Keane: how we made Somewhere Only We Know

Tom Chaplin, singer

We grew up together in Battle and got together as a band in school. I was three years younger, so the other guys waited for my balls to drop before agreeing that I could be the singer. We moved to London in the late 90s and cut our teeth on the classic Camden circuit, towards the end of the Britpop scene, which felt very inspiring for young bands. We were a traditional indie band back then – our guitarist, Dominic Scott, was Irish and adored U2, so there were a lot of big, delayed guitars. After several years we still weren’t getting anywhere, then Dominic told us he was leaving. So Tim [Rice-Oxley] switched from bass to piano. At the time it was unusual to have a piano as the lead instrument and no guitars – we put in the bass parts on a laptop – but suddenly everything fell into place.

Previously, we’d all contributed songs, but with Tim writing on piano he started handing me things like Bend and Break and Everybody’s Changing, which were so much better than anything we’d done before. It was obvious that he’d gone to another level, so Tim became the songwriter, and from then on that was the Keane dynamic.

As young men, we didn’t talk about our emotions much, so maybe they poured into the music. I was always reticent to ask Tim what the songs were about, although if he wrote about heartbreak I knew the people, the ex-girlfriends and so on. There are loads of internet theories about what Somewhere Only We Know means but I always thought that it is about a place where we grew up – and a longing for something pure and simple. My mum and dad ran a school, and we used to sit in the grounds as teenagers, smoking weed and hanging out: I always thought about that place when I sang the song. To me it’s about us as friends and a band, growing up.

We were fish out of water in the London scene, these nice, middle-class boys in our 20s. Meanwhile, some of our old peers were looking down their noses at us because, while they were all becoming successful, we were still pursuing this ridiculous teenage dream. I’m always transported to that place when I sing the song.

Tim Rice-Oxley, piano/songwriter

When Dominic left it could have been the end of the band, but it turned out to be a lightbulb moment. I was never that good on bass and found playing piano much easier. Without anyone to do a big guitar solo the songs became less flabby and I got really into the Smiths, whose early songs were really short.

We’d been gigging for years, playing to literally two people on occasion, and were licking our wounds. We couldn’t afford to live and rehearse in London any more with the lowly jobs we had, so we moved back to Battle, rehearsing at my mum and dad’s house. I wrote Somewhere Only We Know on the little piano in their front room. I had the driving rhythm of David Bowie’s Heroes in mind as a starting point, so used the pounding piano like a rhythm guitar and the rest just flowed instinctively.

The song is about us being back and having something to cling to. I picture a particular place in Sussex, just a bit of scrub where we used to go when we were kids. There was a fallen pine tree and it seemed like a place to escape from the reality of the band’s failure that seemed to be fast approaching. Richard [Hughes, drummer] recently sent me a photo of the three of us on that exact spot, when we were 11 or something, and I wonder if I’d subconsciously remembered the photo when I wrote the song. The B-side, Snowed Under, contains another local reference – to Manser’s Shaw, an old bit of woodland.

I remember thinking Somewhere Only We Know was pretty good, then playing it to Richard who said: “This is amazing.” A record label had expressed some interest so we took a demo of it on CD it to their office in London and said: “We think this is the song.” They said they were too busy to listen to it and we never heard from them again. It probably went straight in the bin. Instead, we signed to Island Records.

Somewhere Only We Know opened all the doors for us and we’re still playing it 15 years later. I suppose many people have somewhere special that feels like a refuge. People still love that song and a lot of them have pored over the lyrics, trying to work out what it means. As a songwriter, it’s a dream come true.

• Keane’s new album, Cause and Effect, is out on 20 September. They tour the UK from 24 September.