LEICESTER SQUARED

Kasabian blend rock and beatbox in a way that may not be original, but keeps the crowds moving. Jim Carroll meets singer Tom Meighan of the self-styled 'people's band'

FARMING it seems, is the new rock'n'roll. Just ask Kasabian. A few weeks after the four lads signed a record deal, Kasabian found themselves at a party on a farm 30 miles from their Leicester home town. They never went back.

They needed somewhere to record their debut album and knew instantly that they had found the right place: 880 acres of land, dozens of disused buildings, an empty textile mill. It made Glastonbury look like a weekend away with exclusive spa treatments and designer-label tofu burgers for middle-class hippies by comparison. "We grew our hair and beards and went around looking like the Manson family," says Kasabian singer Tom Meighan.

What emerged from their time getting their heads together is an album that shows no sign of running out of steam. They've already flogged 500,000 copies of their self-titled debut - and that's before they turn their attention towards the US and take up residency on the larger stages on 2005's summer festival circuit.

What's captured everyone's imagination is an album that contains absolutely nothing new, groundbreaking or innovative. Kasabian mash rock and dance together in a similar manner to every gang of malcontents and cheeky urchins who have slouched this way since The Stone Roses.

The difference comes in the style. Thanks to a series of fired-up, blistering rock'n' beatbox fusions, Kasabian have produced the smartest post-baggy fire-and-brimstone album on the block. Tunes like Club Foot, Reason Is Treason and Lost Souls Forever are perfect for these postmodern times, breathtaking rehashes and retakes of past glories.

Today, sitting in a corner of a chi-chi London hotel, nursing a cup of hot water to soothe a grumpy throat, Meighan is assessing why it's all come good for them. As far as he is concerned, Kasabian are the people's band.

"There's been a need for a people's band for quite some time, and we're filling that role. We're an interesting people's band. We're not a pub rock band; we have something more to offer than that. We're not cool musicians who think about it all too much. We just play music and we're loving it. We appeal to people because it's something to shout about and sing about and feel good about."

There have been a few attempts to paint Kasabian with a political brush. Their Club Foot video, for instance, contained a dedication to Jan Palach, the Czech student who set himself on fire to protest at the Soviet invasion of 1968. But Meighan makes no bones about keeping clear of such associations. After all, the band only discovered who Palach was four weeks after making that video.

"People will try to see us as some kind of political force when we're not in the least bit political. We're just building up our own quiet legend. We write about what's happening in today's world. Things happen, scary things happen, and we're trying to reflect that. We're like most bands in that regard. It's not like we've written a love album or an album full of statements. It's just about today's world with a lot of nonsense in the middle. People can take from our music whatever they want."

Meighan refers to the band a few times as "street kids from the east midlands". Leicester may be one of the most un-rock'n'roll cities in Europe, but he sees some advantages to its geographical location. "It's more northern than it is southern, it's closer to Sheffield than it is to London, and I think that rubs off on the band. We've got the cockiness of the northern bands and the style and sound of the south."

Not that they will see much of their hometown in the coming months: Meighan says he has a half-day off before a three-month US tour begins. He's not complaining.

"Playing live - that's where our heart is, that's where the fun is. When we started off in a van driving around Britain, we were shit. The more we played, the better it got. We did 160 gigs last year and we loved it because it's still all new to us. We did all the graveyard shifts at the festivals."

He pauses for a second and grins broadly. "That won't be happening again."

For sure, Meighan won't be going back to his old job in a steel fabrication workshop any time soon. Even when he was inhaling the Woodbine smoke of his fellow workers, he knew it was just a temporary thing.

"We used to train four times a week in our rehearsal room for this, we used to prepare like we had a fight coming up. It didn't matter if it was a hot summer's day or a freezing cold winter's night, we went to that room and we worked religiously. It was our life."

Later that night, Kasabian play the Brixton Academy, one of the biggest halls in town. It's sonic grandstanding on a scale last heard when The Stone Roses were in their prime or Primal Scream's loose grooves began go to dark for the first time. While the rest of the band keep their heads down and remain in the shadows, Meighan pulls every pose imaginable from the big handbook of baggy-rock star poses. The audience shuffles around to every tune as if it's an anthem. Kasabian seem to be doing something right.

Meighan thinks so. "We're making 40-year-old men think they're 18 again. We're making the football hooligan or terrace nutter feel crazy for an hour. We're making the teenager or the student or their mum or dad feel excited about music again. This trip is just getting crazier and crazier."

Kasabian is out on Sony-BMG. The group play Oxegen on Saturday, July 9th