Post by domejules on Nov 27, 2007 3:41:28 GMT
another funny interview for you
The Word
On the back stairs of a Madrid rock club unaccountably themed around the subjects of exploration, astronomy and map-making, The Fellowship Of The Rock And Roll Ring have gathered. There's Legolas the elf, with his Timotei hair, gamine physique and pointy ears; Gimli the dwarf, heavy of beard and piggy of eyes; Boromir the human, pointy-featured, shaggy haired and flinty; finally there's Samwise the hobbit, a bit chubby, a bit moody, and probably comically clumsy.
They sit there, looking glum and tired. Over long months they have journeyed far from their quiet, backwater homeland. Along the way many hardships have been endured, from endless questions about their facial hair to suspicions concerning their kinship and forebears. From the attentions of wringraith supermodels to the shiver-inducing Trial Of A Thousand Screaming Japanese Girl-Fans. Their bonds have been tested by the manifold earthly pleasures flung their way, and the purity of their quest - to carry bone-shaking Southern rock and roll into the 21st century - challenged by rumours of disease and degradation. In some foreign lands they have had to forego their traditional daily elixir, or "marijuana".
And now, as they embark on the second chapter of their odyssey, they frankly can't be bothered with all the palaver. Today they are corralled in front of the very keen media representatives of the Spanish, looking haunted, hunted and trapped. They're simple folks from the sticks, you know. Youngsters. When they emerged from the Tennessee woods less than two years ago, they didn't expect the world to go bananas.
It's tough being in Kings of Leon. Thus their second album, Aha Shake Heartbreak, is the sound of those hard-partying months on the road, chasing their instant success and their own runaway legend. No wonder it's full of rampaging hormones, violence and dirty words. They had a lot to get off their skinny chests.
As bass player, Jared Followill, who's still only 17, observes with a frown, fame has been good to Kings of Leon, but the myths around them less so. "It's not so much of an ego boost when you have to go home and get tested for sexual disease so your girlfriend believes you really don't have an STD. That's not something to look forward to."
"It came back clean?" quizzes Nathan Followill. "Good. That's one out of four."
Nathan Followill is the drummer and, at 25, the eldest of the three brothers and a cousin who comprise the most feted - and most lusted-after - American band since The Strokes. He is heavily bearded and shorter than you'd think. He is the band's most sage member, but also their biggest liar and greatest joker.
"The first record, we didn't know what we were doing," he says of summer 2003's Youth and Young Manhood. Maybe that's why it was such a blast of hot, bracing southern air: it was ramshackle and chaotic, but almost viscerally thrilling. Kings of Leon didn't sound like any other voguish, guitar-slinging young band. They weren't from metropolitan, big-city America. Yes, they were young tyro punks like many of their peers, but being from Nashville, they knew something of country music too.
Their story, too, was irresistible: they were the sons - and nephew - of a preacher man and had grown up on the highways of Tennessee, as their evangelical father travelled from church to church. Their names - Nathan, Caleb, Jared - had a suitably Old Testament ring (they're actually their middle names, the use of which they say is a family tradition). They sounded like firebrand old bluesman, wore retro-chic vintage threads and, with excellent facial hair, looked like The Band. They were Creedence Clearwater Revival Revival, if you like, with added sex and drugs. And Britain - where their success far outstrips any gains at home in America - couldn't get enough of them.
Youth and Young Manhood has sold 500,000 copies in the UK and earned the band two Brit Award nominations (Best International Group and International Breakthrough Artist) and two NME Brat statuettes. Their entire UK tour last month, including three nights at Brixton Academy, was sold out.
"We were out under the microscope a lot sooner than we ever imagined," says Caleb Followill, the 22-year-old singer. He's unbelievably skinny and has curious corners on the backs of his ears. He is much given to delicately smoothing his flowing hair round the sides of said lugs. To match his girl's hips and lady's face, he has apparently dressed in woman's clothes too - a pinch-waisted, calf-length coat and a floppy felt hat. He is part-elf, part-1930's English ma'am. The cherry on this strange cake is a rough, scratchy singing voice seemingly made from eating cigarettes and gargling Bourbon at the bottom of a swamp. He does most of the talking. He is most exercised by the "microscope" thing.
Which is why," Caleb continues, "once we got our chance to go back home for the first time in a long while, there was a lot pent-up inside of us. We were sitting reading the same articles, reading what everyone thought of us, what was important about us. And they weren't even talking about our music. Good lord!"
Kings of Leon might take their name from the brother's dad (Leon), who was, they say, defrocked for his drinking habits, but they get their singular look from mum. They were ridiculously tight jeans, sewn to nut-cracking specifications by Betty Ann Followill. She is also responsible for the artfully tousled birds-nest hair of the band's teenage wing. When posing for photographs, the youngsters will cluck and preen over each other, ensuring they all look just so.
Matthew Followill, the cousin, is 19. A serious-faced chap, he doesn't say much at all. He still has the puffy face of youth, and wears an unfortunate vest that scoops down towards his nipples. He may be a bit of a whizz on the guitar but he looks baffled, and ultimately frustrated, by the ret of what goes on around the job of being in a band. If he's not a hobbit, he's like Beck's fat wee brother.
Jared Followill, on the other hand, is the picture of effusive, eager-beaver, comically agitated youth. The band's bass player, he was 15 when Kings of Leon started, 16 when the band made their big splash at Glastonbury 2003. A week after Spain he will celebrate his 18th birthday on the road in Berlin.
It's mid afternoon on Thursday 11th November in Madrid. Aha Shake Heartbreak came out ten days ago. Kings of Leon are engaged in a whistle-stop tour of Europe. Days of publicity commitments are followed by nights of gigs. Today in the cool, 700-capacity Copernico, named after the Polish astronomer and suitably decked out with telescopes and ancient maps, the band are coming face to face with the rabid attention from the foreign press. Even the recalcitrant Matthew has been pressed into dispensing Tennesseean bon mots. TV crews, photographers and journalists mill around as the band's crew set up for the gig. Another Followill cousin, Nacho - small, broad, handsome, dwarf/elf hybrid - busies himself checking guitars. On the front of Nathan's bass drum is "KOL" spelt out in wonky gaffer tape. The message is clear: in line with their cool-but-cheap clobber and classic-rock fundamentalism, and contrary to what everyone thinks about them being a trendy "fashion band", Kings of Leon are not ones for flash presentation. They may be a hip act, but they are also a heritage act. Something for everyone then.
Perched on a couple of nautical barrels in the gloomy, underlit club, Matthew and Jared chat to a Spanish journalist. What do they miss about suburban Mount Juliet, 40 minutes from Nashville where they all share a house? It backs on to Old Hickory Lake, the stretch of water on which Johnny Cash also lived. (No, they never saw him round there, but they had been due to meet him, via a mutual producer acquaintance, in a Los Angeles studio the week after he died.)
Jared replies that he misses his girlfriend, and being able to drive his car to a restaurant. "Or sitting in my house at 3am and if I'm hungry, going to the 24-hour grocery." What do they think of all the hype and interest in the band? Matthew says that he wishes they "could be the Rolling Stones and go back to the days when you could just release records and it wouldn't be this huge thing in terms of press and promotion". In those days, things were more low-key and "chilled out."
"Now," Matthew says with a world-weary teenage wisdom born of 18 months of being screamed at from country to country, "people are freaking out all over the world."
On the back stairs, meanwhile, Caleb and Nathan are busy telling a TV camera about the kind of stuff they like. Caleb: "Townes Van Zandt for lyrics, The Ronettes as a band, Johnny Cash as a man." It's a good line, and one he's used before.
Out front, Jared and Matthew's interview is winding up. What do they think of the "Southern Strokes" tag that has often been applied to them (not least because they were signed by the same A&R man)? "If we were the Southern Strokes, we wouldn't be doing this interview," Jared says evenly of the too-cool-for-school, media-wary New Yorkers. "We'd be sitting in our dressing room, drinkin' and smokin' cigarettes."
Spanish PR chores complete, there's time for a quick soundcheck, during which Jared plonks out the riff from the Pixies' Gigantic (the first thing he learned on the bass) and Caleb sings a bit of Joy Division's Transmission. He says he's way more influenced by British music than the bands people think they must like, such as Lynyrd Skynyrd and The Allman Brothers. They aren't, as Nathan puts it, "Rebel flag-flying redneck dicks". Similarly when they talk, on new single Four Kicks, about getting some guns and showing you who's boss, they say that they're satirising the public's perception of them as squirrel-eating hicks.
We repair across the road to a wonderful restaurant where their experienced and multilingual tour manager has persuaded the chef to give us dinner at the very un-Spanish hour of six o'clock.
Now, with refreshments coming and the pressure off, Kings of Leon reveal themselves to be thoroughly decent young men. They may have (well-deserved) reputations for hedonism. Caleb grins that he has an alter-ego, Rooster, "a drunken dude who'll steal your girl and kick your pants". But they're also smart, funny, excitable. And happily, they haven't disappeared up their own fundaments.
They try to have a nice dinner every night on the road. It's one of the things the Followills have learnt to do to keep themselves sane. Sure, of a morning on the tour bus they like to wake up with a bong; of an evening, post-show, the red wine will flow and the girls will gather. But yes, they're epicurians. Nathan and Caleb have become pescatorians (they eat fish but no meat). Spain, France and Italy are their favourite foodie countries. What about sushi? Well, says Caleb, they don't eat so much in Japan. With ready access to dope being problematic there, they tend not to be so hungry. Anyway, they're too busy dodging the ever-resourceful Japanese girls who lurk in their hotels brandishing elaborate home-made gifts (a purse bearing their stitched likenesses, "with real hair on!"), and who find their way to the corridor outside their hotel rooms. "And they're always crying!"
There is much discussion over what wine to have. Then, dish after dish is brought to the table. The flavoursome tomato soup goes down a treat. The octopus is less of a hit. A pall of garlic hangs pungently over the table. The cod is flash-fried to perfection. Matthew and Jared's steaks are fresh, bloody and humongous.
"Can we get a couple of bottles of water please?" calls out Nathan. "And a cow for y'all's steak to mate with. Woo-eeh, that's just about the biggest steak I've ever seen."
It's all a long way from the dusty Tennessee by-ways. The way they've told it often, the Followill brothers grew up on the backseat of a car. Their dad's position as an itinerant preacher with the United Penticostal Church meant they were never in one place for long. Perversely their life only settled down when Leon Followill's drinking saw him exit the church and he and Betty split. It was 1997, and Caleb was 15, Nathan 18. Embracing their newly sedentary lifestyle but soon bored by it, they began writing songs together.
Nathan had been playing drums in the church since he was seven, where Leon had also played bass for the choir band and Betty had played piano. Aged nine, Nathan says, he was doing session work for local musicians in Memphis. Caleb picked up guitar much later, not long before Kings of Leon began in early 2002, purely so he could write songs more effectively. The first song he wrote was Molly's Chambers (their second single, with lyrics pinched from Thin Lizzy's Whiskey In The Jar), the second was Wicker Chair (on their debut EP, Holy Roller Novocaine), and their third was The Bucket (their last single).
Cousin Matthew had picked up the guitar aged 12 while a pupil at a Christian Academy in Alabama. He proved himself a natural. Five years later, after repeated calls to his then-home in Mississippi, he was persuaded to come join his cousins' new band. Little Jared, meanwhile, picked up the bass a mere couple of months before Kings of Leon's first recording session. It was the only instrument that was left. At first he was unhappy: he'd only seen "fat guys" play the bass. "Then a bass player said to me 'I swear to God, bass players get all the girls.' After that," beams Jared, "I was totally into it."
Hanging out on the Nashville music scene, they found a publishing deal and management, and hooked up with Angelo Petraglia. An older guy and a Boston native, he was a guitar player who had written songs for artists such as Emmylou Harris. Caleb: "We were writing songs to write songs. They were bullshit. But Angelo was like, 'wow, you guys could do something great.' In early 2002, after a trip to New York to meet record companies, Kings of Leon signed a record deal. Little more than a year later, they were very successful indeed.
At least they were in Europ, much less so in America. Why do they think we've fallen so hard for Kings of Leon?
Nathan (intoning): "Because we had long hair, we're brothers and cousin. We came from Bumfuck, Tennessee. Our dad was a preacher who was thrown out for drinking. The story was there!"
Jared: "A publicist's wet dream."
Which is why so many people thought it was all made up, even though no-one has yet to offer any proof of any alternative, more prosaic backgrounds.
Nathan: "You couldn't write this shit up as fiction. People were foaming at the mouth. It was the whole good versus evil thing. They painted the picture that we left a church service on the Sunday night, and by Friday night we were in the honky-tonk saying 'fuck that lifestyle, we're done with church!'"
Back home in America, however, they remain much more of an unknown prospect. Why do they think this is?
"The same way that a band like Jet could be so huge in America,' says Nathan. 'If you have an American band with the same sound (as Kings of Leon sort of have), people don't pay attention to them. Cause why? 'Cause they're American, they're you."
"It scares people," nods Jared. "People think, 'wow, those guys don't shower. They're a real rock and roll band and they're from so and so. That's cool!' But when they can touch that and realise, 'wow, these guys went to high school with us, and they grew up the same way as we did, and they look like that? Woo-hooo, that's fucked up. I don't wanna have any part of that!'" This, decides Jared, "freaks people out."
But that shaggy hair and those skinny t-shirts and that Almost Famous vibe, they hypnotise us Europeans, right?
"On our first album, I'll admit" says Caleb, "we were young, we were punks. When our record label told us we were good looking, we grew hair all over our faces. When I noticed that people liked the way I sang, I started singing through my nose. We knew that we were the youngest band and no-one was gonna take us seriously. So we came out with that attitude. Now we're so much more comfortable, confident..."
On Aha Shake Heartbreak, this new-found confidence takes form in headbangingly thriliing rock that sounds like it was recorded live, with hangovers, in a shed. It also means songs about the one thing bands are not meant to write about, which is, what it's like to be a band on the road.
Caleb, as principal songwriter, was told this by several friends. Most people would have taken this as good advice. Not Caleb. He was gonna show them that you could write songs about the highs and lows of being on tour without turning into "fucking Bob Seger. It doesn't have to be that song, singing about the road. Make it personal. So we ended up writing pretty much the whole record about, not so much about being on the road..."
...but about the stuff they got up to. The opening Slow Night, So Long, is about a 17-year-old girl who's "frenching out the flavour", who's "not so nice but the sex sells so cheap". King Of The Rodeo is keen to let "the good times roll", but in an altogether sleazier manner than The Cars ever suggested. Taper Jean Girl has the line "cunts watch their bodies, no room for make-up".
Some of the lyrics, you might say, are misogynistic.
Caleb: "Right. Well, to me we've always been storytellers. Sometimes we'll sit down to write a song and when we're finished read back over it and go, 'wow - that's really disturbing'."
Jared: "It's like you have alter egos. We listen to Johnny Cash and NWA and stuff like that, and that is offensive. But it's a totally different thing - you're telling a story, it's not necessarily what you believe. We'll write about incest but that doesn't mean..." Perhaps wisely, the younger Followill tails off here
But to return to the c-word - in Taper Jean Girl do you have to use it?
Caleb: "That's my mom's least favourite word. That's the only word that she would actually smack us in the face for using."
Is that why you used it, to annoy your mum?
Caleb: "Not at all, the girl that I wrote about, that was her take, that's how she looked at females. I don't want my grandmother to hear those lyrics. But that's the only thing that takes us from being just a regular fucking band, like every other fucking band out there who gets their songs played on phone commercials. That takes us from being that to being actually artists. And knowing we're saying things that aren't going to be accepted by other people. And we're really being honest. And we're acting our age. To a lot of people, they think that's immature. No! It's fucking real. We're saying stuff that isn't that intelligent. We want you to see your flaws. We're like an open wound."
Nathan: "We're showing our family the side of us that is us - that they refuse to believe exists. We do talk filthy. We do drink a lot. We do have sex. We do occasional drugs. Your family has this fake little mirage built up of their precious little nephews or grandsons that are travelling the world and they have to do this and write that to stay cool and stay popular. But it's not that. This is what we are. We are young guys, we do think filth, we laugh at perverted shit. We talk horrible. We talk ways that we know our mother would be crying her eyes out if she heard it..."
"Although," pipes up Matthew, breaking his vow of silence, "we don't really write songs for our grandmother."
They might be young and confused and talk a lot of cobblers, but Kings of Leon make a great racket. At Copernico that night, they're terrific. They're a scorching live band, possessed of an onstage intuition that can only come from familial bonds and that is truly electrifying to watch. Quite where babyfaced, smooth-voiced Caleb Followill drags that subterranean, sandpaper holler and almost unintelligible yelp from, I'll never know. Perhaps he's deliberately singing funny, to hide those 'open wound' lyrics.
Afterwards, the band linger in their tiny, cupboard-sized dressing room. They take all the wine from the rider and head out to see who's stayed behind in the club. Slim pickings, it seems. Nathan collects a group of three girls around him but none are that hot. No matter, there's an overnight drive to Barcelona ahead of them. Caleb Followill pulls on his woman's coat and hat and, with a cheery wave, heads off into the Spanish night.
Earlier, I'd asked them about the sleeve of Aha Shake Heartbreak. It features a photograph of a flower, in an unmistakably rude shape. What's it about?
"We wanted it to look sexy," says Jared.
"But no, it's a flower," says Nathan.
Come on. It is, as your younger, more impressionable fans might say, a cock and a fanny.
"Aargh!" exclaims Nathan, exploding into outraged laughter. "We could show you the other nine pictures of flowers that we had!"
They're even mroe like genitals, apparently.
"We thought it was a milky splash," chips in Caleb.
Which is sexy too. There's nothing wrong with being sexy. But what does it stand for?
"We wanted flowers that you could fuck," says Jared blithely. "We wanted them to look wet and sexy and turn you on and make you feel weird at the same time. Unnatural..."
"Honestly," says Nathan to Jared. "How many times have you jerked off to that?"
Jared: "What today?"
"No!" chips in a mildly frustrated Caleb. "We wanted it to be a flower you had to look at more than once before you got what it was."
So are Kings of Leon a flower you have to look at more than once?
"Basically," says Nathan.
"We're basically a family band," nods Jared.
The Word
On the back stairs of a Madrid rock club unaccountably themed around the subjects of exploration, astronomy and map-making, The Fellowship Of The Rock And Roll Ring have gathered. There's Legolas the elf, with his Timotei hair, gamine physique and pointy ears; Gimli the dwarf, heavy of beard and piggy of eyes; Boromir the human, pointy-featured, shaggy haired and flinty; finally there's Samwise the hobbit, a bit chubby, a bit moody, and probably comically clumsy.
They sit there, looking glum and tired. Over long months they have journeyed far from their quiet, backwater homeland. Along the way many hardships have been endured, from endless questions about their facial hair to suspicions concerning their kinship and forebears. From the attentions of wringraith supermodels to the shiver-inducing Trial Of A Thousand Screaming Japanese Girl-Fans. Their bonds have been tested by the manifold earthly pleasures flung their way, and the purity of their quest - to carry bone-shaking Southern rock and roll into the 21st century - challenged by rumours of disease and degradation. In some foreign lands they have had to forego their traditional daily elixir, or "marijuana".
And now, as they embark on the second chapter of their odyssey, they frankly can't be bothered with all the palaver. Today they are corralled in front of the very keen media representatives of the Spanish, looking haunted, hunted and trapped. They're simple folks from the sticks, you know. Youngsters. When they emerged from the Tennessee woods less than two years ago, they didn't expect the world to go bananas.
It's tough being in Kings of Leon. Thus their second album, Aha Shake Heartbreak, is the sound of those hard-partying months on the road, chasing their instant success and their own runaway legend. No wonder it's full of rampaging hormones, violence and dirty words. They had a lot to get off their skinny chests.
As bass player, Jared Followill, who's still only 17, observes with a frown, fame has been good to Kings of Leon, but the myths around them less so. "It's not so much of an ego boost when you have to go home and get tested for sexual disease so your girlfriend believes you really don't have an STD. That's not something to look forward to."
"It came back clean?" quizzes Nathan Followill. "Good. That's one out of four."
Nathan Followill is the drummer and, at 25, the eldest of the three brothers and a cousin who comprise the most feted - and most lusted-after - American band since The Strokes. He is heavily bearded and shorter than you'd think. He is the band's most sage member, but also their biggest liar and greatest joker.
"The first record, we didn't know what we were doing," he says of summer 2003's Youth and Young Manhood. Maybe that's why it was such a blast of hot, bracing southern air: it was ramshackle and chaotic, but almost viscerally thrilling. Kings of Leon didn't sound like any other voguish, guitar-slinging young band. They weren't from metropolitan, big-city America. Yes, they were young tyro punks like many of their peers, but being from Nashville, they knew something of country music too.
Their story, too, was irresistible: they were the sons - and nephew - of a preacher man and had grown up on the highways of Tennessee, as their evangelical father travelled from church to church. Their names - Nathan, Caleb, Jared - had a suitably Old Testament ring (they're actually their middle names, the use of which they say is a family tradition). They sounded like firebrand old bluesman, wore retro-chic vintage threads and, with excellent facial hair, looked like The Band. They were Creedence Clearwater Revival Revival, if you like, with added sex and drugs. And Britain - where their success far outstrips any gains at home in America - couldn't get enough of them.
Youth and Young Manhood has sold 500,000 copies in the UK and earned the band two Brit Award nominations (Best International Group and International Breakthrough Artist) and two NME Brat statuettes. Their entire UK tour last month, including three nights at Brixton Academy, was sold out.
"We were out under the microscope a lot sooner than we ever imagined," says Caleb Followill, the 22-year-old singer. He's unbelievably skinny and has curious corners on the backs of his ears. He is much given to delicately smoothing his flowing hair round the sides of said lugs. To match his girl's hips and lady's face, he has apparently dressed in woman's clothes too - a pinch-waisted, calf-length coat and a floppy felt hat. He is part-elf, part-1930's English ma'am. The cherry on this strange cake is a rough, scratchy singing voice seemingly made from eating cigarettes and gargling Bourbon at the bottom of a swamp. He does most of the talking. He is most exercised by the "microscope" thing.
Which is why," Caleb continues, "once we got our chance to go back home for the first time in a long while, there was a lot pent-up inside of us. We were sitting reading the same articles, reading what everyone thought of us, what was important about us. And they weren't even talking about our music. Good lord!"
Kings of Leon might take their name from the brother's dad (Leon), who was, they say, defrocked for his drinking habits, but they get their singular look from mum. They were ridiculously tight jeans, sewn to nut-cracking specifications by Betty Ann Followill. She is also responsible for the artfully tousled birds-nest hair of the band's teenage wing. When posing for photographs, the youngsters will cluck and preen over each other, ensuring they all look just so.
Matthew Followill, the cousin, is 19. A serious-faced chap, he doesn't say much at all. He still has the puffy face of youth, and wears an unfortunate vest that scoops down towards his nipples. He may be a bit of a whizz on the guitar but he looks baffled, and ultimately frustrated, by the ret of what goes on around the job of being in a band. If he's not a hobbit, he's like Beck's fat wee brother.
Jared Followill, on the other hand, is the picture of effusive, eager-beaver, comically agitated youth. The band's bass player, he was 15 when Kings of Leon started, 16 when the band made their big splash at Glastonbury 2003. A week after Spain he will celebrate his 18th birthday on the road in Berlin.
It's mid afternoon on Thursday 11th November in Madrid. Aha Shake Heartbreak came out ten days ago. Kings of Leon are engaged in a whistle-stop tour of Europe. Days of publicity commitments are followed by nights of gigs. Today in the cool, 700-capacity Copernico, named after the Polish astronomer and suitably decked out with telescopes and ancient maps, the band are coming face to face with the rabid attention from the foreign press. Even the recalcitrant Matthew has been pressed into dispensing Tennesseean bon mots. TV crews, photographers and journalists mill around as the band's crew set up for the gig. Another Followill cousin, Nacho - small, broad, handsome, dwarf/elf hybrid - busies himself checking guitars. On the front of Nathan's bass drum is "KOL" spelt out in wonky gaffer tape. The message is clear: in line with their cool-but-cheap clobber and classic-rock fundamentalism, and contrary to what everyone thinks about them being a trendy "fashion band", Kings of Leon are not ones for flash presentation. They may be a hip act, but they are also a heritage act. Something for everyone then.
Perched on a couple of nautical barrels in the gloomy, underlit club, Matthew and Jared chat to a Spanish journalist. What do they miss about suburban Mount Juliet, 40 minutes from Nashville where they all share a house? It backs on to Old Hickory Lake, the stretch of water on which Johnny Cash also lived. (No, they never saw him round there, but they had been due to meet him, via a mutual producer acquaintance, in a Los Angeles studio the week after he died.)
Jared replies that he misses his girlfriend, and being able to drive his car to a restaurant. "Or sitting in my house at 3am and if I'm hungry, going to the 24-hour grocery." What do they think of all the hype and interest in the band? Matthew says that he wishes they "could be the Rolling Stones and go back to the days when you could just release records and it wouldn't be this huge thing in terms of press and promotion". In those days, things were more low-key and "chilled out."
"Now," Matthew says with a world-weary teenage wisdom born of 18 months of being screamed at from country to country, "people are freaking out all over the world."
On the back stairs, meanwhile, Caleb and Nathan are busy telling a TV camera about the kind of stuff they like. Caleb: "Townes Van Zandt for lyrics, The Ronettes as a band, Johnny Cash as a man." It's a good line, and one he's used before.
Out front, Jared and Matthew's interview is winding up. What do they think of the "Southern Strokes" tag that has often been applied to them (not least because they were signed by the same A&R man)? "If we were the Southern Strokes, we wouldn't be doing this interview," Jared says evenly of the too-cool-for-school, media-wary New Yorkers. "We'd be sitting in our dressing room, drinkin' and smokin' cigarettes."
Spanish PR chores complete, there's time for a quick soundcheck, during which Jared plonks out the riff from the Pixies' Gigantic (the first thing he learned on the bass) and Caleb sings a bit of Joy Division's Transmission. He says he's way more influenced by British music than the bands people think they must like, such as Lynyrd Skynyrd and The Allman Brothers. They aren't, as Nathan puts it, "Rebel flag-flying redneck dicks". Similarly when they talk, on new single Four Kicks, about getting some guns and showing you who's boss, they say that they're satirising the public's perception of them as squirrel-eating hicks.
We repair across the road to a wonderful restaurant where their experienced and multilingual tour manager has persuaded the chef to give us dinner at the very un-Spanish hour of six o'clock.
Now, with refreshments coming and the pressure off, Kings of Leon reveal themselves to be thoroughly decent young men. They may have (well-deserved) reputations for hedonism. Caleb grins that he has an alter-ego, Rooster, "a drunken dude who'll steal your girl and kick your pants". But they're also smart, funny, excitable. And happily, they haven't disappeared up their own fundaments.
They try to have a nice dinner every night on the road. It's one of the things the Followills have learnt to do to keep themselves sane. Sure, of a morning on the tour bus they like to wake up with a bong; of an evening, post-show, the red wine will flow and the girls will gather. But yes, they're epicurians. Nathan and Caleb have become pescatorians (they eat fish but no meat). Spain, France and Italy are their favourite foodie countries. What about sushi? Well, says Caleb, they don't eat so much in Japan. With ready access to dope being problematic there, they tend not to be so hungry. Anyway, they're too busy dodging the ever-resourceful Japanese girls who lurk in their hotels brandishing elaborate home-made gifts (a purse bearing their stitched likenesses, "with real hair on!"), and who find their way to the corridor outside their hotel rooms. "And they're always crying!"
There is much discussion over what wine to have. Then, dish after dish is brought to the table. The flavoursome tomato soup goes down a treat. The octopus is less of a hit. A pall of garlic hangs pungently over the table. The cod is flash-fried to perfection. Matthew and Jared's steaks are fresh, bloody and humongous.
"Can we get a couple of bottles of water please?" calls out Nathan. "And a cow for y'all's steak to mate with. Woo-eeh, that's just about the biggest steak I've ever seen."
It's all a long way from the dusty Tennessee by-ways. The way they've told it often, the Followill brothers grew up on the backseat of a car. Their dad's position as an itinerant preacher with the United Penticostal Church meant they were never in one place for long. Perversely their life only settled down when Leon Followill's drinking saw him exit the church and he and Betty split. It was 1997, and Caleb was 15, Nathan 18. Embracing their newly sedentary lifestyle but soon bored by it, they began writing songs together.
Nathan had been playing drums in the church since he was seven, where Leon had also played bass for the choir band and Betty had played piano. Aged nine, Nathan says, he was doing session work for local musicians in Memphis. Caleb picked up guitar much later, not long before Kings of Leon began in early 2002, purely so he could write songs more effectively. The first song he wrote was Molly's Chambers (their second single, with lyrics pinched from Thin Lizzy's Whiskey In The Jar), the second was Wicker Chair (on their debut EP, Holy Roller Novocaine), and their third was The Bucket (their last single).
Cousin Matthew had picked up the guitar aged 12 while a pupil at a Christian Academy in Alabama. He proved himself a natural. Five years later, after repeated calls to his then-home in Mississippi, he was persuaded to come join his cousins' new band. Little Jared, meanwhile, picked up the bass a mere couple of months before Kings of Leon's first recording session. It was the only instrument that was left. At first he was unhappy: he'd only seen "fat guys" play the bass. "Then a bass player said to me 'I swear to God, bass players get all the girls.' After that," beams Jared, "I was totally into it."
Hanging out on the Nashville music scene, they found a publishing deal and management, and hooked up with Angelo Petraglia. An older guy and a Boston native, he was a guitar player who had written songs for artists such as Emmylou Harris. Caleb: "We were writing songs to write songs. They were bullshit. But Angelo was like, 'wow, you guys could do something great.' In early 2002, after a trip to New York to meet record companies, Kings of Leon signed a record deal. Little more than a year later, they were very successful indeed.
At least they were in Europ, much less so in America. Why do they think we've fallen so hard for Kings of Leon?
Nathan (intoning): "Because we had long hair, we're brothers and cousin. We came from Bumfuck, Tennessee. Our dad was a preacher who was thrown out for drinking. The story was there!"
Jared: "A publicist's wet dream."
Which is why so many people thought it was all made up, even though no-one has yet to offer any proof of any alternative, more prosaic backgrounds.
Nathan: "You couldn't write this shit up as fiction. People were foaming at the mouth. It was the whole good versus evil thing. They painted the picture that we left a church service on the Sunday night, and by Friday night we were in the honky-tonk saying 'fuck that lifestyle, we're done with church!'"
Back home in America, however, they remain much more of an unknown prospect. Why do they think this is?
"The same way that a band like Jet could be so huge in America,' says Nathan. 'If you have an American band with the same sound (as Kings of Leon sort of have), people don't pay attention to them. Cause why? 'Cause they're American, they're you."
"It scares people," nods Jared. "People think, 'wow, those guys don't shower. They're a real rock and roll band and they're from so and so. That's cool!' But when they can touch that and realise, 'wow, these guys went to high school with us, and they grew up the same way as we did, and they look like that? Woo-hooo, that's fucked up. I don't wanna have any part of that!'" This, decides Jared, "freaks people out."
But that shaggy hair and those skinny t-shirts and that Almost Famous vibe, they hypnotise us Europeans, right?
"On our first album, I'll admit" says Caleb, "we were young, we were punks. When our record label told us we were good looking, we grew hair all over our faces. When I noticed that people liked the way I sang, I started singing through my nose. We knew that we were the youngest band and no-one was gonna take us seriously. So we came out with that attitude. Now we're so much more comfortable, confident..."
On Aha Shake Heartbreak, this new-found confidence takes form in headbangingly thriliing rock that sounds like it was recorded live, with hangovers, in a shed. It also means songs about the one thing bands are not meant to write about, which is, what it's like to be a band on the road.
Caleb, as principal songwriter, was told this by several friends. Most people would have taken this as good advice. Not Caleb. He was gonna show them that you could write songs about the highs and lows of being on tour without turning into "fucking Bob Seger. It doesn't have to be that song, singing about the road. Make it personal. So we ended up writing pretty much the whole record about, not so much about being on the road..."
...but about the stuff they got up to. The opening Slow Night, So Long, is about a 17-year-old girl who's "frenching out the flavour", who's "not so nice but the sex sells so cheap". King Of The Rodeo is keen to let "the good times roll", but in an altogether sleazier manner than The Cars ever suggested. Taper Jean Girl has the line "cunts watch their bodies, no room for make-up".
Some of the lyrics, you might say, are misogynistic.
Caleb: "Right. Well, to me we've always been storytellers. Sometimes we'll sit down to write a song and when we're finished read back over it and go, 'wow - that's really disturbing'."
Jared: "It's like you have alter egos. We listen to Johnny Cash and NWA and stuff like that, and that is offensive. But it's a totally different thing - you're telling a story, it's not necessarily what you believe. We'll write about incest but that doesn't mean..." Perhaps wisely, the younger Followill tails off here
But to return to the c-word - in Taper Jean Girl do you have to use it?
Caleb: "That's my mom's least favourite word. That's the only word that she would actually smack us in the face for using."
Is that why you used it, to annoy your mum?
Caleb: "Not at all, the girl that I wrote about, that was her take, that's how she looked at females. I don't want my grandmother to hear those lyrics. But that's the only thing that takes us from being just a regular fucking band, like every other fucking band out there who gets their songs played on phone commercials. That takes us from being that to being actually artists. And knowing we're saying things that aren't going to be accepted by other people. And we're really being honest. And we're acting our age. To a lot of people, they think that's immature. No! It's fucking real. We're saying stuff that isn't that intelligent. We want you to see your flaws. We're like an open wound."
Nathan: "We're showing our family the side of us that is us - that they refuse to believe exists. We do talk filthy. We do drink a lot. We do have sex. We do occasional drugs. Your family has this fake little mirage built up of their precious little nephews or grandsons that are travelling the world and they have to do this and write that to stay cool and stay popular. But it's not that. This is what we are. We are young guys, we do think filth, we laugh at perverted shit. We talk horrible. We talk ways that we know our mother would be crying her eyes out if she heard it..."
"Although," pipes up Matthew, breaking his vow of silence, "we don't really write songs for our grandmother."
They might be young and confused and talk a lot of cobblers, but Kings of Leon make a great racket. At Copernico that night, they're terrific. They're a scorching live band, possessed of an onstage intuition that can only come from familial bonds and that is truly electrifying to watch. Quite where babyfaced, smooth-voiced Caleb Followill drags that subterranean, sandpaper holler and almost unintelligible yelp from, I'll never know. Perhaps he's deliberately singing funny, to hide those 'open wound' lyrics.
Afterwards, the band linger in their tiny, cupboard-sized dressing room. They take all the wine from the rider and head out to see who's stayed behind in the club. Slim pickings, it seems. Nathan collects a group of three girls around him but none are that hot. No matter, there's an overnight drive to Barcelona ahead of them. Caleb Followill pulls on his woman's coat and hat and, with a cheery wave, heads off into the Spanish night.
Earlier, I'd asked them about the sleeve of Aha Shake Heartbreak. It features a photograph of a flower, in an unmistakably rude shape. What's it about?
"We wanted it to look sexy," says Jared.
"But no, it's a flower," says Nathan.
Come on. It is, as your younger, more impressionable fans might say, a cock and a fanny.
"Aargh!" exclaims Nathan, exploding into outraged laughter. "We could show you the other nine pictures of flowers that we had!"
They're even mroe like genitals, apparently.
"We thought it was a milky splash," chips in Caleb.
Which is sexy too. There's nothing wrong with being sexy. But what does it stand for?
"We wanted flowers that you could fuck," says Jared blithely. "We wanted them to look wet and sexy and turn you on and make you feel weird at the same time. Unnatural..."
"Honestly," says Nathan to Jared. "How many times have you jerked off to that?"
Jared: "What today?"
"No!" chips in a mildly frustrated Caleb. "We wanted it to be a flower you had to look at more than once before you got what it was."
So are Kings of Leon a flower you have to look at more than once?
"Basically," says Nathan.
"We're basically a family band," nods Jared.
. I can't imagine you could ever become too cocky of a rock star if you had a mom still willing to smack you in the face for swearing. 
