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"There's a lot that goes into being a band aside from the music," say the quiet pair from Ohio. "We pay attention to that stuff." Judging by their record and ticket sales, it seems to be working out, as GRAEME THOMSON discovers
THERE COMES A TIME IN THE career of almost every musician when they must confront the prospect of settling for, at best, mid-table respectability rather than champion status. For The Black Keys that moment arrived around 2007. Four albums into a career of solid achievement rather than spectacular success, they found themselves cruising along in the middle lane while peers and pretenders zoomed past with barely a backward glance.
"All these bands like Jet or Wolfmother would open shows for us, then they'd get on the radio and on the cover of magazines, getting all this attention, and itbecame alitile bit frustrating," says drummer Pat Carney, the band's long, laconic geek-dynamo. "Like, 'What the fuck are we doing? Why don't people like our music?' We were kind of envious. But most of those bands fell off or disappeared, and we stuck around. We realised that maybe it was a bit of ablessing that we didn't get all that attention."
The Black Keys' improbable career arc brings to mind Peter Cook's observation that David Frost had "risen without trace". A pair of defiantly unglossy Ohioans whose charisma simmers, shall we say, on a rather low heat, Carney and singer-guitarist Dan Auerbach are rewriting received wisdom about the music industry in 2012. After ten years and eight albums, through a mixture of stealth, skill and steel The Black Keys have become one of the big boys, a Grammy-winning, million-selling, radiofriendly frontline act. Their new album El Camino - a ridiculously enjoyable record that adds glam rock, punk, disco-shimmies and shiny soul to their primitive blues and garage-rock base - debuted at number two in the US charts and shifted over 200v000 copies in its first week. They've sold out three consecutive nights this month at Alexandra Palace. It's not just that this kind of slow burn isn't meant to happen any more; it doesn't happen any more.
Considering their position in their adopted home town of Nashville, the duo initially seem as bemused...