Kaiser Chiefs - Topic

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Things could so easily have stayed the same. After more than 10 years, four albums, platinum record sales, a volley of top ten singles and 3 Brit Awards, it would have been simple for Kaiser Chiefs to sit back and coast a while, to enjoy the warm glow of being one of Britain's most cherished bands. But in late 2012 there came a change: the departure of founder member and drummer Nick Hodgson. Yet an event that might have derailed the band entirely instead lit a fire that has carried the Kaiser Chiefs forward, through a period of re-evaluation and reinforcement, to create an album that is their most considered, literate, and impassioned record to date. Education, Education, Education & War began out of frustration. The band's remaining members, lead singer and lyricist Ricky Wilson, bassist Simon Rix, guitarist Andrew White and keyboardist Nick Baines, decamped to Real World to see if they could kindle something new. In the days that followed, the sense of neutered creativity gave way to something thrilling and unleashed. By the end of that week, Rix recalls, they had "Nineteen or 20 ideas for songs." And more importantly, Wilson says, "We had the spark that gave us hope." "At first the songs came from a very personal anger," explains Wilson. "But then I thought back to what I'd enjoyed writing about in the beginning, with Employment, and what I enjoyed then was looking around and writing about what I saw. And so over the next year I began to write songs about living in this country, about the thoughts that inspired in me." The album title is a reference to Tony Blair's famed 2005 speech on the power of education: "Education, education, education," he told the crowd that April in Sedgefield, "then and now the key to the door of Britain's future success." It is an album that takes the temperature of a nation seven years into a recession, people desperate for work, debt-ridden, suspicious of corporations, big business, government, and eager for signs of compassion, understanding, hope. In the centenary year of the First World War, it also questions the role and importance of modern conflict, the wars waged in Afghanistan and Iraq, the diminished power of an Empire. "I'm not saying it's political, it is about the feeling of futility… about wondering 'what is the point?' Not in a way that means giving up, but in a way that raises a question I want to ask. I don't think a band has a responsibility to say anything more than love songs, but if it's in you