TAS In Session: Los Campesinos!

Los Campesinos!, who are booked at an array of UK and European festivals this summer, were forced to delay the start of their North American tour back in April when, like many other bands, they were waylaid by Iceland's ash-spewing volcano. They finally made it to New York and The Alternate Side's Alisa Ali chatted with four of the band members (who all operate whimsically under the surname Campesinos!) - Gareth, guitarist Tom, keyboardist Kim and violinist Harriet. The quartet performed stripped-down, acoustic versions of a few of their effusively-titled songs, like "The Sea Is a Good Place to Think of the Future" and "A Heat Rash In The Shape Of The Show Me State; Or, Letters From Me To Charlotte.":

Alisa Ali: Are you guys going to write a song about volcanic ash? You totally should.

Gareth Campesinos!: Well, I didn’t realize until we got to New Jersey two days earlier that we do have a song that has the word “volcano in it.” I hadn’t realized that until I sang it and I went, “Heh! That’s very clever. We’ve done it already."

The day that we were meant to fly to America, we were at the airport, all ready to go, and all flights were cancelled. We found ourselves in a state of limbo at Heathrow airport for several days making the most of happy hour in the hotel bar and just existing as best we could. Then it became apparent that there weren’t going to be any flights for quite a while. So we all went home and sat and waited. But now we’re here. And we’re very happy to be here. There was a time that we thought we might not get to the States at all and the whole tour would have to be cancelled. It’s a relief that it wasn’t.

Alisa: You guys play a bunch of different instruments, don’t you?

Gareth: Yeah, on occasion. We tend to pile as much into songs as possible. There’s usually a glockenspiel which I’ve managed to lose along the line.

Alisa: You lost a glockenspiel?

Gareth: Not quite lost. Just left in a box.

Alisa: Do you want to start us off with a song?

Gareth: Sure, This is the song with the word “volcano” in it. It’s called “Letters From Me To Charlotte.”

Alisa: The title of [that song], the proper title of that song, is much longer: "A Heat Rash In The Shape Of The Show Me State; Or, Letters From Me To Charlotte."

Gareth: Yes, but even I got bored of that (laughs). I can’t expect anyone else to go along with it, really. “A Heat Rash In The Shape of the Show Me State.”

Alisa: What’s the “Show Me” state?

Gareth: Missouri.

Alisa: I feel I should have known that. I’m from this country.

Gareth: I’m just incredibly worldly-wise.

Alisa: Clearly. Why did you name it this long, weird title?

Gareth: Partly for awkward moments like this, which I cherish. Also, to frustrate printers when they have to worry about word counts. And just to be as difficult as possible. Teasing, I think.

Alisa: Spoon did that with their last album.

Tom Campesinos!: Yeah, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga.

Gareth: And where are they? Nobody knows those guys.

Gareth: ["The Sea Is a Good Place to Think of the Future"] was pretty much the first song that was finished for Romance Is Boring and it was the first that we recorded with John. At the time it was a bit of a departure from anything we had recorded before and I think on how happy we were on how it turned out and the reaction it got from John at the time of recording and the way people reaction [when we released it] showed us that people who like our band are happy for us to shake things up and make the music that we want to make. I think lyrically it was the first song completed, written on a Brighton beach on the south coast of the UK. It’s a song that some people seem to like.

Alisa: Now your new album Romance is Boring is your second official album, but I kind of consider it your third.

Gareth: Yeah, between this and the record which was definitely our first album, we released something called We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed which, approaching making it, we never intended on making an album. So I think artistically it was never approached thinking like we were making an album here. And it ended up, numerically, seeming like an album but I don’t think the approach that we took to it was one of making an album.

Alisa: What do you mean?

Gareth: By the time we got to making Romance is Boring, we knew that we were going into the studio and we wanted it to work as a cohesive whole. The songs should make sense together and the album should work.

Alisa: So you think the sequencing on We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed didn’t work?

Gareth: Not even the sequencing. We were only going to record five or six songs and then we found ourselves with ten of them.

Tom: It was kind of a contractual thing as well. We only had a two album deal so to extend that, we didn’t call it an album.

Alisa: Very clever.

Tom: Oh, that’s not true.

Alisa: So with Romance Is Boring you were totally in the right mindset when you got to the studio.

Gareth: Yeah, I think so. Whether or not that’s reflected in the music is a different matter, but we knew that we had a long process of recording and that we’d be recording here and there and we had songs that had been written with an album and a journey in mind. So it all fit together.

Tom: Well, that was the intention.

Gareth: You, the listener, decide.

Tom: We’re going to re-release the first one.

Gareth: That’s the one that had the songs that people liked on it (laughs). We’re in a privileged position where we get to be a band and if you’re a band and you’re not playing shows and you’re not writing or recording, what are you doing? We’re aware that this isn’t going to last forever and we want to do as much as we can in the space of time that we have to do it. I guess that means that we want to work quite hard and intensely so that means we want to releasing a lot of stuff. Plus it gets boring playing the old songs over and over so the more we write, the less we’ll have to repeatedly play older songs.

Tom: And we haven’t sold quite enough records to get drug addictions yet. Once we do, there will be a longer gap between albums.