It’s Nice That (INT): Can you guys introduce Los Campesinos! for anyone in our audience who may not know about you.
Gareth Campesino (GC): Depending on who you ask, Los Camp! are either the UK’s first and only emo band, a bastion of principled independence and better than ever, or simply “still going!?”. Whichever way you look at it, it’s hard to deny that we’re a band celebrating 20 years together, having released 7 studio albums and toured the world over.
INT: Rob, can you tell me a little bit about your background in illustration and how you ended up doing so many bloody T-shirts for Los Campesinos!?
Rob Campesino (RB): My background’s probably a little unorthodox. I did an English literature degree, but realised the thing I was best at was drawing. And so I spent a few years trying to correct course, culminating in an MA in drawing at Kingston, which was an unproductive grind through trad British art school nonsense for the most part. And meanwhile I’d been trying, somewhat unsuccessfully, to establish myself as a sort of hybrid musician and illustrator in the mould of Jeffrey Lewis, when Los Campesinos! first asked me to join in 2009.
It was an interesting point in the band’s career, because they were trying to find a path to self-sufficiency as the industry atrophied in the new age of streaming. And this future involved selling a lot of merch. It was a lot of fun, we made a quarterly subscription zine and 7″ called Heat Rash that I poured my heart and soul into! But it was the T-shirts that became the big staple. And I just sort of learned the craft of illustration on the job for the most part.
GC: There’s a commercial imperative to producing a high frequency of different desirable designs. Although sometimes the free market just doesn’t respond to a cool idea like the infamous You! Me! Danson! Ted Danson tee. Putting out merch is a really cool, exciting thing. To have a T-shirt with your band name on is a thrill that still never gets old. And whether you can draw or not doesn’t really matter, so long as what you print is a genuine expression. Which is why it bums me out when bands use AI to generate designs.
RC: I think back to when I was a teenager and I would’ve worn literally anything that said Ben Folds Five on it.
But good artists care about all aspects of their creative footprint. And merch, like album artwork, is a strange realm that seeks to put a visual face on an audio medium. It’s kind of like seeing what your favourite podcast host actually looks like, which can be…deeply weird sometimes.