Keane-ye EP?

Keane are hoping to collaborate with Kanye West on more tracks

16 December 2008 - The band met the American rapper at a studio in Paris recently, where he recorded a rap over one of their songs, You Haven't Told Me Anything.

Drummer Richard Hughes said they're hoping to work on some more new material together: “I think Tim [Rice-Oxley] left another song with him that he wrote a little while back.

“It’s got a huge gap in it which is for a guest vocalist and we were hoping Kanye might take a run at that as well.”

He then joked: “I don’t know, maybe we’ll do a little EP, call it Keane-ye or something.”

Plans for release

Keane's three albums, including their latest Perfect Symmetry, have all reached number one in the UK charts.

And Richard said they got more than they bargained for when they met Kanye.

He said: “We’d been thinking about asking him to have a crack at a remix and actually he ended up rapping over a little bit of You Haven’t Told Me Anything.”

"We’ll try to take that idea and run with it. It would be a shame to put it out without making the most of it."
Richard Hughes

However, they aren’t sure how it will be released yet: “I don’t know how we’re going get it to see the light of day. We’ll maybe try to take that idea and run with it. It would be a shame to put it out without making the most of it.”

'It was very cool'

It was actually a studio in Paris that brought the English quartet and the US star together, as Richard went on to explain: “Kanye was actually in the studio we were in when we started making this record.

“We popped down to say hello because he’s always written nice things on his blog about us. It was just before his album came out, and he played us his record.”

And Richard said the moment they met Kanye was everything he'd hoped for: “Suddenly he just stood up and it was like a classic moment you would imagine in a film.

“He stands up and goes, ‘Grab me a mic’, and someone runs off and get gets him one and plugs it in. Then he just went for it and it was very cool.”

The band played three songs including Somewhere Only We Know and Perfect Symmetry in the 6 Music hub this morning (16 December).

You can listen again to the session at George Lamb's page on 6 Music or watch their performance on 6 Music.

Georgie Rogers