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- guardian.co.uk, Thursday 26 February 2004 12.21 GMT
Anyone looking for an uncensored insight into the life of Britain's latest rock and roll sensation should head immediately to the website of the Sussex trio Keane, who this week smashed into the top three with the expansive, piano ballad Somewhere Only We Know.
The band's online diary reads like a lost collaboration between Harold Pinter and Alan Bennett: you wait for something to happen, but when it does, it is staggeringly mundane. A highlight involves the band's pianist Tim Rice-Oxley visiting Starbucks, then discovering that his coffee is lukewarm.
A vignette of Keane in the studio reveals drummer Richard Hughes clutching an item that has become his "trademark". A leather jacket? A bottle of Jack Daniels? A phial of cocaine? Alas, no: a packet of Hobnobs.
Judging by their online messageboard, even Keane's fans are oddly polite. Their posts resemble thank-you letters to an aunt rather than the ravings of rabid devotees: "It's been our pleasure to go out and buy the records and go to the gigs."
Barely out of their teens, Keane are the apotheosis of the rock-star-as-ordinary-bloke syndrome, introduced by post-Britpop bands such as Travis and widely thought to have been killed off by the distinctly non-ordinary Strokes and White Stripes.
The man who signed Keane, Universal's Ferdy Unger-Hamilton, is not bothered: "Through history there have always been bands whose image has been to be normal blokes, like Crosby Stills and Nash. Is it going to make them a more difficult sell? Everything's all right if the songs are all right, and that's what's going on with Keane. They're self-confessed anti-cool people and that will always work if the songs work."
Unger-Hamilton has a point: in 2004, album sales are determined not by the trend-conscious music press, but by Radio Two, whose listeners are unbothered by image. In addition, the last rock star to offer squeaky-clean ordinariness was Chris Martin, widely mocked when Coldplay first emerged for being a teetotal Christian with a first in ancient world studies. Look at him now: squiring a Hollywood starlet and beating up members of the paparazzi in exotic locations.
Martin became a superstar in America, a country where record buyers currently regard having a personality as a positive barrier to an artist's success. Given that US charts are filled with bands that, in every sense, make Keane sound like the Velvet Underground - Maroon 5, Three Doors Down, Five For Fighting - similar success for the Hobnob-munching trio is not inconceivable. The meek could inherit the earth.
