'It wasn't the US that didn't get us, it was just Nashville'

As Kings of Leon release ‘Can We Please Have Fun’, singer Caleb Followill talks to Laura Barton about the wisdom of their late mother, hunting for approval in his home city and how a producer helped them get the dirt back in their sound

- Laura Barton

It’s mid-morning in Nashville, and across the screen, Caleb Followill is walking me around his office space, pointing out a golden awards’ statuette, and framed pictures, and the books he read recently: Crime and Punishment, The Art of War, The Old Man and the Sea; John Grisham, Dan Brown, Truman Capote. He explains how each item contributed in some way to the new Kings of Leon album. “And I could go song to song and point them out,” he says. “Everything in here is like a puzzle.”

Can We Please Have Fun is the ninth album by the band that Followill, his brothers Nathan and Jared, and their cousin Matthew, formed in Nashville in 1999. It is also their most intimate for some time – weighted by the sentimentality of objects, by the loss of their mother, and by a newfound freedom they found in writing songs without a record label. “It was just kind of like our little secret project,” he says. “It was just about doing something we were proud of and that made us happy.”

It’s a record that also recaptures some of the scuff of the Kings of Leon’s earliest records – 2003’s Youth & Young Manhood and 2004’s Aha Shake Heartbreak, when the band were the foremost southern representatives of an American rock’n’roll revival that bloomed on British shores in the Noughties. That was before they released “Sex on Fire”, which roared to No 1 in the UK in 2008, spending 127 weeks on the chart (it’s now well on the way to one and a half billion streams on Spotify), and its follow-up “Use Somebody”, which also became a chart fixture for the next two years.