Keane 'didn't know what they were doing' when they released Hopes and Fears

Keane “didn’t really know what [they] were doing” when they released their debut album.

The band – which currently features Tom Chaplin, Tim Rice-Oxley, Richard Hughes, and Jesse Quin – released their debut album, ‘Hopes and Fears’, back in 2004, and frontman Tom has confessed that they were really uncertain of themselves at the time.

He told NME: “We didn’t really understand how to make it all work – we were just three kids from a small town in the middle of nowhere, so we didn’t we didn’t have many reference points. We didn’t really know what we were doing.”

The band’s debut album will be reissued on May 10, 2024 – two decades on from its original release.

Despite this, Tom still has vivid memories of launching their debut record.

He shared: “I feel like I’ve lived quite a lot of life in the last 20 years.

“To me, it does actually feel like quite a long time ago. The release of this album was the point at which all our lives changed very dramatically, and it feels like a marker of time, after which so much stuff, both good and bad, has come along. It sticks very clearly in the memory.”

Keane spent years performing live in venues around the UK before they released their debut album.

And on reflection, Tom thinks the six-year gap between their first gig and their debut album was “about right”.

He said: “We had to learn what we were best at as musicians, and had to learn how to write songs. My voice developed lots over that time as well, and it was a long and fairly slow learning curve for all of us.

“It was a relief in a way that we were able to do nearly all of our early gigs in private, and there’s not very much that remains [online]. I saw a video the other day of us playing at the Bull and Gate [in Kentish Town, London] in around ‘98, ‘99. It’s very sweet, but we definitely weren’t the finished article at that point.”