Tim Rice-Oxley talks about giving something back to his hometown with Battle Festival

Battle Abbey Grounds, High Street, Battle, Saturday, August 8

WHEN they began performing on the London scene from their hometown of Battle in the late 1990s, Keane songwriter Tim Rice-Oxley admits the band always felt like outsiders.

“We thought eventually we would be part of this cool scene,” he says during a return home to his old home town.

“We never really met anyone apart from Coldplay – I knew [frontman] Chris Martin from college.

“We would joke about turning up at gigs looking cool and standing in different corners of the room like the Sharks and Jets [from West Side Story].

“We felt like such yokels – but we felt we had something the other bands always seemed to lack. We would watch them play - and they were such better musicians - but they didn’t stick it out as long.”

It was the experience of growing up in a small town, with all its attendant frustrations and seemingly impossible teenage dreams, which encouraged Rice-Oxley to become patron of Battle Festival.

Last year, for the inaugural event, he mentored eight young musicians in one-to-one sessions giving advice about songwriting and acting as an objective sounding board to their work.

And this year he has reunited with Keane vocalist Tom Chaplin for an exclusive acoustic set to raise funds for the festival. Tickets for the event, in the grounds of Battle Abbey, sold out in hours when they were released last month.

“When I was a 12 year-old writing songs I had these silly dreams about getting on tour and having a song on the radio,” says Rice-Oxley. “I remember how distant the possibility seemed when I was growing up.”

With Keane he managed to achieve those dreams – and then some.

Debut album Hopes And Fears shot to number one on release in 2004, and has now been certified nine-times platinum, equating to in excess of 2.7 million sales worldwide.

It was followed by four more consecutive UK number one albums: Under The Iron Sea in 2006, 2008’s Perfect Symmetry, the 2010 eight-track EP Night Train and 2012’s Strangeland plus a 100,000-selling greatest hits album in 2013.

Meeting Rice-Oxley in person there is no starriness about him or evidence of the sort of rock star ego which might demand M & Ms be divided by colour backstage.

Instead he is full of self-deprecating humour and honesty about his desire to help others reach the heights he has scaled.

The idea of mentoring young musicians came out of Keane’s own early experiences.

“The only music I can remember happening in Battle was classical stuff and people playing Sunday afternoon blues jams at The Bull,” he recalls.

“I’d never met a band who were going to London and playing gigs.”

When Chaplin’s dad introduced the young band to his Burwash pal - The Who frontman Roger Daltry - it made a lasting impact.

“It made such a difference to us,” says Rice-Oxley. “We were just starting out – we didn’t know what we were doing at all. He told us to turn the bass up, and gave us advice about the drums. He said The Who had used a cardboard box for a floor tom at first.

“It was half an hour of enthusiasm and encouragement, and when you’re a teenager you need that encouragement.”

Rice-Oxley admits the beginnings of Keane were almost punk in their approach.

“We didn’t really play any instruments,” he says. “Tom was always a good singer, I was okay on the piano, and took up the bass. Richard [Hughes] learned the drums because we needed a drummer. There was a punk mentality of making it up as we go along.”

Growing up in Battle there wasn’t a lot of cutting edge new music around – although Rice-Oxley had happy memories of a record shop which briefly opened its doors in the town for a couple of years.

“I was in there buying CDs all the time,” he says. “It’s easier now to access music and record tracks. I think the technological changes have made a huge difference to the capacity of people to make music whether they are in London or not.

“I was into The Smiths, The Beatles and Paul Simon.

“The bands who grew up in Glasgow or London would reel off names of obscure art house groups from the 1970s that I’d never heard of.

“We grew up with what was in the charts and in our parents’ record collection. You can hear that in our music – it is very melodic and very honest I suppose. It’s lacking in emotional artifice – we never had any idea about being flash or cool. In retrospect I think we ploughed our own furrow.”

He still recalls the band’s first gig in London as a big deal.

“We borrowed a van and got a friend of Tom’s brother to drive us,” he says. “We were such beginners!

“As we started playing more we went to The Crypt in Hastings, but that was about the only place around here.”

Having lived down the road in Alfriston for the last five years, Rice-Oxley still regularly visits his parents in Battle.

He sees his hometown today as being much more creative, with lots of bands starting up, and pubs and venues being more supportive.

“Battle is full of talent – it’s such a culturally rich place,” he says.

“Battle Festival is a perfect way of bringing people together. It is growing every year, there’s a certain sense of everybody trying to pool stuff together and see what happens.”

There is now even a fringe element to Battle Festival – partly based around a monthly new music night ELF (Every Last Friday) which holds monthly shows at different venues.

“More people have started to become aware of the festival and are coming to Battle,” he says. “There is more scope for more events in more venues. What makes it viable is people buying tickets and supporting it – hopefully it will snowball.”

When it came to finding potential mentees for his contribution last year Rice-Oxley turned to music-based social media site Soundcloud.

“We opened it up to anyone aged ten to 22 to send in a demo,” he says.

“It didn’t matter if it was their first song or their 100th. I listened to a lot of music, and then tried to choose a range of people I would like to talk to. There were so many good people out there – hopefully I’ll get a chance to speak to them in the future.”

The Battle Arts And Music soundcloud is taking entries for the mentoring sessions again this year, with a closing date of Thursday, October 1. All entrants must come from 1066 Country, stretching from Pevensey to Camber, and as far north as Bodiam and Hurst Green.

When it came to Keane’s own success Rice-Oxley says it took the band completely by surprise.

“We were off on our first US tour the day after we released our album [Hopes And Fears],” he says.

“We were out there for a month, but kept getting emails saying the album was at number one. We just thought it was a bit mad.

“The last time we had played the UK was the album launch gig at the Kentish Town Forum to 2,000 people. In the US we were playing to 50 people in little pubs. We didn’t feel like a big band.”

It was when the band made their Glastonbury debut on their US return that they realised they had created a monster.

“There were 30,000 people who knew our songs,” he says. “It was overwhelming.”

When the band started out they had all chipped in songs, but as time went on Rice-Oxley began to dominate the writing process.

“I don’t know what changed,” he says. “We worked really hard at our songwriting. We felt our songs and Tom’s voice were the two things other bands didn’t have.

“There was a point where we hit this purple patch of writing songs that seemed to catch people’s ear – they would wander into the part of the pub where we were playing. We wanted it so people who might not have intended to come and see us play would like what they heard, rather than wandering into the middle of a ten-minute guitar solo.

“We learned that from playing hundreds of s*** gigs!”

This weekend’s show will be the first time Rice-Oxley has played any Keane music for about two years.

The band, which added bassist Jesse Quin to their line-up in 2007, went on hiatus in 2013 following the release of their best of collection.

“We had an amazing ten years of making albums and touring,” he says. “We had reached a point where it felt it would be good to have a break.

“I really hope we will make some more music – we have a magical thing together that we should never squander.

“As a band we need to come together and focus – we have always been so passionate about what we do.

“I’m looking forward to sitting down with a setlist, we want to put in some quirky ones for the fans.”

The show will coincide with an international fan gathering of Keane fans in and around Battle.

On their last studio album Strangeland and the single Sovereign Light Cafe - named after a favourite Bexhill hangout – the band immortalised many parts of their hometown in song.

Rice-Oxley admits he still feels a strong affinity with Battle – and is particularly excited about playing in the Abbey grounds.

“We all grew up here – we’ve been friends our whole lives,” he says. “Before we even thought about forming a band we were playing football on the rec, and spent our teens in the local pubs.

“It’s so intertwined with our lives - my first girlfriend lives only a couple of hundred yards up the road.

“The Smiths and Pet Shop Boys’s music have a real passion for small towns, and I always relate to that. If people make out small towns aren’t as good as London it’s one of my buttons – I believe in places like Battle.

“It’s really good – people seem to feel proud of us and are affectionate about the band for going out there and being appreciated nationally.”

As for the future Chaplin is currently working on a solo album, while Rice-Oxley has been kept busy writing with the likes of Lily Allen and The Dixie Chicks in Texas.

“Hopefully there will be another Mt Desolation album,” he says of the side project he formed with Quin in 2010. “We’ve been very slow about it, although we are nearly there with the songwriting.”

And following his first year of mentoring for Battle Festival he is hoping there is more to come.

“I’m making sure it’s not a one-off thing,” he says.

“I would love to expand on it and find ways of recording with the people I mentored, or bring a live element into it. I need to find time and space to make it bigger.”

Doors 7pm, SOLD OUT. Visit www.battlefestival.co.uk