Los Campesinos! Leader Gareth David on How to Survive Indie Rock With Your Dignity Intact
Eighteen years into their career, the UK indie lifers are enjoying their greatest successes while remaining truer than ever to their DIY principles.
When Los Campesinos! frontman Gareth David goes to pick up toilet paper and kitty litter at his local supermarket, he often bumps into a guy who works there, whom Gareth has known since their school days. The conversation tends to go something like this:
Supermarket Guy: [slightly demeaning tone] “You still in your band?”
Gareth: “Yeah, yeah.”
Supermarket Guy: “You off on tours?”
Gareth: “No, we’re not really doing anything at the moment. We all got other stuff going on.”
Supermarket Guy: “Oh, OK.”
And that’s about it.
But one day this summer, following a sold-out U.S. tour and the release of All Hell—the seven-piece band’s seventh album, and their first in seven years—Gareth had a better update. He practically cut off Supermarket Guy’s usual questions, blurting out: “Actually our new album debuted at No. 14 last week, between Noah Kahan and Abba Gold!” The guy remained unmoved by the news, but Gareth walked away with a little vim in his step all the same.
The 38-year-old singer recounts this small glory near the start of our three-hour talk, during which he’s characteristically transparent as he touches on everything from the financial realities of touring to the values that drive the group’s DIY approach to his complicated relationship with a new generation of fans. He’s sitting in his home in the sleepy English town of Midsomer Norton, where he lives with his wife and their big-eared cat, Mildred; as the evening sets in, the daylight pouring through a window behind him slowly fades away.
He’s not exactly a chart obsessive, but he takes pride in notching a new peak for Los Campesinos! on the UK albums tally nearly 20 years into the devoutly independent band’s existence. (The group’s only other appearance came when their first LP, the tweecore opus Hold on Now, Youngster…, made it to No. 72 in 2008, on the heels of their breakout indie hit “You! Me! Dancing!”.) All Hell’s impressive chart bow was spearheaded by actual sales, including CDs, vinyl, and downloads, rather than streaming; fans purchased a total of 1,767 vinyl copies in particular, making it the fourth-most-popular LP of that week.
“Being on the chart is nice, and we wanted to achieve that, but success can mean many different things, and we’re successful in ways that aren’t quantifiable in terms of sales or popularity too,” he says. All Hell is the first Los Campesinos! album that’s self-funded, self-produced, and self-released on the band’s own Heart Swells label. Adding to their DIY bona fides, the band is also self-managed, with Gareth handling the bulk of day-to-day accounting and admin duties. They’re already using that control to pay their recent victories forward, donating £12,000 to causes including trans rights and medical aid for Palestinians. And they are adamant about keeping their gigs affordable, going as far as offering discounted tickets so that unemployed and low-income fans can make it out. In a music industry dominated by cold-hearted streaming goliaths, money-hungry monopolies, and imperial superstars, the scrappy septet’s triumphs are especially worthy of celebration—and, perhaps, replication by other artists in search of a more humane path.
Their community-driven ethos carries through to the songs: All Hell is a major addition to one of the most rewarding catalogs in modern music. Gareth’s lyrics are as funny and cutting as ever, though his purview has grown beyond the charmingly self-deprecating stories of bad hookups and worse breakups that filled previous albums. He wrestles with the dead ends of capitalism on a song called “The Coin-Op Guillotine.” He lays bare the neurosis that comes with being an indie frontman in your late 30s who’s singing to an audience of both midlife millennials and impressionable teens. He takes aim at musicians who talk up their progressive politics without taking action. He laments a world on fire as he hangs on to his loved ones to protect them from the blaze.
Throughout, Gareth’s bandmates—all of them longtime friends, some of them actual family—hold him up with overflowing riffs and sing-along gang vocals. Every member is essential to the cause: guitarist, songwriter, and producer Tom Bromley, keyboardist (and Gareth’s sister) Kim Paisey, drummer (and Kim’s partner) Jason Adelinia, bassist Matthew Fidler, guitarist Neil Turner, and multi-instrumentalist Rob Taylor. “I’ve got no ability or desire to do anything on my own—we are not Gareth and the Campesinos!,” the singer makes clear.
The group’s communal force works from the inside out, and the effect is contagious enough to engender a similar kinship between them and their fans. It’s a camaraderie I’ve experienced first-hand over the last 15 years, between my headphones, bouncing around at shows, and interviewing Gareth several times—on the phone, backstage, and even around one early gig where the band played an acoustic set for a bunch of snot-nosed little kids. The group’s dedication to upholding collective values makes me want to do the same. Their continued relevance in an industry that often treats people over 30 like expired fruit gives me faith that I can still cover the music that moves me and makes me think as I embark upon middle age. Watching them defy the odds with blood, sweat, and a cracked smile inspires me to keep going. I know I’m not alone.
Since you’re now playing to bigger crowds and reaching new chart highs with your most DIY project to date, do you feel like you ever needed the backing of a label and management? Or did having that initial backing make these successes possible?
Gareth David: We are very aware that we had an incredibly privileged first eight years as a band, and we would not be where we are now without that. We had literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of tour support over the first several years. We did a Budweiser advert. We were on late-night TV. So I’m not saying that a new band that’s cut their first EP should disregard working with a label. There are so many great independent labels.
We’re more of a model for a late-period band. A lot of bands get stuck in a certain way of thinking, and they keep doing it to diminishing returns. And it’s not like it was 15 years ago, when there was money in the music industry for independent bands. I look at bands that are our age that have maybe released three or four records on a significant label, and they’ll continue to do the same—but do they need to? Is it the best way? A lot of it’s probably an ego thing. Working with a record label feels like the proper way to do it. It gives you constant reassurance and a safety net. But if you put the effort into really connecting with people that like your band—which maybe requires a band to let their guard down a bit—it’s much more rewarding.
When we stopped working with management and a label, I initially missed when they would pat us on the back when we came offstage after big gigs and say, “That was an amazing show!” But we don’t need that now, because we get that love from the audience throughout the whole show, and that is worth 10 times more. That relationship we’ve created is our safety net now.
We’ve not taken any outside money from a label or anything for almost 10 years. Some bands that are even more successful than us have recently got in touch to be like, “How’d you do it?” They’re surprised that there’s not as much to it as management would lead you to believe.
How would you compare your finances as a band now versus when you were starting out?
The first five years, we were a full-time band, and we were each paid £750 a month to be in the band. We didn’t have time to work any other jobs because we were on tour. And there were way more people taking a piece of the pie. I remember talking to managers early on, and they were like, “It’s a 20 percent commission.” We’re like, “But we’re a seven-piece band, so that means your 20 percent would leave us with about 11 percent each. It doesn’t seem right.” And they’re like, “Sorry, that’s how it is.”
Between that and the label side, you’re always paying money back, because the industry has a tendency to waste money. We’re in a position now where we either find ways not to waste money, or we waste money on things we want to waste money on. Like when we’re on tour and we’ve got a day off, we’ll find somewhere nice to go and eat, and we’ll stay there all evening, get drunk, and have a nice time. It might be kind of expensive, but it’s fine because we’re not paying money to a manager or a label.
The best thing about it is that—and this is very I don’t like to talk about my charity work but...—because it’s our money, we can do what we want with it. Now, when we feel like we’ve earned a decent amount of money, we’re in a position to do something good. We’ve had so much generosity from other people, it’s about time we return that. So we’re able to fundraise and donate money off our own back. Not even our accountant questions it.
Do you split the money equally among band members?
We’ve always done that. I try not to be too “business” about it, but we’re a limited company, so we are shareholders within Los Campesinos! LTD. At the end of the year, if we’ve done well, we can take a dividend, and we all take the same amount of money. Tom and I write the songs, but it’s never been a thought that we should take more money. It’s a band of seven people, and that needs to be reflected in how we do the band as a business as well.
For the past few years your full-time job has been working for the band. Beyond singing and songwriting, what are your responsibilities?
After the Covid lockdowns, we realized that if I gave the band my full attention, it could make more money. I’m always busy, but it’s your boring, admin-y stuff. Accountancy. Until about a year ago, I ran all the merch from my garage as well. It’s my day job at the moment, whereas everybody else in the band does other things while also doing really good things within the band.
How do you balance your creative side with the bookkeeping you have to do?
For a lot of people, it wouldn’t be particularly fruitful for them to be trying to write a song and then also have to respond to all these emails about licensing and uploading tracks to online distro and shit like that. That’s not rock’n’roll at all, and it might not seem like it necessarily lends itself to creativity. But I try to avoid creativity until it stares me in the face. [laughs]
I like the admin side. It’s partly because I’m a control freak and I like knowing everything that’s happening with the band. I like archiving things. I love spreadsheets. I love filling out data into cells. [laughs] A lot of it comes from my interest in soccer—as a hobby, I do a lot of data and archiving stuff. So I just applied the same ideas to the band.
As far as doing almost everything by yourself, have you come across anything where you’re like, Oh shit, this is actually harder than I thought!
Yeah, a lot of it is the boring back-end stuff, like making sure all the relevant royalties are being paid in the right way. And obviously there’s cash flow. For a U.S. tour, for example, all your costs are for before you go out on tour, and you don’t get the fees for the shows or the merch until after.
I’ve got my budgeting spreadsheet here for the last U.S. tour. The money that we spent on the bus was $60,000, and that’s because we’ve got two kids on tour with us now, so that’s our only means of traveling—you can’t tell a 6-year-old and a 3-year-old they need to sit in a van for 12 hours. The flights came to $15,000. Total visa costs were like $8,000. There’s band member insurance and gear insurance. Crew wages. Ground transportation. Shipping the gear back after the end of the tour. Hotels along the way. Our outgoings totaled around $132,000. We could do things a little more cheaply, sure, but we’d rather make less money and enjoy every moment of it.
And then afterwards, you get the money through for the shows. We’re really lucky that all but one of the shows was sold out. The fees were great. We played good rooms. Our ticket prices were like $30, which I think is reasonable. We also do low income tickets. We made good money from it. Our show fees, after a 10 percent booking agent commission, totaled $127,729. And our merch profit came out around $45,000—we do very, very well on merch. But most of that income didn’t come through until after the tour, once all the tax stuff was sorted. So it’s that point where you’re like, Shit. We’ll be fine in three weeks, but right now, what the fuck is going on?
That’s why you couldn’t do what we’re doing, on our scale, as a brand-new band. Because you need a good start point, which is what we gave ourselves over the past few years. A big part of it was that we hadn’t done that much as a band for seven years. But during that time, there were some reissues, some big gigs in London, and we sold a lot of T-shirts. Then we were in a situation where we could afford to record an album and do a U.S. tour.
As far as ticket prices, it seems like people are always pointing fingers at each other: The promoters say it’s the band’s fault and the bands say it’s Ticketmaster’s fault. But as someone who’s basically doing it all, you don’t have anyone to blame. What is your take on how easy or hard it would be to make tickets more affordable generally?
In terms of your Billie Eilishs and your Taylor Swifts, I’m unsure whether they’re just deeply shielded and don’t know about it or they’re happy to hide behind other factors, be it management, or Ticketmaster and LiveNation. Those companies are awful, but they are also an easy thing to blame when there are labels, managers, and the artists themselves that could make a change. If a huge pop act is making $5 million profit on a huge gig, would it really impact their well-being, or their manager’s, if they just made $4 million profit instead? No, it wouldn’t. But as long as they’re playing sold-out shows, they won’t think about it.
From the perspective of bands that are our size, they need to look at whether they’re selling out every show. And if they’re not, then they can certainly consider making their shows a bit cheaper, so more people will be able to afford to go. And they probably will make more money because they’ve sold more tickets.
That’s the main reason for us doing the low income tickets. I would hate it if we were playing in someone’s city, and they would love to be at the concert, but they can’t because they can’t afford it. Offering $10 tickets will make a real difference to somebody, if we’re an important band to them, and they can come to see us. But also, if that helped an LC! fan who was short on cash to afford the show, when that same fan is doing better and they come back to see us in a couple of years time, they’ll drop $50 on merch because they’re so happy to be there. Fans have also got in touch to say, “I really want to come to the show, but there’s only low income tickets available. Can you make some more standard price tickets available?” If you respect your fan base, they will respect you back.
I think the low income ticket thing should be standard. Just think of the amount of DIY shows where you’ll see a poster that will say: “Ticket: $10. Nobody turned away due to lack of funds.” This is a principle that stems from those grassroots levels, and if people at that level can do it, then people at higher levels can do it as well.
As you’ve become more and more vocal about your values as a band over the last few years, you’re also hitting new commercial heights. Do you think those things are connected at all?
It’s hard to consider, because it would never have been the intention. As far as the chart thing, we know that it was as a result of lots of fans buying the vinyl, the CD, and the cassette, partly because they wanted to collect it all, but also because they want to support us. In a lot of ways, I have come to view LC! as being like a sports team as much as a band. A concert is always going to be a partisan crowd, but the support we always feel in the room is more like what I’ve experienced from football matches than from gigs. So there is an element of just wanting us to do well and sort of win.
And it probably makes it easier for people to want us to do well if we share the same values and support causes that they support. When you see a band talking about things that matter to you, even if you haven’t necessarily heard the music at that point, you might be inclined to think, I’ll give them a shot. So although it was never the intention, I think it probably has been beneficial.
One of All Hell’s themes involves your frustration with other bands that have a platform but are essentially squandering it. Like on “Long Throes,” where you assail toothless “punks on the playlist” who are merely “crooning for kindness.” Are you tempted to call out any specific bands by name?
Fifteen years ago, I would have gleefully been listing off bands that I would want to slag off. Now I’m in a strong position where no band can respond to something like that, because if they do, they’re telling on themselves. If anybody says, “I can’t believe LC! are saying this about us!” I’d be like, “Who said I was talking about you?! You must think I’m describing you.”
I’ve seen some online chatter about how those lines are directed at the band Idles because they have a song called “Kill Them With Kindness.” Do you care to confirm or deny that rumor?
I can neither confirm nor deny. But if any individual musician thinks it might be about them, I suppose it is about them. With regards to the reason for writing something like that, I’m still very petty. [laughs] I can say things like that in a song because we’re not a part of the music industry proper, and we’ve got so few friends in bands that are operating at the same level as us.
Sort of semi-related, someone was suggesting the other day that a lyric on a 1975 album was about LC! because, around the 2019 UK general election, I did a tweet highlighting how a lot of bands that had used supposed social awareness to market themselves had neglected to offer any insight into their political stance around that general election, which had a Socialist Labor prospect up against a right-wing Conservative prospect. I am the sort of person that believes that if bands engage in that sort of thing for their own benefit, then they are duty-bound to be transparent in their opinions about those things, though I accept that others would disagree.
Anyway, somebody quote-tweeted my tweet and singled out Matty Healy, and it got like 12,000 likes. And then, as it turns out, in the 1975 album that followed, there was a lyric that was like, “I got a lot of shit for not saying anything during the election,” and on Genius.com that line links back to our tweet. I wouldn’t have thought there was a connection, except for the fact that the quote-tweet went viral, so maybe there was. And what I’m circling around to here is: Maybe Matty Healy complained to Taylor Swift about Los Campesinos! at some point. [laughs] We can only believe that to be the truth.
In an interview I did with Matty Healy a few years ago, I actually asked him about why he stepped away from talking about politics, and he basically said that he didn’t think it did much good in the grand scheme of things. I think he is ultimately more of a showman than an activist. And to be clear, I do like the 1975!
To be clear: I don’t dislike them. I have deliberately avoided their music because initially they were like a post-Kooks thing, very landfill indie. And then I understand that they got good, because a lot of writers that I like, including yourself, started to write about them and enjoy their music. But I was aware that there were maybe too many similarities in our lyrical approaches. If somebody says, “Oh, they write lyrics like Gareth,” I won’t listen to it because I don’t want to accidentally be influenced by anything. So I genuinely don’t have an opinion. I’ve never listened to an album of theirs, but I suspect I would like them more than I want to.
At Los Campesinos! shows over the last few years I’ve been surprised by how many younger fans are there. And you seem to be grappling with this new fandom on a song like “Clown Blood; or, Orpheus’ Bobbing Head,” where you refer to yourself as a “sacrificial muppet pastor to a thousand needy teens.” Are there any downsides to this influx of younger fans?
Loads of teens got into us during Covid, and we’re so grateful for this new lease on life that our younger fans have contributed to. But one of the very few negatives is that we have distanced ourselves from the fanbase a little bit. After every show, I used to be at merch for two hours, signing things and taking photos and chatting. But now it doesn’t feel as comfortable as it used to, because I’ll take a photo with somebody, and then they’ll put it online and be like, “Oh my God, what’s Gareth doing there?!” And that same person literally asked me to make this hand signal or to do a silly face, and now they’re like, “Oh my God, he’s so ugly!” Fuck off. That’s been tough to navigate.
We always feel like they’re taking the piss out of us a little bit. Our appearances have never been more scrutinized. I’ve seen people on Twitter speculating about our sexuality, about our gender. I’ve seen people say, “Gareth is clearly autistic.” And none of these things are any of people’s business. It would be rude if you were discussing it with a friend in person, but it’s just unhinged to be tweeting something like this at somebody or commenting on Instagram. That’s made us less inclined to communicate one-on-one with the younger fans.
I can empathize with a lot of the younger fans and the way they behave, but when I’ve said things similar to this in the past, they never think it’s about them. They always think, Oh yeah, it’s that other subsection of the fanbase. We’re normal. Why can’t they be normal? But it’s like, I know you mean well, but it’s literally all of you.
I looked up how so many younger fans got into Los Campesinos! and saw that there was a popular Twitch streamer who turned a lot of them onto the band. And then I read that, earlier this year, this same streamer was accused of abuse. Obviously you have no control over any part of a situation like that, but it made me wonder how you feel about it all.
That streamer did play a huge part in a number of young fans getting into us, and immediately I was very aware of the benefits we were seeing from it. This person has a band of their own, and they covered an LC! song. They would talk about us and wear our merch, so we sold a lot of merch off the back of that connection, which during Covid was a real boon for the band.
But I resented it from the start, because there was this association between ourselves and the streamer that we never did anything to [encourage]. I’ve never acknowledged the person by name, and that was important to me, because I didn’t want us to be a part of their extended universe. We’ve been doing this for such a long time, and we’re legit and worthwhile in our own right, so I didn’t want to ride on anyone’s coattails.
We’ve never met, never spoken in person, but it didn’t stop the fan base from imagining this friendship between us. They made it a far bigger thing than it ever was. I find that frustrating. When the news came out about this person having been abusive in relationships, fans would start being like, “Oh my God, Los Campesinos! unfollowed him on Twitter and Instagram.” No, I never followed him in the first place.
Deep down, I think these younger people would have found our music anyway, because a lot of our back catalog is perfect for precocious teenagers. But the whole thing still feels strange to me.
One of the lines on All Hell that hit me like a gut punch is on “Holy Smoke (2005)” when you sing, “No children and no profession, walking dead at 37.” I’m a 42-year-old music journalist with no kids, and when I first heard that song I didn’t even have a job. It was almost too real. But at the same time it’s a very rousing song. It seems like your life is pretty amazing right now, but do you still have moments where you feel like society has deemed you useless?
It’s a weird one, because I don’t have children and I’m not going to have children. And that’s something that I’m very happy about, but it’s also when you start viewing yourself in the bigger picture. I’m also very aware that my job is Los Campesinos! and I don’t have any desire to do anything within music outside of that. There are lots of other things that I could do—I have a good skill set as far as admin things, and if it’s a job that I’m happy to do, then I’ll do it. But it does make you think, at this age, having done what I’ve done previously: What is there from here? At what age does it become demeaning to be in a band like ours?
Especially when so much of our performance is based around energy and aggression, that’s something that disappears with age. Don’t get me wrong, that’s not going to disappear anytime soon. We’ll look reasonably young. I always mean to google how old the National are, because they’re still looking good and performing well. Nobody really looks at them and thinks, Come on, old man. And they must be at least 10 years older than me. I thank them for that. [laughs]
One thing that was important to me with this album is that I didn’t pander to younger fans. I’m aware that a good percentage of our fan base now is not much older than the band itself. We’ve always written for ourselves, but I wanted to continue to write for those fans that have been with us for 10-plus years. It means a lot to me when fans talk about how, as our albums have progressed, what we’ve been singing about has remained relevant to them at that point in their life. And the amount of people that have continued to say that with All Hell has been one of the things I’ve been most proud of about it. When people are reacting to the lyrics, there’s a mixture of all-caps posts by the younger fans, and then somebody in their early 40s just being like, “Why’d you have to do me like this, Gareth?” [laughs]
That “walking dead at 37” line made me think of the one from your last album, Sick Scenes: “31 and depression is a young man’s game.” It reminded me of how Adele names her albums after the age she was when she made them.
I really love the Adele approach to naming albums! I genuinely think it’s brilliant and hilarious. There’s one on our album No Blues as well: “I took form as a ball in the virgin snow that started on its slow descent, barely more than 27 years ago.” Yes, guaranteed that I will reference my age on every LC! album going forward. It was very much an Adele influence to continue doing that.
The lyrics to “Feast of Tongues” almost read like wedding vows. It’s one of the more beautiful love songs you’ve written. As someone who’s made their name on heartbreak and how love can go wrong, now that you’re married, do you ever worry that you can’t access those struggles as much?
I remember when we were talking with the producer John Goodmanson in advance of recording Hello Sadness, it came up that I was in a relationship. But by the time we got to the studio, the relationship ended. John’s reaction was, “Thank fuck for that! I was really worried about how we were going to do an album if you were in a relationship.” [laughs]
But that was never a consideration this time around. It helps that I’m a lot more in tune with bigger-picture stuff now, in that there’s plenty of sorrow and torment in the wider world that I’ve called upon to write about. And you’re quite right about “Feast of Tongues,” which is about finding contentment whilst the whole world around you is burning, and how it feels to experience that with somebody that you trust and love. That it’s better to experience those horrors with them than without them.
That idea is littered throughout the record. I’ve seen people say that it’s a really hopeful album, but it doesn’t feel like that to me. Most of it is summed up by the last lines of the record: “You’re so beautiful, the sky is blue/But we both know too well/It’s all hell.”
When I saw Los Campesinos! a few months ago, you mentioned on stage that you don’t think of the band as a nostalgia act, and I think the success of this album, both critically and commercially, reinforces that idea. Do you consider yourself a nostalgic person?
I think quite a lot about this line from The Sopranos, when Paulie is driving Tony nuts over the dinner table, and Tony turns to Paulie and says, “‘Remember when?’ is the lowest form of conversation.” And we do a lot of “remember when?” in the band, but that’s the nature of adult friendship. It’s a lot of reinforcing your love for your friends by talking about the great things that you’ve experienced with each other. LC! have probably got 20 topics of conversation at this point, and over the course of a two-week tour, we’ll probably tell the same story from 10 years ago twice and enjoy hearing our mates retell it. At our age, nostalgia will sneak in.
But we’re also aware that when we stop looking forward is when we start running out of new experiences to make. We really do not want to be a legacy act. If you’re somebody that sees our name on the poster and is like, “Ah, I remember ‘You! Me! Dancing!’ Let’s go and watch them!” Thank you, but I genuinely would rather you didn’t, because that’s not what we think about. And maybe we’re naive in that respect, because we are a long way through our career, and we never know when people will stop caring or if something we do will just be a dud. There’s no guarantee that that won’t happen. But we’ve managed not to yet.
