No other place in the world like India, says Tom Chaplin

No other place in the world like India, says Tom Chaplin

Known for songs like Somewhere Only We Know, Nothing in My Way, Hold On To Our Love and others, English alternative rock band Keane, recently performed in India for the very first time.

Tom Chaplin, the lead vocalist of the band spoke to Bombay Times about their visit to Mumbai, their love for desi food and more. Excerpts…

You’ve been to India before. What memories do you have of that trip?

I was here with my wife; she was my girlfriend back then. We came here for four weeks and travelled around the country and yet we only saw a fraction of what India had to offer. But it was amazing. So culturally rich, so diverse and interesting. We went to Rajasthan, visited Kerala backwaters, and then went to Delhi. This year was my first time in Mumbai and my first trip to India with the band for a concert.

You have a special connect to cricket and we Indians are cricket lovers. What do you love about our country the most?

I am a massive fan of cricket! I grew up playing it and have always loved the game. I also remember walking through the markets here during my last visit and seeing the incredible fruits, vegetables, spices and herbs and just everyone trying to sell stuff! Nowhere else that I can recollect having been to, has the kind of energy that India does. There’s no other place in the world like India.

Indian food is quite famous in the UK. What do you love about our cuisine?

That was another reason to come to India! Of course, we have Indian restaurants in the UK but they’re

not the real version of Indian food. I love the food here. It is packed with heat, but still so flavourful. I remember the food, it was the complexity of the flavours but also always a good heat in it which I love. I love spicy food so yeah, I can’t wait. I’m not going to eat on the plane so that I can be fully hungry by the time I arrive in Mumbai.

You’ve spoken about your love for cricket. Which of our cricketers do you like?

Rohit Sharma, I think is fantastic. Kohli (Virat Kohli) as well, I think your bowlers are all brilliant. Jasprit Bumrah. There are some seriously good players in India now. Earlier, it used to be that India’s weakness was their fast bowling. They always had good batters and good spin bowlers, but now it feels like there’s a lot of good fast bowlers that come out of India and so now it feels like they’re a complete package. You guys have got a very complete cricket side and it’s very hard for other countries to compete with that. It’s deeply impressive.

As a band, what are you looking forward to the most in 2024?

We’re working on doing some stuff a bit differently with Keane, which is really exciting. We’ve got 70 odd gigs this year, so it’s a very busy time!

What prompted you guys to pick up ‘Keane’ as the name of your band? Is there a story behind it?There is a story. Most stories about band names, they often begin in the pub, right? When you first start out, because you’re young, you’re spending a lot of time drinking and talking and figuring stuff out, and trying to think of a decent name. And so I remember we were in the pub and we just sat there and made a massive list of names for the band. Most of them were ridiculous. One of the ideas that came up was this, when I was a kid, there was this little old lady that we knew called Cherry Keane. She was a friend of my mum’s and she was lovely, and a very sweet woman. When she died, I was in my early teens, and she left me a couple of hundred pounds. And I used that money to buy an amp. So there’s this little connection. And I remember sitting in the pub and talking about Cherry Keane. That’s kind of a cool name for a band and so we lived with it for a while. And then people started pointing out that maybe Cherry Keane wasn’t quite right, well, there was something slightly inappropriate about it. At least that’s what people were telling us, so we just shortened it to Keane. And we liked the way it sounded and the way that it didn’t tell you that much about the music. It’s a name that means something to us, but it’s otherwise, it’s just a name that’s out there. I’ve never really thought about it that much. You come up with a name and then you’re stuck with it forever.

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