Keane’s haunted house music

Drawing up to the big house, you see a sweat-soaked man digging a grave with a pick and shovel. Who is it for? “For Tom Chaplin, the lead singer of Keane. His partner kills him and buries him in the garden, but then he ends up coming back in the form of a ghost and walks around the house — I guess to make life impossible for his ex.”

Casually telling this gruesome tale is one of the assistants of Juan Antonio Bayona, the director of hit 2008 Spanish horror movie The Orphanage. He’s directing a new video for British rock band Keane near Barcelona. The chart-toppers found fame in 2004 with the release of their critically acclaimed debut album Hopes and Fears, which was notable for not featuring a single guitar. Now the quartet from Battle, in south-east England, is returning with their fourth record, Strangeland, after four years of silence broken only by 2010 EP Night Train.

It is the first weekend of March and we are little more than an hour by car from Barcelona, where, in the town of Capellades, Bayona’s team has located the perfect house in which to make a film that humorously serves up “the clichés of 1970s North American and Italian horror films [...] one after the other.”

That is the proposal the director put to the band for the video for the track Disconnected, and now the house’s green boudoir is teeming with camera equipment and instruments as they work to get it on film. “It’s a luxury to see how they work and how difficult making a small, three-minute film like this can become,” says band member Tim Rice-Oxley. “These guys have many more important things than this video to do [Bayona has just finished his new feature The Impossible, starring Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor] and, look at them, here they are. It’s wonderful. We’re really lucky,” concludes the pianist.

These guys have many more important things than this video to do"

The take finishes and Bayona and his screenwriter, Sergio G. Sánchez, look at the result of their work on a monitor in the hall. “We declare ourselves band groupies,” says the director.

Sánchez goes further: “In my office I have a poster of the group signed by the three original members [Jesse Quin joined officially as bassist in 2011]. I have all the t-shirts of all the tours, I have badges, I even have a mask of [drummer] Richard Hughes...”

The pair says they met each other the same year Keane released their first record, as they began work on what would become The Orphanage. “Keane’s music has formed part of the soundtrack of our professional lives. So when we were promoting the film in London, we did what we could to meet them, and we felt there was mutual admiration,” they say.

Rice-Oxley provides the confirmation: “They came to see us in London at a promotional concert for Perfect Symmetry [their third record], and I remember that Tom and I had loved The Orphanage. That’s where the idea of a possible collaboration began.”

What do Bayona and Sánchez make of the Strangeland tracks they have heard? “Their attraction is disillusionment,” says Bayona. “There is a track on this album called Sovereign Light Café, which is a beautiful song about disillusionment, about childhood, about going back to the place where you grew up and trying to be recognized and to recognize yourself. [...] It is probably one of the best songs I have ever heard and it is on this latest record.”