Keane - "This is the last time"

The song "This is the last time" is the oldest track on Keane’s debut album "Hopes and Fears".

Tim Rice-Oxley (piano): "In 2000, I fell in love with the Smiths. At the time, as usual with us, we were feeling down. Tom [Chaplin, vocals] and I were humping boxes around in London and Richard [Hughes, drums] was temping at the BBC. Then suddenly I was introduced to the music of the Smiths. I’d been into Morrissey’s early stuff although, to be honest, I hadn’t realised that Morrissey had even been in the Smiths. I remember being really impressed by how they packed so much into a three-minute pop song. Not just all the hooks and melodies but the pathos and humour as well. They seemed to get everything right and in a concise way. That was a big moment for me — that’s when my songwriting went up a level. And the first song to emerge from that was "This Is the Last Time" — it’s a Smiths facsimile, basically !"

Keane are famous for being a 3-piece pop band with no guitar or bass player. Although Keane have successfully replaced the role of the guitar with their piano arrangements, you can still hear bass on the record. Andy Green (producer) : "Sometimes, Tim played real bass, but if the structure of the song was the same as the demo we found that we could often use bits of the more interesting synth bass [that had been written and played by Rice-Oxley on the demos]. On the track "This is the last time", the verses are demo bass from recordings three years earlier, and the choruses were replayed by Tim on a real bass guitar".

Available on their debut (and to this day only) album "Hopes and Fears"