Interview: Keane’s Tom Chaplin Talks “The Wave”, Drug Addiction, & Fighting Mental Illness Stigma

By: Curtis Sindrey –

Tom Chaplin of Keane.

You may think you know Tom Chaplin. His soaring, emotional voice lay at the center of Keane, the anthemic, multi-million selling UK band who scored five number one albums in the UK between 2004 and 2013 – including two that landed on the Billboard 200, delivering such unforgettable hits as “Everybody’s Changing,” “Is It Any Wonder” and “Somewhere Only We Know.” But even at the height of his fame, there was a side to the singer hidden from the world. Now, after a three-year journey to hell and back, Tom Chaplin returns with his solo debut album, The Wave, a self-penned album revealing the real man behind the songs. It is a journey from utter despair to redemption, love and self-acceptance, told with enormous, emotional pop music. The voice is the same. The songs tell a whole new story.

The Wave is a powerful collection of songs of self-destruction and recovery. Yet it is far from a harrowing listening experience, glittering with the rich melody, anthemic drive and high production values that people have come to expect from Keane, this is the first time Tom Chaplin has stepped outside of Keane, with Chaplin’s unmistakable voice driving all eleven tracks with a range of emotions, never previously scaled.

In our new interview, Chaplin details the making of The Wave, his destructive path of cocaine addiction, and eventual recovery, how he’s fighting against the stigma of mental illness, and more.

Your new album, The Wave, is described as “not being a concept album, but it has a narrative arc”. Tell me the story the album tells.

So they are really my stories from the last three or four years and where that begins was when I decided to take some time out from Keane and I had this idea of wanting to do something on my own in terms of taking control of the writing, which is not something I did in Keane, and just to pursue a different journey for a bit, which was something entirely impossible to ignore. So I said to the guys that I wanted to take some time out to do this, and I set out to do so with gusto and enthusiasm and actually very quickly ended up stuck and did hit a wall creatively. This coincided with the return of my problems with drug addiction and at the same time I had a kid, so it was a whole mixture of different sort of experiences which put a lot of stress on me as a human being. And I went to a really dark place and you know the kind of extent of my problems with drugs, really, really killed me and pretty much destroyed all the good things in my life.

So I found myself at the end of 2014 being in this hole and I did have an epiphany kind of moment where I just realized I couldn’t go on any longer and I had to start turning things around. It was actually the moment when I had been on a three-day drug binge without sleep, and living at a friend’s house but on my own. I thought I was about to drop dead but I just said to myself if I wake up tomorrow and I am still here, I have to do something about this. It’s been going on, off and on for 10-15 years really. I woke up the next day and I felt the need to change, and it’s been quite an amazing journey from that point onwards. 

I obviously had to repair a lot of the relationships that I broke in my life and particularly the relationship with myself. Knowing who I was again. So the album kind of documents all of that stuff really, and as you said it does loosely have a concept which was never the intention but it’s just the way the cards fell. So it starts in this very dark place the song “Still Waiting”, which is all about kind of being stuck in a hellish nightmare of addiction and wanting to escape and not knowing that I could. All the way through to the closing two songs which are “See It So Clear” and “The Wave”, which are songs about discovering inner peace, finding a sense of resolution and you know everything else on the record tells the story along the way which has been my process in the last couple of years.

Your 19 years in Keane and now setting off on your own, what was the transition like singing Tim [Rice-Oxley]’s songs in Keane, to now writing your own material?

I’ve always written songs and I contributed songs to Keane in our earlier days. Tim and I would split the songwriting 50/50, but two or three years before Keane’s first record, Hopes and Fears, which obviously was a very surprising success for us as a band, Tim just started writing all of these incredible songs and I just thought that I can’t keep up with this…I can’t…I didn’t believe I was capable of writing songs of that consistency. But I also didn’t have the kind of motivation and desire to do it either, which I think is kind of a lot of the job. So I kind of referred to his greater skills in that respect, and let him get on with it. And over the years that part of me, that creative part of me, wanted an outlet and it grew, grew and grew, and I thought I got to give this part of me a voice. 

What I realized was just how incredibly hard it is to do, in terms of writing the songs and how much work goes into writing a record. It’s not just that you kind of throw out 10 or 12 perfect songs and that’s that. You have to go through a very painstaking process of very hard work. I ended up writing a good 40 songs to try to find something good, so are the perks of this album. But this time around I did have the motivation, desire, and the right things to talk about. And to try articulate in the songs something that had a real energy to it, so I was willing to put in the hard work and I guess I surprised myself in a way. 

I didn’t know if I was up to it, and I didn’t know if I was capable of writing songs good enough. I felt that at the end of the process of writing this record that I had done myself justice and even kind of exceeded my expectations. I really enjoyed it and It’s the first time in my career where you are actually getting more of the external voice, a sort of singing voice but also sort of but you’re also getting this internal voice this part of me that’s never been articulated before and marry those two things, because it’s been very liberating for me as a person and as an artist.

Tom Chaplin will release his debut solo album, The Wave, on January 13th.

In the past, artists have said that by doing drugs they become more creative. Do you think drugs and creativity are compatible in that sense?

Well, it depends… I think when they are done in moderation and when it’s certain types of drugs they can kind of create a doorway. I suppose like the 60’s is always what people tend to look to in that respect. Acid and marijuana obviously drugs that, you know, open something up and you can hear it in the music of that particular generation. 

But I do think as a general rule particularly the kind of drugs I took became my main type of poison but they generally destroy you to a great degree. I think from my experience with coke is that it actually destroys that vital window into your soul, it numbs you as a person. It closes you off to your emotional world and if you cannot access that place then you’ll never write good songs. You have to be very well to write good songs. So for me, and I think probably it would apply to most artists, that I think drugs in moderation and the right kind of things can be helpful but once they reach the self-destructive levels, that my drug use reached it actually has the opposite effect, you just can’t access that place anymore. So yeah, don’t do drugs kids!

What are some ways that people can help remove the stigma of mental illness?

What’s so interesting is the first time I went into rehab 10 years ago, you know it was quite a big story in the U.K., and I was kind of pilloried for it, a kind of ‘Oh here we go again’…you know. Another kind of things where he’s ended up a mess and it’s a real cliché and all of that stuff. And there was a lot, quite sort of dazing, superficial and mocking the things written about the situation I was in. I think that was the climate of the time, in the respect at the time about any mental health problems, it’s either something you laugh at or something considered as weird. Yes, it felt like there was still a really big stigma attached to it. 

The distinction I feel now having spoken about, I’ve become open about the problems I’ve experienced. I’m sensing that the landscape has really changed, and it’s now being recognized and the answer to the problems with mental health, that we have in western society in particular is that the antidote to it is to open up, talk about these things and to sort of lift the veil. And not to condemn this stuff to such a shameful place that we don’t really talk about it because actually that attitude is not getting our society anywhere.

It’s very interesting reading about Adele, she was talking openly about postpartum depression and feeling completely hopeless after having her kid. And I think that kind of thing, you know It’s funny because when my wife and I had our daughter, my wife experienced postpartum depression for a while after my daughter was born. And she said, “no one ever told me this could happen, there’s talk of the baby blues but no one told me quite how awful or terrible I could feel and how much this thing is meant to be a dream and glorious thing”. To feel so shit, haha. Anyone in which I can use my platform or any of use can use our platform to talk about these things more openly to kind of be vulnerable and to realize that’s not actually weak, it’s actually courageous. A courageous attitude to adopt. I think It’s really helpful, there are so many people in our world that are struggling and who find it hard to talk about their problems. As hard as it is to feel, talking about our problems is the best thing that we can do. You know in my own small way if I can do that with the record I’ve made and the way I talk about, you know I feel like that is an achievement.

Absolutely and the things you know you could have easily as just swept it under the rug, written happy Pop songs about love or whatever.

That’s the next record, haha.

I think what I find most admirable is how many people are sort of just suffering in silence and you know, how people like yourself in the public eye are going through these types of things. Plus the scrutiny of the media and everything, I couldn’t imagine going through something like that.

I think the thing for me is that I was always frightened about admitting my problems, and I always wanted to keep them under wraps. I think the reason being a lot of shame is attached to these things and I’ve noticed in Britain anyway, that there’s kind of stiff upper lip attitude in this country. And that’s always the problem I had, oh I don’t want to admit these things out of fear.

But actually now with a bit more experience under my belt I’ve realized that life is way too short to worry about what people might think. We all have fragile parts of ourselves, frailties and things that we feel anxious about or ashamed about. Like I said the antidote to that is to get it out there to express that and convey it to another human being. You know you don’t have to do it the way I have and tell the world but just to find a therapist or a confidante in your life you can express that stuff to is really liberating. Instead of carrying around a whole load of crap you think about every single day, you just let someone know and suddenly that problem is moved from a place that’s just locked inside yourself to a safe place that’s out there in the real world. And it kind of defuses  is somehow, you know that notion a problem shared is a problem halved is kind of a cliched old term but it makes real sense to me. I do wish that we all did more of it. My experience of doing that, much along resisted it for a long time..has..I can live with a type of freedom now that I never had before.

Keane frontman Tom Chaplin’s new solo album, The Wave, follows his three-year battle with the cocaine addiction.

Is therapy something you’ve tried in the past?

I have done mountains of therapy, haha. The thing that helped me the most was going for psychoanalysis, the kind of proper big stuff which requires quite a bit of time and effort. It’s actually a thing that more than anything else has gotten me well from my problems.

I actually don’t attend Alcoholics Anonymous or all those kinds of meetings but I do have a kind of person who I see regularly who I share my deepest, darkest problems…and you know I continue to see that person because he keeps me well. So, yes a very important part of my life, it’s funny because there is so much emphasis on eating healthy, going to the gym, physical fitness or you know all well-being. But the most important thing our mental health, our emotional well-being is still something that most of us don’t actually spend much time with and are working on that.

That’s actually..when I think about my therapy, not that I think about it that’s it’s been so painful raking up the past. I don’t actually think of it like that, I think of it as being on an adventure, being a journey to who I am and discovering more parts of myself, uncovering thing and learning about who I am. And actually for the most part, while there has been some difficult stuff that I’ve had to process and go through..actually I’ve enjoyed a lot of it. Discovering who I am, so I think and it’s also the way that those kind of things are perceived needs to change as much as anything, not to feel nervous or anxious about but something to look forward to. Causes me joy.

So you’ve been able to gain a lot of insight into who you are and the sort of thing?

I would say so, yeah. In my own sort of way, I suppose. As you grow up environmentally, through your experiences in life, you develop a defense system. Either that works or in my case it doesn’t. My process has been tearing down that defense system down and build a new one. But you know it could be a default of handling my life the way it is now and yes, so you know really go deep and look at all the facets of my life so far and what I think and feel. I think I’ve learned quite a lot about myself. There’s a song on the record that exactly about that process you know, it’s about exploring your past, about this idea that rose-tinted view of life. The way that we probably like self-preservation, but probably about pieces together a fairly happy story about how things have gone. And that’s the sort of rose-tinted glasses effect, I also think to kind of get underneath that which is what the song says, the spaces in-between and the stuff underneath that helps to kind of give an enriched view of who you are. And I think for me that song in particular explores the sort of therapeutic process…that soul searching element that I obviously had to go through to get well.

When you guys blew up in 2004 with Hopes And Fears, and a string of successful singles, how did that sudden surge of fame influence you?

Oh it had a terrible effect on me actually… in all honesty. I think one of the reasons I got into being in a band, I was never very good about expressing myself emotionally. I also felt low on self-confidence actually and I was very shy, self-conscious and didn’t like myself very much. And actually the idea of being a frontman and kind of running around on stage pretending for all the money in the world like the most confident person out there was strangely appealing. It was almost like hiding in plain sight. The ultimate defence against the self loathing I felt. So in theory it sounds like a great idea, I mean I guess this was all fairly unconscious process at the time but you know I thought that it would be the answer.

When as you say as things go up and it became this great big success, I was completely unprepared for what was coming. Which was a lot of scrutiny and a lot of pressure on my mind. You know the things you might think look good elements to the success of a band, like adorning fans and money, actually those too had a strangely negative impact. You know it became things that were very hard to handle, because on one hand I had an ego that was completely out of control and the money kind of indulged all of that stuff particularly drugs, which developed into a growing drug habit. But underneath it all I just felt miserable, so those two extremes are very hard to live with. And you know it is ultimately a very bad cocktail that ended in real disaster.

Two years I suppose after Hopes and Fears came out I was in rehab, my life was in a complete mess. And actually in the years that followed that I find a way of surviving but I was never really tackled the underneath, the problems underneath so they kind of continued to fester and the problems with addiction would come and go…and never quite as bad until the last few years. Until they came back in really crazy way. So, yes it put me into an amazing place, these really extreme experiences that I wasn’t really cut out to deal with that stuff at the time. I look back with kind of mixed feelings about everything that happened and particularly around Hopes and Fears. There’s a part of me that really wishes I could go back and redo it, armed with the information I have now about myself and I think that I would really enjoy it. And savor it but sadly at the time I just wasn’t capable of doing that.

The great thing about this record is how the songs are thrive in this optimistic spirit of survival. Was that a conscious decision on your part?

I have not actually anyone describe it in that sense as a record about survival but I think that yeah that’s the a very good point about the whole thing, thinking about it. I suppose for me it was the thing I hoped that would resonant with people because in many senses it’s not really an album about drug addiction. That’s where it begins, of course the record is about much more about everything that has happened in the aftermath. Finding a way out of that dark spot and as you said surviving it. To tell the story and maybe also to…I guess…addiction…it’s not a niche thing but it’s not something most people will experience personally in their life but they may know people around them that are experiencing it. But I think we all experience real darkness and you know depression or other problems that beset us in this life. In that sense it resonates with people because it helped them to find a way out of that or to understand that there is a reason to feel hopeful or to keep pushing on. Then that for me, I hope..you know..what people will react to when they hear this album.

Tom Chaplin will perform at The Mod Club in Toronto on January 24th. Buy tickets here.