'We Were Trying To Think Big': Kaiser Chiefs Reflect On 20 Years Of 'Employment'

When Leeds rockers the Kaiser Chiefs first burst onto the scene in the mid-'00s, it almost felt as if they came out of nowhere; emerging fully-formed with an impressive roster of songs at their disposal.

For all intents and purposes, they might well have. After all, their brilliantly-titled debut album was dubbed Employment and jokingly offered that this was the starting point for all that would spring forth from there on.

Of course, their apparent 'overnight success' was one that took a lot more time behind the scenes. For one thing, the group had begun life back in 1996, with the group (comprising vocalist Ricky Wilson, guitarist Andrew White, and then-drummer Nick Hodgson) forming under the moniker Runston Parva.

By 2000, the group had welcomed close friends Simon Rix into the fold on bass and Nick Baines on keyboard, and as they adopted the shortened name of Parva, they set to work on the release of their debut album under that name, 2002's 22.

Having been dropped from a record deal, the group decided to head in a new direction. Adopting the name Kaiser Chiefs, they refocused, determined to shake off any notion of being "has-beens," and began writing and recording what would become their first, 'proper,' album.

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As Rix explains via a Zoom call on a sunny afternoon, the transitory period for the group was one marked by not just excitement, but a little bit of regret over what had failed to materialise previously.

"We'd just finished an old band that had been completely unsuccessful, and that was quite sad," Rix recalls. "We were quite down about that, I guess.

"We started the new band as a way of saying, 'We all want to be in a band anyway. If it's not successful, we all still want to be in a band, so let's just get on with it.'"

Very quickly, the nascent group took to the studio to write and record. The result was a couple of their biggest hits, including debut single Oh My God and the enduring Modern Way.

"I think when we wrote those two songs, we were like, 'This is good. This is different to what everyone else is doing,'" Rix recalls, remembering how things had been "a bit of a slog" in their former band before things started to pick up.

"It was something that was gathering momentum all the time," he notes. "Just from playing locally and playing better gigs locally to then getting tours, to then releasing a song. We did a home demo of Oh My God, we made CDs for it, and it sold out instantly.

The process gave the Kaiser Chiefs a sense of momentum in which they kept creating more and more – intent to make the most of the opportunities they had been presented with.

"We just kept going and going and going and going," Rix remembered. "By the time we actually got to recording the album, it was mad because we were just so busy that we were squeezing in recording in between gigs."

Beginning the process in earnest, the group kicked off proceedings at The Town House in Hammersmith with veteran producer Stephen Street, who had worked with the likes of The Smiths, Blur, and The Cranberries.

Recording I Predict A Riot as a bit of a "test," the sessions seemed fruitful, with the group quickly knocking out a raft of veritable bangers with Street, including Everyday I Love You Less And Less, Modern Way, Na Na Na Na Naa, Saturday Night, and a new version of Oh My God.

"It was just busyness," Rix recalls. "But it was what we'd been waiting to do for such a long time. We were just trying to make the most of it, I guess."

The remainder of the album (including You Can Have It All, Team Mate, Born To Be A Dancer, and Caroline, Yes) was recorded by Stephen Harris, who was known for his work with Santana, the Dave Matthews Band, and Kula Shaker. The result of this session was one that was a little more laidback and enjoyable for the group.

"That was a bit more fun," Rix admits. "Doing the non-singles is always a bit more fun because you can experiment a bit more. We had a little bit of time, but I just remember it being very, very busy, but in a good way."

By the group's own admission, the main issue that they faced during this time was trying to get a record label involved. Having released their initial version of Oh My God via the indie Drowned In Sound, the Kaiser Chiefs' rising success saw a lot of attention, though it was only Atlantic and the local indie B-Unique that made offers for the group.

"Nowadays we'd have just done it ourselves a bit more, and that would've been good, but in 2004 you still needed a label to be commercially successful," Rix remembers. "We were getting played on Radio 1, we were in the NME, we even got MTV 2 because we made a homemade video.

"We were doing loads of gigs, we had people coming to the gigs, we were selling out, and we were selling a decent number of tickets and doing lots of support tours," he adds. "We were doing everything that a 'signed' band would be doing, but labels were still coming to see us and just saying no."

Ultimately, the group would sign to B-Unique ahead of the release of their first single, with this professional relationship coming about thanks to Sam Preston, the vocalist of The Ordinary Boys.

"They took us on tour a couple of times, which was really good," Rix remembers. "[Preston] just whinged at his label until they signed us. Obviously, they had to agree to it, but I think it's funny, like I always say when I'm talking about smaller, emerging acts, I tell them that we just got ignored, and it was because of somebody taking a really big chance on us that meant we got successful.

"But very quickly after we signed to them, we quickly moved to Polydor," he adds. "There was a lot of other sort of boring music industry stuff that happened, and suddenly we were very hot and signed to a major. But that initial somebody taking a punt on Kaiser Chiefs, it was only because one person had made it their mission to get us signed."

While getting signed to a label was undoubtedly a major part of the group's success and their ability to be heard on a global scale, Kaiser Chiefs' rise to fame was undoubtedly something the band had never quite expected – despite their best efforts to be "as big as we could possibly be."

"We were trying to aim big, but we'd written this song [I Predict A Riot] and it was mainly about Leeds and it has all of this local dialect in it," Rix notes. "We weren't really thinking about the American market or Australian market or whatever.

"When we went to London, we played in a 150-capacity venue. We were writing songs to try and grab 80 of those people to like our band. Especially songs like Na Na Na Na Naa, they were really songs where we're like, 'We need a song that's really simple and when people leave they're going to remember the song.'"

Indeed, 20 years on, Na Na Na Na Naa still manages to get stuck in the heads of even the most resolute critics of the Kaiser Chiefs. A lot of the group's music is rather catchy, though even the band's name is designed to be catchy – especially coming off the back of a band such as Parva, whose moniker was undeniably awkward to remember.

"You'd be out in a club or whatever and be like, 'Oh, I'm in a band,' and they'd be like, 'What's it called?'" remembers Rix. "You'd say, 'Parva', and they'd be like, 'What?' No one could ever remember it.

"So when we were like searching for the new band name and more than any of the other reasons – like the [former Leeds United captain] Lucas Radebe connection [to South African team Kaizer Chiefs] – the reason we like Kaiser Chiefs was that it's really strong and really memorable and if you saw it on a poster, you'd be like, 'This is interesting. What is this?'

"We were trying to think big," he adds. "But equally, I don't know if we thought we would be – one year later – touring Australia with the Foo Fighters in arenas. I guess that would've been on the list of things that we wouldn't have seen happening."

For those who remember 2005, it was a massive year for indie rock, and an even bigger year for the Kaiser Chiefs. Though the Employment album and its singles didn't make impact on the local charts (the record peaked at No. 60 and only I Predict A Riot and Everyday I Love You Less And Less hit the singles charts, albeit in the 90s), they were a hit on triple j, where I Predict A Riot reached No. 34 and Everyday I Love You Less And Less followed closely at No. 28.

In the UK, it was a different story, with the record peaking at No. 2 – second only to the Arctic Monkeys' ubiquitous debut. This is all a means of saying that the Kaiser Chiefs were making a name for themselves on a global scale, and by the end of their breakout year, they'd supported the likes of U2, the Foo Fighters, and Weezer.

In December, that tour in support of the Foo Fighters and their In Your Honour album brought the English outfit to Australia for the first time.

"We'd had a really, really, really busy year," Rix remembers. "I sort of remember it being like a nice break; almost like a holiday. We'd been used to lots of flying back and forth to America, being in a van, and being in a tour bus for days and days.

"When we came to Australia with the Foo Fighters, it was quite relaxed. It was like, quite nice hotels because it was a big tour, so it was a gig, then a day off where you had to fly for an hour to Brisbane and then the next day we were playing half an hour because we were first on.

"I remember just having a really nice time," he continues. "Going to some rock clubs, eating some good food, meeting some really nice people. I think we did a couple of shows of our own, and I think we did a festival in Perth [the Rock It festival] where we played with Oasis, the Foo Fighters and us."

It might be a little dizzying to think of where the Kaiser Chiefs had managed to reach in just a year, but for the group, it was a testament to their endless determination and boundless hard work.

"The album that we'd released in March, by December 2005, was still selling like 100,000 copies a week or something crazy," he adds. "We sometimes think about what it would look like in the streaming era, because those were people going and spending like, £10 of their money on a CD.

"It was feeling like a bit of a reward for what had been a really, really hard couple of years of working hard and writing some good songs. Constantly working hard and suddenly, here we were."

This year sees the Kaiser Chiefs returning to Australia for the first time since 2012 to bring their 20 Years Of Employment tour to the country. Fittingly taking place almost 20 years to the day since their first visit, it's been a long time coming for the group. So, why has it taken so long?

"It's a really good question," Rix admits. "Obviously, it's quite far away, and we've done four albums since.

"We've always wanted to come, and Whitey [guitarist Andrew White] has actually got some family in Australia, so he is always keen to come, and I've got a good friend who lives in Perth, so I've always been keen to come, but it's just been about time availability and all of that stuff.

"I would like to come more often. So let's see if this can be the start of something good," he adds. "We used to come all the time, sometimes like twice a year or whatever. But we'll come and do the Employment stuff, which I'm really looking forward to, and then maybe we can come again and do some new stuff."

As Rix referenced, there have been a few albums released between the group's last visit to Australia, and a total of seven new records issued since the release of Employment. While the debut album takes up an increasingly small representation of their discography, it's arguably the point that fans go back to the most.

However, as most music lovers would be aware, the second the touring cycle for a record is done, a lot of those tracks find themselves relegated to the archives. This much was true for the Employment era of the Kaiser Chiefs, with this new tour allowing them the chance to revisit much of the material on the record for the first time in decades.

"I think that's partly to do with the goal of a Kaiser’s set, which is really to be quite fast and furious; it's quite 'bang, bang, bang,'" Rix explains. "And on the album, obviously, you're going to have album songs that are a bit more reflective.

"I think it's been good revisiting old songs, thinking about how you wrote them. I feel like the Employment stuff's quite simple. If you said to me, 'Can you do a full album playthrough of album five?' I'd have to take some time and listen to the album and really dig into what I did.

"'What was the bassline? What was the piano doing here?' Think we kind of complicate things a bit more and there's a lot more going on," he adds. "Some of those early Employment songs are just very simple, like there's a riff and there's some words, and then there's a breakdown, and then it's the end.

"It's been nice to sort of think about that and then return to somehow playing those bass lines. It takes me back to being the person I was then and how I thought about music then."

While Rix notes that he hopes the simplicity of Employment may inspire something in the same vein for their next album, it has provided a great excuse to look back into their past and consider where they are now as compared to where they came from.

While Employment stands tall as a monster of the mid-'00s indie rock scene of the UK, its legacy is cemented thanks to tours like the one the band is currently on, and the recent China anniversary edition of the record, which appends rarities and demos to the original record.

So, for Rix, how does the album feel? Does it still feel as fresh as it does to many of its fans, or have the past 20 years made the record seem like a distant memory?

"I think at this point it feels reasonably in the past because, when people are asking me about the album and I think about recording or I think about gigs we're doing, it does feel like quite a long time ago," he explains.

"I think for a long time it didn't, but now it feels like we've done a lot of stuff since then, and things have changed a lot since then. So in some ways that bit feels a long time ago, but I guess because we still play I Predict A Riot in the set normally, sometimes the songs don't feel that old.

"But me standing in this recording studio with Stephen Street recording the bass for Riot, that seems like 50 years ago."

Tickets to the Kaiser Chiefs' upcoming tour of Australia are on sale now.