Born in West Yorkshire in 1978, Ricky Wilson is a musician and broadcaster. With a master’s in graphic design, he taught at Leeds College of Art and Design, and in 2000 formed Parva, which became Kaiser Chiefs. By the mid-noughties, hits including I Predict a Riot, Everyday I Love You Less and Less and Ruby had turned them into a chart-topping, stadium-headlining band. Ricky was a judge on The Voice from 2013 to 2016, and hosts Virgin Radio UK’s drivetime show. Kaiser Chiefs’ Easy Eighth Album is released on 1 March. Ricky lives in London with his wife, the stylist Grace Zito, and their twins.
This photo was taken on New Year’s Eve in 2001 at my house. The popped party popper suggests it was after midnight, and me and my friends would have walked the streets of Leeds after. Great fun. The army hat was a gift from my mate Tim. I like putting things on my head. Always have done.
The band were somewhere in the background when this was taken. This was pre-Kaiser Chiefs, back when we were called Parva. When I wasn’t running a club night or performing with them, I was working behind a bar and teaching art. I only did that for a year. I was terrible at it.
If you were to ask my mother about my childhood ambition, she’d say: “You always said you were going to be in a band.” But that’s not true. When I was young, I wanted to go into advertising or be an animator. Being in a band mostly appealed to me because it felt like joining a gang – being a frontman was certainly never my goal. I spent a lot of time in the art room during my lunch breaks at school, and I wasn’t considered confident or cool. I wasn’t cool after school either – in fact, the only time I was cool was for about 15 minutes in 2004. Really, I was a bit shy and kept my head down. By the time I went to art college, something clicked and I realised you could be whatever you wanted to be. I could create a character for myself. I thought: “Why don’t I just try to be outgoing for a bit? So I did, and it stuck.
Our band had a bizarre mental fixation on success. We had a self-belief that verged on obsession: we thought that if we tried hard enough and for long enough, we would break through. I kind of wish I still had a little bit of that in me. We weren’t even that good!
When things did start to happen for Kaiser Chiefs, we were so relieved it was taking off that we forgot to put on a pretence. We’d get invited to the NME awards, where everyone was wearing huge sunglasses and pretending they didn’t want to be there. We’d show up in our V-neck jumpers, bouncing around as if it was the best night of our lives. I was always starstruck, too – we’d get to a festival, lock ourselves in our dressing room, and point and stare at all the other artists as they arrived. Shane MacGowan once came into our dressing room. He was amazing. He asked for an apple from our rider. I thought: “Good for you, Shane, one of your five a day!” We didn’t realise he was going to smoke crack out of it.
As we got bigger, Kaiser Chiefs became an easy target. Perhaps we were laid-back and didn’t fit in, so people felt comfortable saying bad stuff about us. That got upsetting after a while. I didn’t mind when other bands turned on me, because that’s part of the game, but the press were vitriolic. It was the NME’s job at the time to be really nasty – some of the writing from the early noughties was so un-PC and very vicious. But the worst part was when we went from the music papers to the tabloids. That transition is good for record sales, but when the Daily Mail is calling you “the portly pop star” and the “jowly frontman”, it’s not so good for your self-esteem. Then again, it made me lose weight. I started running and stopped eating rubbish.
At the start of the band, I found live shows hard because I was terrified. I’d get really nervous in the build up to go on, so the rest of the group would do a chant for me backstage. It went: “Everybody thinks he’s cool! Everybody thinks he’s cool!” The chanting would get really loud, then I’d go: “My name is Rick! And I am cool!” That was the only way that I could convince myself to do it. Once I was on stage, I found if I moved around a lot I could distract myself from what I was actually doing. The thought process was: “If you don’t stop moving, nobody will spot the cracks!”
Alcohol also became a coping mechanism for my stage fright. For a lot of people in bands, it becomes a habit, a pre-show superstition. You end up not being able to perform without it. That can be dangerous. It started off as fun, but a few years ago I realised if you are going on stage drunk and trying to hide that you are drunk, that’s when things have gone bad. It inhibits your performance. It’s a tightrope – people want you to be rock’n’roll, but not too rock’n’roll. So now I just don’t do it. We do have a disco before we go on stage, though. Twenty five minutes of blasting out songs that have dance routines in the lyrics, like Black Lace’s Superman.
We were always looking for opportunities to get the band more well known, so when I had the chance to do The Voice, I thought I should. That level of fame was weird. I had a tabloid guy look through my bins once. Other people may have been worried they’d find something illicit, like drug paraphernalia. I was just concerned they may find out I don’t recycle properly. I was genuinely scared. As if they’d run the story: “Exclusive: Ricky Wilson doesn’t wash out his yoghurt pots!”
At the peak of tabloid mania, I got chased by a paparazzo on a scooter down the motorway when I was going to the airport. I met the guy years later when he was walking through Soho. He goes: “Hey! I was that guy on the scooter!” I said: “Do you want a picture?” He said: “Nah.” Fame only lasts for as long as you’re actually on the thing that made you famous. The day after the final episode of The Voice, my life was back to normal.
Now I’ve got twins who are nearly two. The one thing I’ve managed to bring from my experience in a band into parenting is that I can sleep anywhere. Grace is really jealous of that. Even if we’re in hospital and it’s quite tense, I can conk out in an uncomfortable chair. Throughout the noughties we were working very hard and travelling relentlessly – so much so that Nick [Hodgson, who left the band in 2012] once tried to undo his seatbelt at a restaurant as he thought he was on a plane. It was exhausting and I couldn’t do it now. But it was good training for being a dad.
That and the hat thing. The twins like putting stuff on their heads too. It’s like a compulsion – yet to be diagnosed, but always good for a laugh.
