Los Campesinos! frontman Gareth Campesinos! tries to work it all out on Sick Scenes
It might sound like a corny old showbiz adage, but to Los Campesinos! anchor Gareth Campesinos! (née David), it’s become something of a sacrament: Don’t give up your day job. Even though he and his six bandmates have all substituted their surnames for Campesinos! and kept the celebratory exclamation mark.
When the 31-year-old Gareth phoned from his Bath, England, hometown to discuss his group’s latest whimsical effort, Sick Scenes, he was just finishing his nine-to-five shift at a local graveyard, where he’s employed as gardener. “Well, perhaps ‘gardener’ is too grand a term,” he says. “I cut grass. I’m just keeping the grass short and making the cemetery look as nice as it can. I like duties where you can actually see your progress. And when the grass is really long and you’ve been there a few hours, and now the grass is short? It’s like, ‘Well done! You’ve done that correctly!’” Plus, he points out, there’s the bonus of listening to his favorite music and podcasts on duty, or having lunch by his favorite tombstones, like the soccer-ball-shaped monument to a player who died during a match in the 1920s.
Additionally, the vocalist has two other side careers—one wherein he closely watches test-taking students to ensure that no cheating occurs and another for his favorite soccer team, the Welton Rovers, for whom he oversees the team’s website and social-media accounts, plus the writing and editing of its match-day program booklets. To record Sick Scenes for a month in Fridão, Portugal, he had to quit yet another gig at a record label and management company, which he admits he didn’t really enjoy. “I don’t really like that side of the music industry—I’m very skeptical of the worth of management and paying other people to do things that you can do yourself,” he says. Only songwriting partner Tom Campesinos! (née Bromley), stayed with him for the entire session. The other Campesinos!—Rob, Kim, Matt, Neil and Jason—flew over during weeklong day-job vacations.
Initially, Sick Scenes, the band’s sixth disc, seemed ill-fated. After 2013’s No Blues, Los Campesinos! parted company with its record label and its management, with Gareth taking the club-booking reins.
It felt like the musicians were starting from scratch again, like back in 2006 when they met in Wales at Cardiff University and issued a lovably eccentric 2008 debut, Hold On Now, Youngster… “Even the label that we were with had explicitly said, ‘Maybe it’s not worth doing this anymore,’” the frontman recalls, somberly. “They were actually trying to stop us from being a band.”
Gareth’s corporate moonlighting wound up inspiring him, however. Helping young artists at that imprint, he decided to reinvest that energy in Los Campesinos!, so he got busy arranging financial backing for Sick Scenes. Musically, the album turned out chiming, jubilant, totally uplifting, with new-wave-quirky melodies carried aloft by galloping rhythms and buzzy guitar work. But listen closer to the misanthropic lyrics Gareth sneer-sings on “Sad Suppers,” “5 Flucloxacillin” (about a regimen of antibiotics he was on), “A Slow, Slow Death” and deceptively gentle ballad “The Fall Of Home” (a cynical examination of small-town life and the artistes who leave it behind), and it becomes a much darker proposition. The happy/grim contrast is what the group was aiming for.
“Because we hadn’t been able to record for so long, or even do the things that bands should be doing, we had a lot of pent-up aggression,” he says. “And struggling with mental health issues in my 20s. I always comforted myself by thinking, ‘Well, when you’re a bit older, things will be different, you’ll have worked it all out, and you’ll actually have a clue.’ But then you get that little bit older, and you realize, ‘Nah—it’s not as simple as that.’ That’s kind of the mindset behind this whole record.”
Besides, when Los Campesinos! finishes its spring tour of America, that cemetery grass will have grown that much higher and groundskeeper-ready. Gareth can be alone again, aside from an occasional interloper that he often mistakes for something otherworldly.
“When it’s particularly quiet there and suddenly a squirrel jumps past, there’s a moment where I’m convinced that it’s some sort of apparition,” he says. “But no. It’s only a squirrel!”
—Tom Lanham
