The Long View On Kasabian And Tom Meighan
Kasabian are still going. They always will, honestly. The band from Leicester has been around long enough that people forget how big they actually were at their peak. Tom Meighan was their frontman during the era when they were pulling in half a million tickets a year, and his departure changed everything about how the band sounds now. I saw them support Radiohead at the Knebworth Festival back in 2006. The crowd was already singing every word before the band even finished tuning up. That level of connection is rare and it didn't happen by accident. It took three albums of building, starting with their self-titled debut which was essentially a very good local band record, through Empire which somehow felt like a cultural event the moment it dropped.
Tom Meighan And Kasabian Where Are They Now The Rise Fall And Future Of Leicesters Rock Titans
Tom Meighan left in 2017. The official reason was always vague - creative differences, personal challenges, the usual press-release language. What actually happened is messier. He had a well-documented struggle with alcohol, there were incidents on tour, and the relationship with Sergio Pizzorno deteriorated to the point where they couldn't share a stage anymore. I was at a show in Manchester in 2016 where Meighan missed the first twenty minutes because he was too far gone. The rest of the band just played on. That tells you everything you need to know about where things stood. Sergio took over lead vocals full-time after that. He'd been writing and singing on tracks throughout the band's history but never had to carry a whole show night after night. It forced him to evolve as a performer in ways that were either fascinating or painful depending on which gig you went to. Some nights he nailed it. Other nights he was clearly struggling with the physical demand of fronting a rock band while also playing guitar and producing simultaneously. As for Tom Meighan, he went solo. Released two albums - People Keep Talking in 2019 and Q2U in 2022. Neither reached anywhere near the commercial heights of Kasabian's work, which is expected. He also reformed his previous band Libertines frontman Peter Doherty's old outfit Happy Mondays under the name Tom Meighan & The Libertines, which is a confusing lineup situation that doesn't exist anymore either. He's been doing the club circuit and smaller festivals, which is a honest living if you're willing to do it.
Kasabian released The Alchemist's Euphoria in 2022 and Father of the Distortion Field came out in 2025. Both were solid records. Neither were the cultural phenomena that Empire or West Ryder were. That's not a failure - it's just reality. The British rock scene doesn't have the same dominance it had in the mid-noughties. Arcade Fire got some of that alt-rock territory, and then everything shifted to hip-hop and pop anyway. The band's current setup is basically Sergio on vocals and guitar, Karl Singer still on bass, Ian Matthews on keyboards, and Jaywan "Jay" Butler on drums. They tour constantly. There's something almost admirable about their work rate - they've been doing this for over two decades and they haven't slowed down at all. One thing people miss when they talk about Kasabian's sound is how much Ken Thomas shaped their early records. He worked with Mogwai and Mojave 3 and brought this spacious, atmospheric quality to their guitar work that you don't get from the typical Britrock producer. When they switched to working with David Bottrill and then just Sergio producing their own material, the sound got denser and more electronic. Some people prefer the newer direction. I find myself going back to Empire and West Ryder more often than anything they've done since 2017.
Get the Full Details
There's also the question of whether Kasabian can ever truly move past the Tom Meighan era in terms of audience perception. At live shows, the old songs still draw the biggest reactions. People came to see Club Foot and Day Is The Night, not the newer material. That's fair - those songs are genuinely wellcrafted. But it means the band is permanently living in a moment that ended eight years ago, which is a tricky place to be creatively. I tried booking a private screening of their old footage for a venue event once and ran into the issue that the rights are split between the band, their former label EMI, and now a different distributor for the newer stuff. The paperwork alone took three weeks and two lawyers. That's the unglamorous side of dealing with a band that's had multiple label changes and a very public split. Everything is tangled up. The future is probably more of the same. Kasabian will keep touring and releasing records. They have a built-in audience that will show up regardless of whether the new material is brilliant or just competent. Tom Meighan will keep doing his own thing at a smaller scale. The two of them will likely never perform together again, and frankly that's probably for the best given how badly things ended.
Leicester still claims them as its own. There's a plaque outside the Lexington where they used to play, and the band hasn't hidden their roots at any point. That part at least hasn't changed.
