And then, in 2003, I heard Keane's debut single, Everybody's Changing, and the voice this time was Tom Chaplin's. Björk started it, then artists such as Polly Paulusma, Fiona Apple, Thea Gilmore began to beguile also – something idiosyncratic and haunting in the voice had to make me want to investigate the music further. I didn't abandon western rock entirely – I kept half an ear open and it was voices that slowly lured me back. The music of Elis Regina, Milton Nascimento, Jorge Drexler, Cheikh Lô and Fela Kuti were more familiar to me than Bruce Springsteen and Oasis, for example. Tastes change, I suppose, but I found the rhythms, energies and melodies of Latin American and African music far more beguiling than anything the west was serving up. In the 1980s and 90s I took something of an aural sabbatical from Anglo/US rock music. But the case of Keane and I is different. I've briefly met other rock icons at social occasions but these encounters have been entirely random – and all the more enjoyable for that fact. We used to sit beside each other – the new boys – at editorial meetings. Bizarrely, I did get to know David Bowie because we both joined the editorial board of an art magazine at the same time, Modern Painters. It's like the world of astrophysics or the armaments industry, say: I'm aware of these zones of activity but we haven't really bumped into each other, so to speak. Even though I've been an avid consumer of contemporary music since my early teens, the world of rock music has always been at something of a distance – I listen to it, read about it, I talk about it, but I've had little or no contact with its denizens. There are exceptions, of course – Salman Rushdie has written the lyrics for a U2 song Nick Cave has written two fine novels – but these instances are unusual interminglings, I would suggest. In the broad spectrum of the arts, two worlds rarely overlap – the literary world and the world of rock music. Tim Rice-Oxley and Tom Chaplin from Keane discuss their new album Strangeland with the novelist William Boyd, who wrote a short story for it .uk
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