The New Cue #362 March 1: Kaiser Chiefs' Ricky Wilson, Weyes Blood, Liam Bailey, Everything Everything, St. Vincent, Liam Gallagher & John Squire, Been Stellar, Yard Act

"There's a reason we've been going for 20 years and it's because we don't talk to each other enough"

Good morning! Or afternoon, evening, middle of the night, two weeks later, whenever you’re ready, hello, we’re glad you’re here unless you’ve unsubscribed in the meantime in which case you’ve actually made us quite upset but maybe this edition will make you re-subscribe. We’ll look back on it as a little bump in the road that made us stronger in the long run.

In today’s edition, we’ve got a chat with Kaiser Chiefs frontman Ricky Wilson. We’ve put that before the paywall because we’re nice, probably too nice, or maybe not nice enough, who knows, but there is gold on the other side of the paywall so you’ll want to get involved in that too. We have a whole host of recommending going on and Weyes Blood picks An Album To Blow Your Mind just for you. Here’s a playlist, play it!:

We’ll see you on Monday for a Start The Week chat with St. Vincent. Nice! Enjoy the edition, and press the Share button if you like it, or tell a stranger about it, just do something that will make us more popular, that’s actually an order so you have to do it.

Ted, Niall and Chris

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End The Week With… Kaiser Chiefs’ Ricky Wilson

Pic: Cal McIntyre

Today Kaiser Chiefs release their eighth record, titled Kaiser Chiefs’ Easy Eighth Record. A big buoyant pop album, it features a collaboration with Nile Rodgers and arrives two months shy of 20 years since the Leeds quintet emerged with their anthemic and soon-to-be-unavoidable debut single Oh My God. Back in January, Niall hopped on Zoom with frontman and birthday boy Ricky Wilson to hear all about it…

Hello Ricky. It’s your birthday today. Happy birthday!
Hello, thanks!

How are you spending it?
Doing interviews about our album.

That’s dedication.
Then I'm gonna do a three-hour radio show. And I'm gonna go home, be in bed by nine, watch something I don't care about on TV, like Reacher, and then fall asleep by 9.50pm.

Sounds similar to my birthdays. I prefer other people’s birthdays.
Well, I don't really like my birthdays because, as you know, I am the centre of attention for money. And I don't think there's any point in me being the centre of attention when I'm not getting paid.

Haha. This morning I was dropping my wife to work and listening to Talk Sport and out of the blue Alan Brazil announced it was your birthday. They hadn’t even been talking about birthdays, they were talking about directions to Cheltenham.
I've only met him once!

Well you obviously made a big impression.
I think it's all you need, just to meet him once. You get everything you want in one afternoon sat the end of the hotel bar. I've got anecdotes for days about that one afternoon. His life is an anecdote, it's amazing. Well done, Alan.

Aside from your birthday, how are you? What's going on in general?
Relentless. Took a job, and then I found a job and heaven knows it's good being on the radio. I've got twins. Love being on the radio, love being in the Kaiser Chiefs, love having twins but put all three together and it feels quite relentless.

Ah, congratulations. How old are the twins?
They’re two in April.

Fantastic. How's fatherhood treating you?
It's knackering but I'm pretty good at it. I think I've been in training for it for the last 20 years being in the Kaiser Chiefs. Basically no sleep and a lot of worry.

I thought you were gonna say that you're the dad of the group.
No, no, no, no, never. I'm the teenage son that comes home unexpectedly with all his washing.

I like the way the new record straddles the two worlds of the Kaisers, indie Kaisers and pop Kaisers.
We've understood over the last four albums that there's no point on turning your back on things you enjoy making. You can see how the more pop song stuff makes people feel live. We started off making indie records for an indie audience and soon became quite mainstream but then the mainstream was into indie, so it was kind of easy pickings for us. Not naming any names but we didn't see any of the contemporaries in the guitar world being the people we had to beat. We had to beat other people and we thought we could do it better and we tried, and we failed a lot but it doesn't mean it wasn't fun, like making a record with Brian Higgins and stuff like that. It was a lot of fun and it teaches you a hell of a lot. You don't want to let go of some of those influences because they're a lot of fun, but then you're still who you are. It's a weird thing, because I don't think I don't think we ever did anything too contrived... He says, drinking from a Virgin Radio mug.

If this is your “easy eighth”, what’s been the hardest?
The third one was difficult, I just didn't enjoy it and I think you've got to enjoy it. Fourth one was difficult because Nick was leaving but wanted to do a swan song and it was just a tricky time. Fifth one was really hard because Nick wasn't there, so I'd say the fifth one – Education, Education, Education And War - was the hardest but also the most satisfying. I suppose if it's hardest and it pays off you don't remember that it was tough, but the ones that seem harder were the ones that were hard work.

It's been ten years since the Kaiser Chiefs reboot after Nick left. How would you sum up that decade?
Doesn't seem like a decade, it seems quicker than the first decade. What never stops about being in a band is when you write the song and you know it's brilliant, you pin your hopes very high. What the last 20 years have taught me is you shouldn't get upset when expectation doesn't meet the heights of your hope. But that shouldn't mean you set your hope standards lower. You've always got to have the high hope. That's what sums up last decade, that I don't think we've compromised on hope and I don't think we've been shattered by disappointments. And also with our disappointments, it's all relative. Our disappointments would be other people's triumphs so I'm fine with that.

I saw last year that Slipknot’s Corey Taylor was bigging up the first Kaisers record. Who’s the most unlikely Kaiser Chiefs fan you’ve ever met?
I think Corey Taylor has to be up there. Until you start listening to him and his songs and you go, 'Ah, I get why you like it'. I don't think it's similar in any way but I get why he has some kind of affinity with what we do, because we've always been led by the joy of doing it. We've always been led by the fact that it's a weird and wacky privilege to be allowed to do what we do. There's not many other musicians who have ever bigged us up, he's a brave one. We don't really have that many friends in the music industry but the ones that are are quite loyal.

What's been your most diva-ish ever request?
The good thing about being in a band – they’ll disagree with this totally - is that they don't really let you, you can't really be a diva. I did get nicknamed Laurence Llewelyn Bowen one time because I was always changing rooms in hotels. I have certain things I like, like a bath. I have two baths in my house, I've lived there three years and I've had two baths. But if I go to a hotel room, I will have a bath every single time. But nothing majorly diva-ish. I mean, it does get a little bit diva-ish as to the fact that I'm the only one that lives in London and they arrive in a tour bus and I arrive in a car, but that's just logistics, that's not diva-ish. It looks diva-ish to the outside world and you know what? I don't really mind that.

You’ve got a show on Virgin Radio. What’s the most surprising thing you’ve got out of being a radio presenter?
The thing that I've got out of it most is I get terrified by doing a half hour interview about a record, right? Talking to you now, or anyone, when I hang up on you, I'm going to be worried until it comes out about what I said and how I said it and worried about how it's going to come across and if I said anything negative about anyone and I'm going to be panicky about that. But I do three hours of live radio five days a week and I say far more big revealing stuff. The other day I did an interview with NME and they were poking me and poking me trying to get a comment about either Gallagher, they didn't care which one, just because they think it'll make a good headline. And I was just thinking if you'd listened to my radio show yesterday, this would have been your headline from the start.

Haha. What’s been your biggest faux-pas on air?
I've only had one complaint and it was justified and in no way am I celebrating this but I came out of the Kelly Clarkson song that goes “what doesn't kill you makes you stronger and I went, “someone should have told you about sepsis then.” And then I got a complaint from someone, rightly so, who's had sepsis because it's a serious thing. It's been my benchmark of things not to do, always think there's someone out there that's gonna get offended.

If someone asks what you do, is Kaiser Chiefs singer still number one?
This sounds so corny but I think dad of twins is number one. Everything else is just facilitating that their survival.

What have you got in mind for the third decade of Kaiser Chiefs?
We don't think that far ahead. My wife gets really annoyed at me because as a band we don't talk to each other enough, she says. I'm going, 'There's a reason we've been going for 20 years and it's because we don't talk to each other enough'. When we're together, I don't laugh as hard as I laugh in any other situation.

ND

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Ted Kessler

I have spent the past week lost in the absolute joy of Liam Bailey’s second solo album, Zero Grace. It is a mini-masterpiece of soul-reggae vibes the like of which we haven’t heard since the good ol’ days of bringing home a Tuff Gong release from Our Price, unpeeling the shrink-wrapped vinyl and placing the sleeve on our laps to prepare for the blast of heavy-manners sunshine. Huge tunes, deep lyrics. It really stands alone in the modern era, the kind of cross-genre blockbuster that Polydor no doubt thought they were in line for when they signed Bailey on Amy Winehouse’s recommendation to work with her producer Salaam Remi in 2010. Bailey wasn’t ready, though, and left a year later, unhappy that he was being moulded into a pop star shape he was uncomfortable wearing.