Keane

Keane doesn’t sound like the bands that packed London pubs in the late 1990s. While other groups dragged distorted guitars, they put the piano at the heart of their music, weaving keyboards through pedal effects and synthesizers to craft textures that shift from whispers to roars without ever losing the melody. This isn’t rock with piano in the background: it’s rock where the piano takes center stage, and that made them stand out from the first rehearsal.

The band formed in Battle, a town in southeast England, when Tim Rice-Oxley and Richard Hughes—school friends—tried to start a group in a place where sports ruled everything. “If there’s no bat and ball, they see you as a madman,” Hughes would recall years later. Rice-Oxley, studying Humanities at University College London, convinced Dominic Scott to play guitar and brought in Tom Chaplin as vocalist when he joined in 1997. The band’s original name, Cherry Keane, honored a family friend of the Chaplins, but it was shortened to Keane for simplicity. Chaplin dropped his Art History studies, moved to London, and the group began playing pubs like the Hope and Anchor, where they debuted in July 1998. Between 1998 and 1999, they crisscrossed London’s live scene, gaining experience while Chaplin became the voice that defined their sound.