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Los Campesinos!: Onwards And Upwards

Gareth tells us about the band's new album 'Romance Is Boring'.

Posted 28th October 2009, 3:20pm in Interviews, by Matthew Britton & Miriam Baynes
Los Campesinos!: Onwards And Upwards Having already released two critically acclaimed albums and toured all over the globe, Los Campesinos! are far from a set of new faces. However, a reshuffle of the band has seen Aleks leave to pursue her studies with Kim replacing her. With new album 'Romance Is Boring' due out in early 2010, the band seem to be at a critical time of their development. We spoke to lead singer Gareth about the band’s embarrassing past, exciting present and future drunken fan boy moments.

First of all, how was Swn festival?
It was amazing, it was like the first time we’ve played in Cardiff for a year. Normally playing there is a bit of an anti-climax because we’re from Cardiff and we inevitably know everybody in the audience, so it’s a bit weird looking out and seeing everyone you’ve played with in bands before.

Did all your family turn up?
Actually, they did. Mine and Kim’s parents were there with our younger sister, Ellen’s mum was there, lots of people came from Bath to see us play. The venue was really pretty and people were queuing up around the block to get in, and it was just a real feel good gig. We played with Dananananaykroyd and Internet Forever and Munch Munch – it was a really good line-up and it gee’d us up.

This is your first UK tour in a year, how are you finding it? Which city do you enjoy playing most?
We really genuinely enjoy playing Manchester. We’ve got lots of friends in Manchester that it’s just nice to see. It’s probably the UK city we’ve played the most if you ignore Camden Crawl, but we always look forward to playing here. We always manage to play a different venue too – I don’t know how, but we’ve never seen the same room twice. It’s the second smallest gig on this tour, it being the first tour in a while and Kim’s first tour, we booked smaller venues. It sold out after a few weeks, so I’m very very excited.

What can we expect from the third album, 'Romance Is Boring'?
I don’t know, it’s the sort of question that I’d love to be able to answer, but it’s difficult to detach yourself from it. When you’re at the end point of an album, even working on the tracklisting and stuff, I lose all sense of perspective on it. It sounds like an absolute cliché, but you are just living it and breathing it for this number of months with the writing before that as well. When you get to the end, it’s a bit of a blur. We’re all just extremely satisfied with what we’ve done, it’s musically and lyrically far more developed and grand than anything we’ve done before, especially with the contributions from outside the band.

How do you think that the contributors have influenced the album?
Well, Zac Pennington [Parenthetical Girls] is one of my best friends, and he’s part of one of my favourite bands. We asked them to support us on our tour [in the US last year] and they said yes, which was really weird and then to become really good friends was just... I tour managed them on their last UK tour. My friend Charlotte put that on – she’s only done three so far, but they’ve all been really good. Zac’s been a huge musical influence on me and also as a person, he’s incredibly talented.

Xiu Xiu are my favourite band, and then a weird turn of events ends up with me being acquainted with [singer] Jamie Stewart, then getting to a point where – I can’t remember how it happened, be he agreed to be on the record. He part sounds amazing, it just changes the sound and makes the song incredible. To hear him singing words I’ve written is just the biggest pat on the back I could’ve given myself. Lyrically, this album is totally the direction that I want to be going in. I’m a completely different person to who I was when we did the first album

We’ve read that you’re embarrassed by some of the earlier stuff...
A couple of bits. There was a time when I was aware of what people expected from the little they knew of Los Campesinos!, and I played up to it. I guess I was quite impressionable and I look back now and I’m embarrassed by how I tried to tread that path and wind people up. Over the years I’ve come to terms with who I am and knowing what I want to write about without having to be a dickhead about it. There’s one or two songs that are a bit cringey, so we try to avoid playing them as much as possible. There’s one which I may have rid us of forever – We throw parties, you throw knives. I don’t like it at all, I don’t think we’ll play that again. It started with a mix is alright, but I doubt we’ll do that again either. But if I can get rid of Tweecore [2007 single 'International Tweexcore Underground'], I’ll be happy. Once that’s gone, onwards and upwards.

With your last US tour you did the record box collection. Did you purposely make the question to win it so difficult?
There’s about £200 worth of vinyl in it, but it was really good and people did get involved with it. I purposely set a difficult, annoying question at the end because I didn’t want too many people to enter and I didn’t want people to enter who hadn’t heard the band and it’d go to someone who didn’t care and would just sell it on e-bay.

Did you know the question before you did the videos?
I knew that it’d involve people getting involved in the videos, but no, not until about 10 minutes before I posted it – that’s why it took so long. In the end there were about 130 entries when I expected 5 or 6.

Who’ve been your favourite artists of 2009?
Absolute favourite from this year is Former Ghosts. I’ve been following the demos for the past year and they’ve been incredible - it’s the most beautiful, destructive record. The songs are all autobiographical and so personal – that record is incredible.

What else? The Zola Jesus record is amazing, Slow Club’s album, Cold Cave’s Love Comes Close...

Is there anybody at the moment who’s getting a lot of press attention who you don’t like?
There’s nobody I dislike, I’d much rather talk about bands I do like. If somebody listens to them a result of us, that’s exciting. I don’t like bands that put on a front or try to be something they’re not. I’m really reluctant to slag people off because there’s people I’ve met thinking they’re going to be dickheads and disliking there music, then you meet them and they’re the nicest people. That’s part of the person I was two years ago – I would just slag off bands because I’d think my music taste was so much better than everybody else’s, but now I don’t give a shit what music people like.

And what about you supporting The Cribs? How did that come about?
We’ve met them on several occasions and they’ve been nice and complimentary about us. They’re big fans of riot grrl and stuff and they know that I am too. It’s incredibly exciting. Support slots are weird as you’ve got to accept that most of the fans aren’t there to see you, which is amazing as expectations are low, but on the other hand it gives you a real opportunity to show the main band up and have people leaving saying ‘Wow, I hadn’t heard those before’. Even the chance to meet Johnny Marr - I’m not going to attempt to get near them, I don’t want to get in their way, but I’m sure I’ll have at least one drunken fan boy moment with Johnny Marr.

You can catch Los Campesinos! touring the UK in the coming weeks, with support slots for The Cribs in December. Their third album, 'Romance Is Boring', is due to be released 1st February on Witchita Records.

Photo: Miriam Baynes

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