“Saturday nights in Leeds”: Why Kaiser Chiefs’ ‘I Predict a Riot’ didn’t quite connect with Americans
When the Kaiser Chiefs’ debut album, Employment, was released in 2005, a full pair of decades in the rearview now, the jetway seemed uniquely clear for them to conquer not just the UK charts, but to pull off the rare trick of instantly breaking America, as well.
“It sounds like it’s a derogatory term, ‘breaking America’, like we’re bending you over our knee,” singer Ricky Wilson told the Journal News of White Plains, New York, in the spring of ‘05. “Well, maybe Kaiser Chiefs can help America dance again.” Unfortunately, America was content enough dancing with Justin Timberlake.
Despite Employment reaching number two in the UK charts and becoming something of a sensation, Kaiser Chiefs weren’t even able to achieve the level of Stateside success that the like-minded Franz Ferdinand had a year earlier. Whereas the Scots had at least scored a Top 40 album in America, the Leeds-based Chiefs fared no better than number 86.
Similarly, the most instantly catchy single from Employment, the boisterous night-out anthem turned Yorkshire Tea advert theme ‘I Predict a Riot’, fell well short of the US listenership reached by Franz’s ‘Take Me Out’, topping out at number 34 on the Billboard’s “Alternative Airplay” list, the exact peak reached the same year by Bloc Party’s ‘Banquet’.
In the aftermath, the Kaiser Chiefs were swiftly grouped in with a proud lineage of great pop bands who, for one reason or another, were deemed slightly “too British for Peoria”, Peoria being a small town in Illinois often used to represent the middle-of-the-road sensibilities of America’s fly-over country.
It should have been predictable: two of the bands the Chiefs cited as major influences, Blur and Madness, were already card-carrying members of the club. And before Employment was even released, Ricky Wilson was already telling American journalists that his band had tried to sound like the White Stripes, only to realise “that five guys from Leeds don’t do American garage rock very well… British music is happiest when it’s been able to enjoy its own Britishness.”
20 years on, ‘I Predict a Riot’ certainly feels like a classic of its time – musically and thematically noughties to its core. It also holds up, in any decade, as a fantastic “pre-game” song; an engine-rev that ought to appeal to pint-swillers in any country with an over-abundance of bars – of which America is certainly one.
What stopped the single from being a worldwide hit, maybe, is just its slightly Yorkshire-skewed lyrical narrative; a not-so-universal understanding of what a night out is generally gonna turn into after last call.
As Wilson explained when ‘I Predict a Riot’ was first released, “It’s a song about the mentality of lager-fuelled fights after the pubs close on Friday and Saturday nights in Leeds, and how frightening it is to get home without having a fist plunged in your face.”
If you’re joining Ricky and the boys in early 2000s Leeds to complete the country’s most notorious pub crawl, the “Otley Run” – that’s a very different animal from your average social outing with chums in somewhere like Dayton, Ohio, or New Haven, Connecticut.
Americans can certainly drink themselves into a stupor, and fisticuffs or public vomiting aren’t unheard of. It just might be that the Kaiser Chiefs’ description of an inevitable “riot” was a bit too literal to resonate with the average Yank: “I tried to get to my taxi / The man in a tracksuit attacks me / He said that he saw it before me / And wants to get things a bit gory.”
Compared to that, the generic sentiment of ‘Take Me Out’ does sound a tad more appealing.
