Serge Pizzorno is looking back at the rise of his band Kasabian and trying to pinpoint when it all became a bit too much.
“You’d turn up at shows and there’d be 20-odd trucks there, a catering team, loads of people everywhere,” he says. “And you’d think, wow, this is actually a job for a lot of people, and it all rests on these four maniacs!”
This was in 2017: the band had just completed their sixth album, For Crying Out Loud, released to mixed reviews, and all was not well in camp. After 20 years together, Pizzorno was worried the band were getting stuck in a rut. And then there was the personal turmoil: not for songwriter Pizzorno, who had settled into family life in Leicester (he has two boys, Ennio and Lucio), but for Tom Meighan, the band’s wild-eyed frontman.
Mimicking their idols Noel and Liam Gallagher, Pizzorno wrote the songs while Meighan brought the stage presence, preposterous quotes (“Our songs sound like we’ve shit ourselves 10,000 feet in the air”) and ludicrous tales. Band legend had it that, whenever Meighan became too much to handle, the other members had to take him to the nearest Toys R Us store to calm him down. But following a split from his partner, the relentlessly upbeat singer was struggling. He cried in one interview at the time.
“Tom’s still figuring things out, but he’s in a much better place now,” says Pizzorno when we meet for coffee in London. But it’s no wonder they needed time out. “I was worried we would get stale. Sometimes you need to go down the rabbit hole to refresh things.”
The SLP is that rabbit hole. It’s his initials – his full name is Sergio Lorenzo Pizzorno – and the name of his forthcoming solo album, recorded at his home studio, the Sergery (yes, really). With its guest appearances from Little Simz and Slowthai, and wild eclecticism, it’s reminiscent of Gorillaz – a cartoonish world constructed as an escape from the pressures of being in an enormous band.
Pizzorno sees it less as a new direction and more a return to the way he started off making music. Back then he was using an old Atari and a Midi keyboard; these days he’s been recording on his phone, stealing snippets from 70s Italian horror movies, “weird Polish shit”, and whatever grabs his attention when he’s out and about.
“I’ll be in Tokyo, hear the buzz of the electricity running through the pylons, and be like…” he waves his phone in the air, as if frantically trying to record the sound. “All my mates will be taking the piss. And even in my own head I’m thinking, ‘I’m never gonna use this.’ But this time I did.”
Indeed, the buzzing pylons make it into The Wu, an incredibly odd song about wandering through hotel corridors in search of the afterparty. It’s a case study in Pizzorno’s esoteric influences, from the South African disco label Heads and Lee “Scratch” Perry to the late Nigerian synth wizard William Onyeabor. Elsewhere there’s Mediterranean house (Nobody Else), mariachi meltdowns (Meanwhile … in the Welcome Break) and, in ((trance)), the kind of joyously anthemic track that wouldn’t sound out of place in, well, a Kasabian set.
Did the rest of the band not think: can’t we have a couple of these tunes? “It’s probably testament to why we’re still together that they didn’t mind,” says Pizzorno. “Tom understands that you need to explore what else is out there. Otherwise you become the band everyone expects you to be.”
The irony is that Kasabian have never been the band a lot of people think they are anyway. When they emerged in the early 00s, with electro-influenced rock anthems such as Clubfoot and LSF, they were stereotyped as lairy lad rockers, when in reality they were just as enamoured by hip-hop and acid house.
“On our first record I would wanna sit people down and go, ‘No, no, no – this is where we were fishing for that stuff, Can and Neu! or whoever. But whatever we said, the journalist would just ask us about the Happy Mondays. I soon realised it was best to just keep your mouth shut, because if you’re still able to make albums and art, who cares where it comes from anyway?”
I interviewed the band a few times back then and always found them far kinder and more erudite than they were portrayed (“On the road carnage with rock’s rowdiest band!” screamed one NME cover line). But it’s fair to say, with their wild tales and boasts, they played up to it.
Was the lad thing a bit of an act? “We knew that journalists wanted it,” says Pizzorno. “But at the same time, we did grow up where, if you wanted to be in a band, you had to have your wits about you. If you’re playing in a village pub in Leicester in front of a load of lads that would throw darts at your head for having long hair, you can either go in and be all art school, or you can snap a snooker cue in half and say, ‘Let’s go!’ But then I still wanted to get them in the corner and talk about Jodorowsky afterwards.”
Pizzorno’s lad-rock credentials were no doubt enhanced by two televisual moments: a goal on Soccer AM, in which he improbably flicked the ball up in the air while wearing winklepickers before volleying it into a tiny hoop; and an even better strike during the Soccer Aid charity match that saw him scoop the ball over former England keeper David Seaman’s head and into the top corner of the net. The mention of these acts of sporting glory makes Pizzorno groan: “You’ll work for ages on a piece of music or art that you’re really proud of. But kick a ball through a hole in an inflatable bouncy castle and it’s what you become known for.”
Come on though, which was his favourite goal? “With the Soccer AM one I’d been up all night, I was hanging. If I was sober I’d never have even tried it. But the [Soccer Aid] one … not only is it a great goal, but for five minutes after scoring it, I’ve never been more off my nut in my life. As a pure sledgehammer hit of adrenaline, it was insane. God knows what it would be like to score in a World Cup.”
Less impressive when it comes to lad stereotypes was a cover of Q magazine, on which Meighan and Pizzorno appeared alongside two naked ladies, something that even back in 2011 looked like a relic of a bygone era. Pizzorno groans again, but this time he means it. “That really kills me,” he says. “It was sold to us as Jimi Hendrix, Electric Ladyland, a celebration of 60s psychedelia. But we learned an important lesson there – we need to take control over every element.”
Pizzorno says the band have always been more inclusive than people give them credit for. “Art can be the start of something. At [Kasabian’s] gigs you only have to look at the first few rows to see there’s people from all over the world, with completely different views on how things should be done, but at least we’ve got them together.”
There’s a song on The SLP that addresses this, the final track Meanwhile … in the Silent Nowhere. “It’s about communication,” says Pizzorno. “Previously, even if you were rightwing or had extreme views, it felt like there could be some sort of dialogue where you could at least hear each other’s stories. Now it feels like, ‘This is my belief, fuck you’ … there’s a danger in us not sitting down and talking face to face.”
What does he think of the current political situation? “It’s like Vegas. Fundamentally, the system is rigged and whatever you implement, the outcome will be the same. You’re probably talking revolution here but we need someone to come along and start again.” Is Jeremy Corbyn that person? “He’s the best shot we’ve got … but I think there’s more. There’s someone else out there that can marry spirituality [with politics] and break the system and get us to start again somewhere better.” He laughs: “I think I’m just waiting for the messiah.”
Right now, Pizzorno has more pressing problems than the overthrow of capitalism: how to be a musician without Meighan by his side. He’s planned an impressive stage show, with different characters performing each song. It sounds ambitious. “But in a really minimal way,” he stresses. “Not overblown, the opposite to lasers and screens. It won’t be pretentious. Pretentious is my number one fear.”
Will there be costume changes? “Very subtle ones. There might be a hat. I might be barefoot. Fundamentally, I want it to be like a David Lynch thing, where people feel on edge, as if they’ve entered another world for 50 minutes.”
Pizzorno says he knows he can never compete with Kasabian’s enormous gigs – those gigantic, truck-bearing affairs with catering teams and staff everywhere. “But the aim is to get to that same euphoric point,” he says, “just in a whole new way.”
