Keane’s song “Somewhere Only We Know” has achieved a huge milestone, reaching one billion views on YouTube. The 2004 song, which was released as the first single from their debut album, Hopes and Fears, has long been the English alternative rock band’s signature song.
In the video, directed by Corin Hardy, the band exit a venue through the stage door and enter a taxi. The band are accompanied by an alien creature as they drive through the rainy city. Eventually, they arrive in a wooded area, passing by a “fallen tree,” and reach a clearing where instruments have been set up. In the end, the band are joined by forest sprites like the one from the cab.
The band discussed the making of the video in a Vevo Footnotes video. The footage was mostly shot at night in midwinter with the band performing the song while standing in a fast-moving river in a forest glade. “The coat I’m wearing in the video was given to me by (Coldplay)’s Chris Martin,” pianist and primary songsmith Tim Rice-Oxley reveals. “I popped round to his flat not long after they got really big and he said “we keep getting given loads of free stuff, do you want a coat?” which was kind of him.”
“Somewhere Only We Know” shot to No. 3 in the U.K. on release in 2004 and remains one of Keane’s best songs – a feat which humbles the band to this day.
“We were really struggling at the time and feeling like our music might never get heard,” Rice-Oxley says. “So I think of the song as a kind of message to ourselves…just to keep persevering and to say that when things were hard, we were there for each other.”
