn't stop Kasabian from still being singled out as the flagship name of a British scene that, Arctic Monkeys aside, struggles damn hard to keep pace with past generations. Unfortunately, though, For Crying Out Loud does absolutely nothing to reverse that course. If anything, for the first time the Leicester band really seems to get tangled up in itself and in the stereotypes it has stitched onto itself.
The substantial difference between an album like 48:13 and For Crying Out Loud, which incidentally share covers of rare ugliness, isn't in the intentions — as they'd like us to believe — but in the final result. One could argue that even back then there was more appearance than actual substance in the Kasabian formula, but tracks like "Bumblebee", "Eez-eh", "Stevie" and "Clouds" really did produce a propulsive effect, or at least came across as credible even beneath the hypertrophic production calling the shots. By comparison, the single "You're In Love With A Psycho" or the amphetamine-charged "Ill Ray (The King)" and "Twentyfourseven" come off poorly, precisely because they try to retrace those same steps but with fewer ideas and less apparent conviction.
Serge Pizzorno has made much of the decision to return to guitars and to a rather personal idea of classic rock, as if picking up a guitar instead of fiddling with synths were somehow revolutionary nowadays, but the truth is that For Crying Out Loud is a crib sheet of everything Kasabian are — or perhaps were. Beyond certain dancefloor pretensions mentioned above, we find a "The Party Never Ends" that wearily returns to the territory of "West Rider Pauper", a "Wasted" that dabbles in British-flavoured power-pop, a "Comeback Kid" built to explode into the most classic (and banal) of stadium singalongs, a "Are You Looking For Action" built for a seventies dancefloor, and then the inevitable acoustic ballad "All Through The Night", which, in context, doesn't disgrace itself.
It's easy, precisely because of that context, to spot the best chapters in the set with eyes closed: "Good Fight", an honest midtempo number framed by a sticky chorus, and even more so "God Bless This Acid House", with electric guitars launching a monster track that seems to want to reconcile britpop's unbearable carefreeness with the Beach Boys' surf-rock scenery (complete with the obligatory backing vocals).

A step backward that invites reflection on the path Kasabian have taken over the years, now conceptually closer to the stadium rock of Muse (with whom they've also shared the stage several times live) than to the moral integrity of the models they drew much of their sound from. Like two-faced Januses, the English band carries on bearing both sides of the same coin. Because, let's face it, just one side clearly wouldn't be enough.

The farewell to Tom Meighan and the new era

There's a need for carefree abandon that seems determined, at all costs, to run through the twelve songs of The Alchemist's Euphoria, Kasabian's seventh studio album, released in August 2022. The reasons are easy to understand: the traumatic departure of former frontman Tom Meighan forced the Leicester band to change course on the fly, obliging Serge Pizzorno to definitively take on the role of leader maximo of the English band. A band that, already in previous records, had decided to invest everything in a pop-rock that's radio-friendly in intent and overbearing in manner, tailored to an increasingly dominant live dimension compared to what the Leicester outfit is now actually able to deliver on record.

The new album simply renews the ingredients just described, adding a sometimes questionable backdrop (all-caps titles full of mangled words, imagery set in outer-space scenarios, a cover that matches all of this…) which only heightens the sense that we're dealing with a band now geared more toward image than substance. And since this is Kasabian, a project that has always seemed unable to fully express its considerable potential, it's all the more annoying.

The essence of the project is entirely contained in the three radio-friendly minutes of "ALYGATYR", a track that genuinely has the right drive and looks set to become the next stadium-and-piazza anthem: a new "Bumblebee" or "Eez-eh" for the masses. It's clear this is what Kasabian now do best, and that's fine too. Increasingly distant from rock pure and simple, the English band doesn't forget the obligatory torch-song, "THE WALL", a half-disguised ballad that will nonetheless be lighting up phone screens on their next tour.

Outside their comfort zone, things get complicated indeed. The impromptu crossover on display in "SCRIPTVRE" calls to mind, perhaps unintentionally — or perhaps not — Limp Bizkit (is it already time for a noughties revival?), but the surprise factor doesn't make up for the shortcomings of a fairly anonymous track. It gets even worse with "ROCKET FUEL" and "STRICTLY OLD SKOOL", songs that clearly convey the prevailing confusion of ideas, clumsy attempts at reinvention without losing themselves, with "STARGAZR" perhaps (?) representing the furthest frontier of Kasabian's experimentation. Small comfort comes from "T.U.E. (the ultraview effect)" and "CHEMICALS", the former inspired in its synth-pop shell, the latter punchy and almost liberating. Too little, frankly, to redeem yet another lacklustre album.

In the summer of 2024 Kasabian return with Happenings, 10 songs for just 28 minutes of music. Their second record without Tom Meighan on vocals, "Happenings" once again rests on Serge Pizzorno's shoulders, assisted behind the desk by producer Mark Ralph. Ten songs flow by one after another in just 28 minutes, with a common thread of dancefloor ambitions running from the swaying "Darkest Lullaby" (the best track on the record) to the harmless uptempo of "Coming Back To Me Good", right through to the by-now predictable swagger of "Call", which tries — in vain — to replicate hits like "Eez-eh".
"How Far Will You Go" is a sonic assault that, despite itself, lacks invention but probably whips crowds into a frenzy live (see above), a bit like the crowd-pleasing chorus of "Italian Horror", which at least shakes things up. Could the closing big ballad be missing? Of course not, hence "Algorithms", with its acoustic guitars and heartfelt vocals in a chorus already "calling out" for mass audience participation. Better, then, is "Passengers", with a verse that sounds like it could have come from the pen of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and a chorus à-la Coldplay.

Meighan's rebirth and his challenge to his former bandmates

As mentioned earlier, heavy use of drugs and alcohol, and above all a 2020 sentence that gave him 200 hours of unpaid work for acts of violence he admitted committing against his then-partner Vikki Ager (whom he later married in 2021), had led Serge Pizzorno and co. to oust Meighan from his role within the Leicester band.
From that moment on, Tom has come a long way, certainly a rough and difficult one, first and foremost rebuilding a stable life for himself, free of any kind of substance dependency.
Having served his sentence, Tom also put his working life back in order, even reinventing himself as a singer-songwriter, he who had never written so much as a scrap of a song before.
The Reckoning is a telling title: the settling of accounts, precisely what's left after the best — or, in his case, the worst — that one has built in one's own life.
The record is his manifesto of rebirth, made possible thanks to the crucial contribution of Gareth Young and Bnnan Infadel.

On tracks like "Rise" and "Deep Dive" it feels like a return to the glory days of "Shoot The Runner", a feeling that also comes through clearly on "Shout It Out", "Everyone's Addicted To Something", "Movin' On" and especially on "Acrobat", perhaps the most successful moment in this respect.
Setting aside the harmless Bon Jovi-style rock of "Daytona Racing", "Thinking On Your Feet" carries faint echoes of the Kasabian style of their debut album, thanks to a few electronic flourishes that could well make the fortune of a good remixer aiming for the dancefloor.

There's also room for more intimate, understandably pained passages ("Scared"), skilfully bolstered by digital strings and arrangements suited to Meighan's message, a man gripped by utter despair and the fear of never being able to climb back up.
As mentioned at the outset, among the songs — not exactly cryptic in their content — the English artist doesn't shy away from touching on his fraught relationship with his former bandmates, and who knows whether the Darth Vader evidently cut down with a lightsaber, or the fake-fur-clad agitator (here there's really little room for doubt) that Meighan name-checks in the intriguing title track, are pointed jabs at his former bandmate and friend Serge Pizzorno, whom Tom accuses of having repeatedly tried to push him out of the band, even before the events of 2020, out of jealousy over his charismatic role as frontman.

In September 2026 Kasabian return with Act III, once again on Sony. Having digested the traumatic — in every sense — departure of Tom Meighan, Kasabian, on their third attempt, as the title suggests, seem to have found a precarious balance to dance on. Granted, they still occasionally succumb to the odd perhaps inevitable misstep, but Serge Pizzorno handles electric anthems and dancefloor ambitions with greater skill this time, which translates into uptempo tracks that are at times overflowing ("Hippie Sunshine", "Great Pretender") and danceable numbers that no longer feel bolted-on but essentially harmless, if not almost enjoyable ("Silver Apple Eyes"). "Soulmate" even tries to reconnect with the English band's roots, an exercise in Madchester-ism that turns the clock back to the golden days of "L.S.F.".
Of course, the line between style and arrogance remains rather thin around here, and the pendulum ends up swinging to both extremes. While the curious "Superpowers" blends 100% Kasabian-style choruses with verses that seem to pour straight from Eminem's pen, coming off rather well overall, the urge to overreach (or to try again to crack the charts) produces a "Nothing Better Than This" that once again proves bland and contrived. Where "The Guru anc the Crypto Time Machine" seems to fold in on itself, "Glide" surprises with the instrumental solutions it dreams up.
Act III, itself divided into three acts separated by instrumental interludes, is a sincere portrait of what Kasabian have become: a project caught halfway between revisiting their youthful heritage, which still comes across as their most sincere and successful side, and a push toward pop territories that, even with hindsight on their side, clash with the reality of things. Like a cloven viscount out of Calvino, Serge Pizzorno keeps showing the two enigmatic faces of the same coin.

Contributions by Cristiano Orlando (“The Reckoning”)

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