out beats on imaginary drums. “I didn’t get to bed until 5: 15 last night,” he says, shaking his head. “Family drama.” After a lavish dinner celebrating his 29th birthday in the airy semiprivate dining room of a 17th-century manor house turned luxury hotel, Nathan was kept awake into the wee hours tending to his younger bandmates’ various relationship crises. Early in their careers, the Kings indulged unapologetically in the traditional carnal and chemical fruits of their rock’n’roll labors. These days, it’s different: Nathan and Jared are each engaged. Caleb and Matt have long-term girlfriends. But steady companionship doesn’t always breed happy stability.

“Every time the guys have trouble with their girls, I have to become freakin’ Dr. Phil,” says Nathan. His own girl, a blonde singer-songwriter named Jessie Baylin, was supposed to be here by now, but her flight from the U.S. got delayed. “So I’m anxious about that and about the show.”

The anxiety is somewhat noticeable all around when the Kings emerge through fog and strobe lights onto the stage 20 minutes later. They open with a new song, a thumping, reverb-heavy rocker called

“Crawl.” Most of the 100,000 or so expectant faces nod coolly along with the thick, fuzzy bass line. Everything sounds okay, but the band lack the playful strut usually underpinning their tunes. As they launch into their back catalog, though, the crowd loosens up, becoming a swarm of bouncing bodies, which in turn relaxes the band. By the end of the set, Caleb’s voice is nearly shot, but the masses aren’t bothered, screeching out the notes he can’t reach. Afterward, even Fratellis drummer Mince Fratelli, whose band played in the slot before the Kings, is impressed: He approaches

Nathan to congratulate him, clear the air, and announce that they’re “all huge fans of the band.”

Jared admits the crowd’s sheer size was overwhelming. “It was the weirdest fucking thing,” he says between swigs of beer outside the dressing room. “When I walked out there, I felt like I was about to cry. My lip was quivering like I’d just seen Mr. Holland’s Opus. But after a few songs, I got into it and was like, ‘It’s just a show.’ ”

$500 to write shitty country songs to buy pot,” says Nathan. “Me and Caleb were like, ‘We can write shitty country songs.’ ”

They were soon introduced to Angelo Petraglia, a professional tunesmith who helped hone their songwriting skills while introducing them to music they’d missed—the Stones, the Clash, the Velvet Underground—growing up in a strict Pentecostal family. Six months later, Nathan and Caleb were in an RCA conference room in New York singing for executives. The label signed them, and the pair returned to Tennessee tasked with assembling a band and making a record.

Nathan played drums in church growing up and Matt had been messing with the guitar since grade school, but Caleb and Jared, then only 15, had a month to learn the guitar and bass, respectively, before they hit the studio with Ethan Johns, a British producer known for his work with Ryan Adams and Counting Crows. The resulting EP, Holy Roller Novocaine, was an unhinged whirlwind that mashed the boogie-woogie backbeat of classic Southern rock with the raucous energy of then-zeitgeist-capturing garage-rock revivalists like the Strokes and the White Stripes. A similarly minded full-length, Youth & Young Manhood, followed a few months later. In America, the Kings garnered generally positive reviews, though their retro look drew some snickers. In Britain, they were an immediate sensation.

“They came with a story, a look, and everything defined very early on,” says BBC Radio 1 DJ Zane Lowe. “They came to the U.K., obviously partied very

hen Kings of Leon first

Wappeared in early 2003, looking every bit the well-appointed mess of ’70s-style long hair,

beards, and tight jeans, many had a hard time believing their impossibly colorful story: Nathan, Caleb, and Jared Followill grew up traversing the back roads of the American South at the hip of their father, Ivan, a traveling Pentecostal preacher. The pressures of the job and lifestyle eventually wore on Ivan. He started drinking heavily, left his job, and split with Betty Ann. Nathan, Caleb, and Jared moved to Tennessee with their mother after the divorce, and Nathan and Caleb nosed toward a career in music.

“We met a guy who told us he got paid

hard with all the right people, and made a really brilliant debut. It didn’t hurt that they came from somewhere no one knew a lot about. There’s a lot of romanticism about that part of the world.”

Their 2005 follow-up, Aha Shake Heartbreak, chronicled much of their hard partying while beginning to ease off the Southern-rock tip. Once again, the U.K. and Europe ate it up, while the U.S. just nibbled around the edges. By 2007, the band had scored opening slots on tours with Pearl Jam and U2, whose influence could be heard on their third album, Because of the Times. It sounded more atmospheric and anthemic, a clean break from the sonic signatures that had bred unwelcome Skynyrd comparisons. Still, the public reaction was unchanged: ecstatic overseas, muted at home.

The Kings’ backstory is really only half true, in that it pertains to only half the band. Jared is eight years younger than Nathan, and was ten when their parents split, so his formative years were largely spent in the relatively unexotic confines of Christian private school. Matt’s parents divorced when he was young. He grew up mostly bouncing between Mississippi and Alabama with his mom and stepfather. So the story of the Kings’ musical evolution is largely the tale of Jared and Matt stepping out of their older bandmates’ imposing shadows.

“The only reason I got in this band in the first place was my mix-tape abilities,” says Jared one afternoon a month after Glastonbury. He’s sitting with his thin legs dangling off the kitchen counter of the Nashville house he bought last year, while Matt fiddles with a cigarette near the sink. “When Nathan and Caleb went up to sing at RCA, they were walking around listening to a compilation I made with stuff like Clinic, the Pixies, the Cure, and the Strokes on it.”

The house is nice, decorated as you’d expect of a 21-year-old flush with a bit more cash than he really needs: stylish couches, high-end stereo equipment, flat-screen TV with NCAA Football 08 on pause, white suede sofa-chair sitting incongruously in the breakfast nook, fridge largely empty, save for expired cheese dip and a bottle of rosé champagne.

Jared is Nathan and Caleb’s brother, but within the band, his closest confederate is Matt, who admits he “didn’t know shit” on the band’s early albums. Now the raw, garagey riffs he came up with back then have been augmented by sharper, more piercing guitar tones, fluid leads, and a healthy dose of effects. When his guitar wails behind the hooky chorus of Only’s lead single, “Sex on Fire,” it’s not the sound of a guy content to linger in the background.

For his part, Jared began frequently playing what is basically lead bass on Because of the Times, a practice that’s continued as his confidence and, he admits, his comfort with shamelessly pilfering lines from bands like the Pixies and Joy Division have grown. “I rip off more fuckin’ people than anyone in the world,” he says. “I rip off my own rip-offs.”

Nathan appears very in tent. (Get it?)

S T YLING BY CHRIS TOPHER NIQUE T; SE T DESIGN BY CHELSEA MARUSKIN FOR THOMAS TREUHAF T; HAIR B Y DENNIS GO TS AT COMMUNI T Y N YC; MAKEUP BY THORS TEN WEISS AT COMMUNI T Y N YC