Shropshire Star

Kings of Leon's Caleb talks ahead of Birmingham show

They were once the hardest-partying band on the road.

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Kings of Leon boozed their way through the 00s, carousing around the world as their six studio albums racked up millions of sales, propelled them to No1 around the globe and earned them 68 platinum discs – which is a lot of space on their walls.

And yet the release of their seventh album, the appropriately-named WALLS, last October marked a paradigm shift.

Instead of boozing, the Followills have been cutting back; instead of partying, they've been fixing their relationships; instead of hell-raising they've been organising, erm, food festivals. When they aren't doing that though they still play, and land at Birmingham's Genting Arena on Monay.

Rewind to 2011 and Kings of Leon were playing to 50,000 festival fans after their breakthrough mainstream hit, Sex On Fire, had taken them to the top of the bill around the world having previously populated the playlists of indie kids only. Band members weren't talking to each other, they were travelling in separate cars and eating haute cuisine on private jets.

Singer Caleb tucked into a dish while reading a music paper. In it were a bunch of burger-guzzling Alabama rockers having their photograph taken as they gunned for glory.

"Man, I have so much jealousy and fear of missing out when I see bands like that. I'm like,'wow, that's camaraderie; that's what a band is'.

"And we're eating fancy food on an airplane, y'know? You feel like you're missing out on something."

Something had to change. Egos were ballooning, fights were common place and their penchant for good times had spiralled wildly out of control. Caleb recalls: "After a while it's not like, 'I'm going to do an interview with my brother', it's, 'I'm going to do an interview with The Drum Player; I'm going to do an interview with The Bass Player.'

"Look at every band that's still around and classic – you become 'I'm The Drummer', 'I'm The Bass Player', 'I'm The Lead Singer'. When you get together it's never, 'we are the band'. We lost that, y'know?

"There were a lot of moments where we weren't talking. It was like, 'man, we've become business partners. We haven't maintained our friendship and our brotherhood, everything that we are'."

And they should have maintained that more than other bands. The chart toppers are made up of four members of the Followill family – brothers Caleb, Nathan and Jared, with their cousin Matthew.

Caleb sings the lead vocals and plays rhythm guitar, Nathan drums, Jared strums the bass and Matthew adds the lead guitar. Jared said: "Playing bigger shows allowed us the privacy that we needed to stop some of the arguments we would have by being contained in tiny little buses. The bigger we got, we got our own cars and did our own thing and would only see each other for the hour-and-a-half before the show. We went too far in the other direction. If you're not gonna be friends and family then you can't really be a band – or we can't be this band."

Younger, more bohemian days in the early 00s, from left, Matthew, Jared, Caleb, Nathan

Caleb says: "We had a big moment in Scotland when my ego was out of control. I almost got in a fight with my manager, me and Nathan got in a fight. That should have been the moment when we went, 'alright, let's stop for a second'.

"But we kept going and it happened on stage as opposed to in a hotel room where it should've happened." That on-stage moment came in Dallas in 2011 when Caleb told the crowd: "I'm gonna go backstage for a second. I'm gonna vomit, I'm gonna drink a beer and I'm gonna come back out here and I'm gonna play three more songs." He didn't return.

Drummer Nathan says the band had to take a break. "Coming off of an 18-month world tour and then going straight into the studio – I mean, that can be kind of taxing. For a young band, that's great because what else are you going to do? You're just going to make music and have fun. We got to take a little time away and be with our families and get to be husbands and daddies for a while, and not musicians," he said. "Early on we didn't have families of our own. it was a little easier back then. But now three of us have kids, and we're all married, so the priorities change as your family grows.

"Caleb does a majority of the lyrics, but this record was the first one in a little while where we were all four very involved lyrically and was kind of a team effort. Us being family, no one shies away from 'no, that's a horrible line' or 'that's a great line'. Our brutal honesty is good and bad for us sometimes."

And having their own families has both brought a new maturity to the band as well as a sense of perspective for its members.

"Our kids are always together, they all go to the same school," says Matthew. Nathan adds: "You can tell us apart from the other parents – we're the ones smoking weed underneath the bleachers."

Their rockstar mates, like U2's Bono and Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder, also offer them advice. Jared says: "I remember really early on, Eddie told us to never tour Europe for more than three weeks because that will break up your band."

Caleb adds: "He also said to chase summer around the world. But we didn't realise he was talking about a groupie."

By Andy Richardson

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