Kicking Back with Keane

It's not every day your sister calls and says "hey what are you doing in an hour, want to meet Keane?" But last week I found myself on the receiving end of that fortunate question! The story that leads us to the asking of that question is even longer, but it goes a bit like this: Lisa's boyfriend's boss downloaded a Keane song from the Nokia website a few months back not really knowing that for every download of a Keane song your name would be entered into a drawing to meet and greet the band before their Dubai show, granted free tickets, a limo to the concert and a nights hotel stay. My sister's lucky boyfriend gladly accepted the package but in order to pick it up someone had to go to the meet and greet, and since he's not the biggest fan he passed that duty on to Lisa, who then called me for back up!

It was all quite easy really, we showed up at the Raffles hotel that morning and simply said " we are here for Keane" and with no questions asked we were taken on to elevator, directed to the room and when we open the door there was Keane, in the middle of a press conference with about 15 Dubai journalists. We first thought, that was easy and then though, why don't we try asking for these things more often!

The boys from the UK were pretty mild mannered and answered all the press questions, but in my opinion, knowing what they "eat on tour" and "how they relieve stress" wasn't really that interesting, so just when the press conference was about to close and they called for last questions, I fronted as a journalist and asked "How do you feel about the comparison of your sound to bands like Coldplay or Travis, without the guitar? Do you find it flattering, or is it frustrating when you've worked so hard to create your own unique sound?"

Whew, that felt good! The answer that followed was about a 5 minute lecture on their respect for their predecessors and a rundown of who has influenced them. It was pretty much the only question about their actual music that was asked. My work here was done.

After the press conference, we had a chance to meet the trio and I got to gush about how I saw them perform at the 9:30 club in Washington, DC in 2006. I think I got an "oh cool" out of the nearly mum threesome, but in any case they were amenable enough to take a few photos with us, not too shabby!

We all gathered later that night for the concert where a great time was had by all!