Live long enough, and you’ll discover history has a habit of repeating. Ancient history, even.
Twenty years ago, Kaiser Chiefs put on one heck of a breakout party at Glastonbury, unfurling tracks from their debut album, Employment. The sun was out — a triumph for mid-summer England — and the Leeds indie rockers were in a celebratory mood, making their leap from the pages of NME onto the biggest festival stage of them all.
One memory baked in from that performance, which included the lager-soaked anthems “I Predict a Riot”, “Oh My God”, and “Everyday I Love You Less and Less”, was the appearance of an inflatable dinosaur, which randomly made its way from the crowd onto the Pyramid Stage, and which frontman Ricky Wilson joyfully played with.
Kaisers Chiefs will never shake that moment, and they’re fine with that. When the band returned to Glastonbury in June of this year, “I asked for an inflatable dinosaur,” recounts founding bass player Simon Rix. “We did pretty close to our original Saturday afternoon spot and yeah, I wanted to get a big inflatable dinosaur. But it never arrived.”
Rix, Wilson and co. will kick off their four-city ‘20 Years of Employment’ tour of Australia with a November 23rd date at Perth’s RAC Arena, before heading east for shows in Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane.
“We have good dinosaurs screens, we’ve got some content and it’s quite dinosaur-heavy. I presume we’ll still do it when we come to Australia,” Rix tells Rolling Stone AU/NZ over a Zoom from his home. “We walk on to ‘Walk the Dinosaur’ by Was (Not Was) and there’s a bit of Jurassic Park action happening as well. So there’s lots of dinosaur references, but no inflatables, sadly.”
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Unlike the dinosaurs, these Kaiser Chiefs have a lot of life left in them yet.
Formed in 2000, the English band are eight studio albums deep, two of those going to No. 1 in their homeland. Along the way, they’ve collected five UK top 10 singles, including the 2007 leader “Ruby”, plus three Brit Awards and a coveted Ivor Novello Award. They’ve sold 8 million albums worldwide, including 2 million copies of Employment.
Employment was the spark that lit the fuse. The collection peaked at No. 2 on the UK chart, logged more than 17 months on the top 40 chart, and enjoyed the “China Anniversary” reissue treatment in July with three new expanded formats, including unreleased tracks.
“We knew it was going well in 2005,” Rix says, adding that Employment charted “much higher than we ever expected.” The band were touring America and Europe, playing headline gigs in serious venues, earning main stage slots at Glastonbury and Scotland’s legendary T in the Park. “They were the moments where you were like, ‘Ah, right, okay. This is big, bigger than us.’ This is like, what we dreamed. You want that to happen, you want the band to be successful and everybody to know the songs. I guess that was the manifesto. But when it happened, it was still a surprise.”
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Looking back, “we were so busy in 2005,” Rix remembers. “Whenever something came along, we said ‘yes.’ And it meant that we were crazily busy.”
One of his few regrets was due to their hectic schedule. “We got a spot to support the [Rolling] Stones in, like, Austria somewhere. We were just so busy that we said ‘no,’ and we were like, ‘Oh, we have to do it another time.’ We never got asked again.”
Who knows. History has a habit of repeating.
Kaiser Chiefs 2025 Australian Tour
Ticket information available via secretsounds.com
Sunday, November 23rd
RAC Arena, Perth, WA
Tuesday, November 25th
Festival Hall, Melbourne, VIC
Thursday, November 27th
Hordern Pavilion, Sydney, NSW
Friday, November 28th
Fortitude Music Hall, Brisbane, QLD
