Funny how a person’s accent can change depending on location, company and the topic of conversation.
Chatting to Gareth Campesinos! about his lyrics, the frontman is quiet, measured and well spoken. Diverting the conversation to the latest football results, the singer suddenly switches to pure, clear Gloucester tones. “I’m a Wotton Rovers AFC fan!” he exclaims. “I’m a season ticket holder – have been all my life – and my Dad and Grandad follow them as well. On a sort of televised level I follow Manchester United but when we’re in America or somewhere I always phone home at 5 o’clock on a Saturday afternoon to make sure I know the result straight away.”
Endearingly honest, Los Campesinos! have always had a personal side, always been unafraid to tell the world what’s on their mind. However when the band began to approach their third album (proper) it seemed that personal troubles could eclipse the studio routine. The collapse of a long term relationship forced Gareth Campesinos! to re-think his lyrical approach, lending the resulting album a painful, heartfelt atmosphere. “I’ve always only ever been able to write lyrics about what I’m going through, I don’t have the imagination to cover anything else so that was an inevitability, I think. I haven’t regretted it just yet” he explains.
Often the very last part of the song to be written, the lyrical content mirror a more mature approach from the multi-limbed ensemble. “It’s kind of been apparent over the past two albums that we’ve been attempting to not even deliberately but evolving from what the first record was like, moving beyond that. Since then, we’ve become adults and as musicians we’ve been exploring with darker shades” the singer states. “I’ve always written personally and I think Tom (guitar, riff machine) kind of expected it to become more exaggerated and to move further in that direction. I think also there’s not really that much communication between me and Tom in the initial writing stages. Tom will come up with some riff ideas and I won’t have any lyrical ideas for them and either I’ll react to them by doing something that juxtaposes with them or naturally sits or exaggerate the effect of the music.”
The personal nature of the lyrics are hard to avoid. Always ones to wear their hearts on their sleeve, new album ‘Hello Sadness’ finds Los Campesinos! with broken hearts and torn sleeves. At times the honesty will make you wince, something that Gareth Campesinos! seems rather unperturbed about: “A lot of my favourite lyricists have been very, very honest people – like Aidan Moffat from Arab Strap or Paul Heaton – they have always been very personal writers. The same with novels and stuff that I enjoy, it’s the people who aren’t afraid of pulling punches or putting themselves out there that I enjoy the most” he says. “So I suppose it makes sense that I would want to attempt something similar. The previous albums have been – maybe not quite so personal, but honest and I haven’t had any comebacks or regrets but I haven’t had any complaints, really. I think it’s the only way I could do it.”
Yet this isn’t to suggest that ‘Hello Sadness’ wallows in a pit of sorrow. Gareth Campesinos! fills his lyrics with a rich vein of humour, but the frontman argues that while he does use a fair amount of irony, he is sometimes mistaken when attempting to play it straight. “I think that a lot of the time people say I’m being funny when I’m not actually trying to be funny. A lot of the things that are spoken about in buzz word terms that I read about in reviews of the band, people will say ‘sarcastic’ or ‘tongue in cheek’. A lot of the time I’m not intending it to be like that” he states. “I think that perhaps people like to apply that to the lyrics in order to find them less jarring themselves. The honesty that’s in the songs is tagged as being sarcastic which makes it easier to listen to when a lot of the time I don’t think it’s being sarcastic – it’s that sort of caught in the moment despair which does exist.”
Constructed across a series of months, new album ‘Hello Sadness’ only came together when the band found a studio in Spain. Working with long term friend, producer and collaborator John Goodmanson Los Campesinos! were able to focus on their new album without distraction. “It was probably idyllic – it was in a place called Gerona and you couldn’t walk to anything where we were so there were no distractions” the singer sighs. “The weather was gorgeous, the studio was a great studio and it had a swimming pool and a great pool table, it was like being on a really sedate holiday with your mates. It was the perfect scenario for us to be recording in.”
The pastoral surroundings the album was recorded in stand in marked difference to the schedule the band are currently facing. Launching a short tour, Los Campesinos! will play three continents in just under a month, facing a fan base armed with their most bracingly honest material yet. “We’re very, very lucky to have the sort of devoted fan base that we do. I think that the personal nature of the lyrics rings true with a lot of people who like our band. So they can apply the songs to their own experiences and beliefs then it becomes less mine, the incidents that the songs are about can become less reality and more stories, I guess.”
However that isn’t to say that Gareth Campesinos! is entirely at ease with re-living a very recent break up onstage every night. “I’m sure it’ll largely depend on how much I’ve had to drink before the emotional significance comes through. So I will probably have to be wary of that!” he grins. “After recording the album we were really content with creating something which was really direct and a lot more manageable – I think we finished ‘Romance Is Boring’ with 15 songs and we acknowledged even at the time that it was a bit long. We were trying to get it out of our system and it was very self-involved. When we came to ‘Hello Sadness’ we wanted something that was very direct and to the point and worked better as a traditional album and we’re very happy with it.”
– – –
‘Hello Sadness’ is out now.
