2012 has been a period of hectic touring for the band, who pride themselves on their hardworking ethic – but they reckon it’s about time they had a summer holiday. Maybe even two. “This year really has been intense,” says Gareth David, the group’s vocalist, glockenspielist, and principal lyricist. “We’ve just finished up a pretty busy stint of touring, and at the moment I’m taking ten seconds to try and put my life in order before we go on a Spanish tour. Actually, do I even need to contemplate the details of touring Spain?” he asks. “Isn’t that over-thinking the whole thing a bit much? It’s Spain, right? Sure it’s warmer, but the point is we’ll have a great time, enjoy what little remains of the summer and then go back to America. And then finally come to Australia for some real fun.”
Everyone wants a piece of the English group at the moment, with Los Campesino!’s latest album release perfectly timed to take advantage of the scheduling of both the European festival season and the American summer touring circuit. But countless transatlantic flights throughout the year have taken their toll. “As soon as we get off one plane, we’re right back on another. This particular Spanish trip is a little bit out of the blue because we thought our period of touring was finished. But it turns out our manager was made quite a good offer… It’s frustrating because you’re never really able to plan anything in advance, and you do exist in quite a stop/start mode – but by no means am I complaining,” David says, waving aside the looming spectre of the misunderstood artist. “It’s a great life, and to be part of a world that means I can make music the priority is just an absolute dream. I guess wanting to be in the one place for more than a day is just greedy,” he laughs.
It’s a world away from the heady days of 2006, when all the band had was a demo tape, a MySpace account, a handful of high energy, twee-pop punk songs, and an increasingly curious online following. Word had begun to spread south to London about the manic, exhilarating and verbose live shows they’d been performing in union halls and student clubs around Cardiff. Sure enough, live favourite You! Me! Dancing! was swiftly seized upon by BBC Radio 1, with the increased exposure earning them the support spot on Broken Social Scene’s British tour in August of that year. Just months later they were snapped up and signed to British independent label and house of cool, Wichita Recordings (Les Savy Fav, Simian Mobile Disco), which launched them on an ongoing odyssey of gigs spanning time zones and continents.
Yet while Australian fans have been beckoning them Down Under for some time, David seems surprised that they are actually making the trip at last. “We’ve gigged all over the world, and it’s been mentioned on numerous occasions where we’ve all been sitting around that Australia is the one place we thought we’d never get to tour. Problems kept coming up with scheduling, or we’d be booked into some shows in the States already, but then Harvest made us this awesome offer. We’d have been fools to refuse.” And are the band excited to be touring at the start of the Australian summer? “To be perfectly honest, the thought of the Australian summer terrifies me! You do know we’re English, right?” he says with a laugh. “Seriously though, it’s going to be great. We just have to remember to be social because we usually take any chance to be writing or recording, purely because we enjoy it so much and it’s what we want to be doing with our time.”
After covering so much ground already, David tells me that Los Campesinos! are only now starting to hit their stride. “It’s funny, because even though we’ve been playing some shows recently, we’ve not actually had much chance to rehearse,” he admits. “But we’re sounding great! We’ve got a bunch of shows coming up across the States, and it feels good to be heading to Texas and California in such good shape. There’s something about that familiarity between us all that we’re comfortable enough to take risks, because we know it will be anchored at some point. We’re the kind of band that if we rehearse too much then we play terribly; we’re honestly at our worst when we’ve had heaps of prep. We’re much better on a wing and a prayer, when everything sounds very close to chaos, and everyone’s wondering what is going to happen next. If we can just keep them on the edges of their seats – well, we’ve done our job.”
BY BENJAMIN COOPER
