Kasabian’s New Album Inspired by John Lennon’s Musical Chair Theory

Kasabian's new album owes a debt to a surprising assist from a former Beatle.

Q Magazine (via NME) reports that the upcoming Kasabian effort, due this fall, was inspired by comments made by John Lennon during a 1970 interview, in which he likened music to chairs — particularly the blues, which he pointed to as the foundation for everything the Beatles and their acolytes did after.

"The blues is a chair, not a design for a chair, or a better chair… it is the first chair. It is a chair for sitting on, not chairs for looking at or being appreciated. You sit on that music… We didn’t sound like anybody else, that’s all," Lennon told Rolling Stone. "I mean we didn’t sound like the black musicians because we weren’t black. And because we were brought up on a different kind of music and atmosphere, and so ‘Please Please Me’ and ‘From Me to You’ and all those were our version of the chair. We were building our own chairs."

"Lennon said the Beatles version of rock & roll was their chair," said Kasabian guitarist Serge Pizzorno. "So I thought ‘Wow, I want to make my version of that chair.’" What this means, according to Pizzorno, is a set of songs that return the group to their "guitar roots."

Singer Tom Meighan added that fans can expect a much more direct sound than the more experimental approach the band employed on 2014's 48:13. "Serge played me the demos and I was ‘F---ing hell!,'" he recalled. "It’s nothing like 48:13. There’s no f---ing interludes or any of that s---."

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