Kaiser Chiefs were close to calling it a day when former drummer Nick Hodgson decided he’d had enough in 2012.

“We were fighting for survival,” admits curly-mopped bass player Simon Rix, a few days before the big-selling band head to Brighton for a secret intimate show as part of The Great Escape Festival.

“Nick came in and said, ‘I think we should split.’ We were like, we don’t want to split up. We would prefer to mend the band, to fix it, to get ourselves back to where we wanted to be: playing at the top of festival line-ups, to be on the radio.”

So they recorded Education, Education, Education & War, which went straight to number one in the UK charts after its March release.

Between the recording of the album in January 2013 and its release, bosses at TV talent show The Voice offered Kaiser’s singer Ricky Wilson a second chance to be a judge on the flagship reality show. He’d been turned down a couple of years earlier for reportedly asking too many questions in the interview.

Rix admits the band had a few worries about sending forth their leader to appear on a middle- of-the-road pop show. But they shed their pride – and Wilson shed pounds.

“The reason he did that was because we had this good record,” explains Rix, who believes the album contains Wilson’s best vocal performances, with the singer pushing himself to the limit to rip out the emotion.

“He got the offer just as we were making it and we all thought long and hard about it. As a band, we were against it, but when it came to the crunch it was like, well, we have got this great record.”

Wilson’s appearance on The Voice made him realise he wasn’t the best singer but the total entertainer, like the “old-fashioned frontman”.

Few would disagree when Rix claims, “We are not just a band who get up and play songs for cash. Everyone knows they can rely on us for a good gig. We make it our ambition to make sure everyone has the best time ever.”

Still, Rix admits many fans thought the band had disappeared after cumbersome 2011 release The Future Is Medieval, which only scraped into the top ten following its online release, with fans able to pick any tracks they fancied out of a possible 23.

With Hodgson gone – and old Leeds friend Vijay Mistry added to the line-up on drums – Rix describes Education, Education, Education & War as “making a debut for the second time”.

Originally the aim was to score a top five, but that target was raised when Wilson was offered The Voice gig.

“We did it for the record and it worked for the record and now there will always be a little bit of a Voice hangover. But the record is now selling itself because it’s a good record.”

Wilson wrote 99% of its lyrics, but to create the music the band returned to writing all together in a room. “We learnt one person can’t write a Kaiser Chiefs song. It has to be all five of us doing our bit.”

Rix came up with the name on rumbling battle-cry Bows & Arrows, which he says is about the band fighting to keep themselves together.

That combative spirit runs through the album.

“We all felt like we were fighting to get out of a corner. It came from fighting for the band.”

The album’s title is adapted from a 1996 soundbite by then Labour leader and soon to be Prime Minister Tony Blair.

It’s not an anti-Blair album, he adds, but anti-all politicians.

In a Russell Brand way?

“Yes. But we’re a funny bunch. We all have our views but we don’t want to sit and talk about politics. None of us want to be politicians but we are influenced by the world around us.”

This time they wanted a theme and to keep those sharpened edges they’d previously rounded off.

“If we felt like something we said was too much and we would get asked difficult questions, we would smooth the edges.

“We liked the Tony Blair thing and being a little bit political. The futility of life in the political system is definitely on the album. We thought it sounded grand – it was something that would prick people’s attention.”

  • Great Escape bundle tickets, £67, available from greatescapefestival.com. For more information visit amazon.co.uk/TheGreatEscape or follow @AmazonMusicUK on Twitter