Kasabian Share Coachella Memories, Ponder Satire
Kasabian returned to Coachella this weekend for the first time in seven years, and the gig brought back a few fond memories for guitarist Sergio Pizzorno. “Seven years ago, Vincent Gallo came to see us. He’s someone I’ve admired for a long time,” Pizzorno tells Rolling Stone. “You go through this pace and there are not many people left you kind of want to meet. He’s someone I really did, so it was great.”
Gallo directs movies, of course, something Pizzorno dabbled in recently with a little black-and-white short film called Telepathic Shenanigans. It’s been described as a spoof of the Oscar-winning silent movie, The Artist, but Pizzorno says his aim wasn’t nearly that calculated. “We were bored in a hotel, it was raining and we were drunk, so we just thought we’d just do a video,” Pizzorno says. “It was just two pissed-up idiots from England, bored.”
Pizzorno did have some satire in mind, though. “It’s taking the piss out of all the bands that do black-and-white videos and think they’re really cool,” says Pizzorno.”So we were just like, ‘Fuck that, we’re not cool. We’re just having a laugh.”
The ability to shoot a video on their phones and release it right away is an exciting prospect for Kasabian. “Because we’re not children of the Internet, it’s taken a while for us to embrace it,” Pizzorno says. “But what’s really exciting for me on this cycle is, I realize it’s given me the power back creatively to just put things out there of my own band, whether it’s just a little piece of music I’ve written on the way, or maybe it is just a video we’ve done taking the piss. There’s something great about that. It’s empowering.”
Pizzorno adds that such projects keep the group levelheaded, even as they make their Coachella return and get ready to headline the Reading and Leeds festivals later this summer. “It keeps you (feeling like) less of this superpower, big band, and more like why you started it in the first place.”