Kasabian

The version of the end of Tom Meighan's time in Kasabian that gets passed around has the order the wrong way round, and the order is exactly what matters. He did not leave the band after pleading guilty: the band announced his departure on 6 July 2020, talking about a "mutual agreement" and "personal issues", without mentioning the facts, and the following day, 7 July, he pleaded guilty to assaulting his partner. Twenty-four hours separate the euphemism from the court record. Kasabian had spent fifteen years as the most swaggering band in British rock, direct heir to the puffed-up chest of Oasis, and what defined them at the end was not a riff but a statement written a day too early. The rest of the story—the name taken from a murder trial, eight consecutive number ones, the creative engine that had always been in another chair—is also more concrete than it is usually told.

Leicester, Saracuse and a name taken from the Manson case

The group formed in Leicester in 1997 and was called Saracuse at first. The original line-up was Tom Meighan on vocals, Sergio Pizzorno on guitar, Chris Karloff also on guitar and keyboards, and Chris Edwards on bass. Ian Matthews joined on drums in 2004, the year of the first album, and Karloff was out by 2006.

The name was Karloff's choice and there is nothing invented about it: he found it while reading about Charles Manson. Linda Kasabian was the member of that group who drove the car on the nights of the 1969 murders and who later testified against Manson at the trial, in exchange for immunity. In other words: a stadium rock band from Leicester is named after the key witness in a California murder case. The fact is rarely mentioned, and it explains a good deal about the kind of atmosphere the group was after.

Their sound was not that of their contemporaries either. While British indie in 2004 revolved around the nervous guitar of Franz Ferdinand, Kasabian built tracks on heavy, repetitive loops, with one foot in rock and the other on the dancefloor, closer to the method of The Prodigy than to their neighbours on the scene. The architect of that was Pizzorno, author of most of the songs from day one.

"Empire" and "Fire" are not from the same album

It is worth separating two titles that almost always turn up together and wrong. The self-titled debut, from 2004, brought "Club Foot", "L.S.F." and "Processed Beats", and set the house style: hypnotic percussion, terrace-chant vocals, riffs that worked better in a big room than in a car.

"Empire" is the song that gives its name to the second album, Empire, from 2006, the record that installed them as headliners. "Fire", by contrast, is from West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum, from 2009, which reached number one in the United Kingdom and was shortlisted for the Mercury Prize that year without winning it. There are three years and two albums between them, and "Fire" is the one that ended up being used on sports broadcasts and in stadiums across half of Europe.

Between one and the other the internal division of labour became clear. Meighan was the frontman, the one who held the contact with the front rows and made a festival feel like a match. Pizzorno wrote, produced, chose the direction of each album and sang parts from the beginning. The press tended to describe them as a balanced pair; the credits did not say so.

6 July, and then the 7th

On 6 July 2020 Kasabian announced that Meighan was leaving the group. The text spoke of a mutual agreement and of the singer needing to attend to personal issues. It said nothing more, and what was coming the next day was already in a court diary. What follows includes proven facts of violence against a partner; in Chile, SernamEG's guidance line, 1455, is open all day to anyone going through something like this.

On 7 July 2020, at Leicester Magistrates' Court, Meighan pleaded guilty to assault by beating against his then partner, Vikki Ager, over an incident on 9 April of that year. He had denied the charge before and changed his plea after seeing the security camera footage. The sentence was 200 hours of unpaid work within an eighteen-month community order. He did not appeal.

The band spoke afterwards, and harshly: they said they had been led to believe that Meighan would front up and publicly take responsibility for what had happened, and that his silence misled a lot of people who followed them. The euphemism in the statement cost them credibility for months, because it read as a cover-up even though the sequence was one of poor coordination. Meighan, for his part, later spoke of alcoholism and of an attention deficit diagnosis, always making clear that they explained his state but did not justify what he did. He married Ager on 13 July 2021.

Eight consecutive number ones

What tends to get summed up as "the band carried on" is verifiable and a good deal more emphatic. With Pizzorno on vocals, Kasabian released The Alchemist's Euphoria in 2022, Happenings in 2024 and Act III on 4 September 2026. All three reached number one in the United Kingdom.

That run leaves the total at eight consecutive albums at the top of the British chart, from Empire in 2006 to Act III last month. It is the clearest argument for a reading that used to be arguable and now is not: the engine of Kasabian was the guitarist who wrote the songs, and the change of singer did not move the commercial needle by a single place.

What to remember

Kasabian gave British rock back a kind of festive arrogance that had been left behind in the nineties, and they did it with a method of their own: heavy loops, terrace choruses and an ambition for enormous rooms that Pizzorno designed album by album. "Club Foot", "Empire" and "Fire" still work where they were meant to, which is in the middle of thirty thousand people jumping.

But the lesson of their story lies in those twenty-four hours of July 2020. A band chose soft language—"mutual agreement", "personal issues"—so as not to name an assault that a court was going to find proven the next morning, and the cost of that choice was greater than telling the truth would have been. If you are living with partner violence, in Chile SernamEG's 1455 gives free guidance around the clock; and if what shows up underneath is alcohol, SENDA's 1412 answers anonymously. Calling things by their name does not fix anyone's life, but disguising them did not serve anyone here either.

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Sources

Kasabian is a British band formed in Leicester in 1997, initially under the name Saracuse, made up of Tom Meighan (vocals), Sergio "Serge" Pizzorno (guitar, songwriting), Chris Karloff (guitar and keyboards) and Chris Edwards (bass); Ian Matthews joined on drums in 2004 and Chris Karloff left the group in 2006. The name comes from Linda Kasabian, a member of the group led by Charles Manson who drove the vehicle during the 1969 murders and appeared as the principal witness at the trial; it was chosen by Chris Karloff after reading about the case. Their self-titled debut album (2004) included "Club Foot", "L.S.F." and "Processed Beats". "Empire" (2006) gives its name to the second album and contains the song of the same name; "Fire" belongs to "West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum" (2009), which reached number one in the United Kingdom and was nominated for the Mercury Prize that year without winning it. On 6 July 2020 the band announced Tom Meighan's departure in a statement that attributed it to a mutual agreement and to personal issues, without referring to the ongoing court case. On 7 July 2020, at Leicester Magistrates' Court, Meighan pleaded guilty to assault by beating against his then partner, Vikki Ager, over events that took place on 9 April 2020; he had denied the charge and changed his plea after closed-circuit television footage was shown. He was sentenced to 200 hours of unpaid work within an eighteen-month community order, and did not appeal. The band subsequently stated that they had been led to believe that Meighan would publicly take responsibility for the events. Meighan attributed his situation at the time to alcoholism and to a diagnosis of attention deficit disorder, without presenting them as a justification, and married Vikki Ager on 13 July 2021. With Pizzorno as vocalist, the band released "The Alchemist's Euphoria" (2022), "Happenings" (2024) and "Act III" (4 September 2026), all three number one in the United Kingdom, completing eight consecutive albums at the top of that chart since 2006. Profile compiled for Rebobinados with fact-checking; interpretations of the meaning of the work are offered as the author's reading. No song lyrics are reproduced, for copyright reasons. Information drawn from Wikipedia, the BBC, The Guardian, the Leicester Mercury, the Official Charts Company and other coverage.