Los Campesinos!’ 20-year archive of silly band T-shirt designs is a sweaty journey through indie rock aesthetics

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.

INT: This is a great project because you can almost see the evolution of indie rock aesthetics over the years, starting with twee indie illustrations (reminiscent of Hipness Purgatory aesthetics, Johnny Foreigner, MySpace, etc) and then evolving into Mission School aesthetics, football kits, punk zine-y designs and blatant political messaging. How do you guys feel about the design and fashion of indie rock merch over the years?

RF: Yeah it’s really funny to see the evolution even within my own work. The big switch to Mission School aesthetics is the moment when I took over LC! merch. I’ve always been powerfully drawn to the work of Daniel Clowes and US indie comic artists like Adrian Tomine and Chris Ware. And it always felt quite a natural fit for the slightly more grown-up future that LC! were gravitating towards when I first joined.

I have immense respect for the work that the illustrator Sarah Lippett did on the first record, Hold on Now, Youngster..., and the campaign around it. That slightly more naive, interpretive style is something I’ve never really been able to do. I’m probably too buttoned-up and figurative.

In much the same way we have with our music, we’ve generally tried not to pay too much attention to fashions in merch and clothing. We’ve never really been a cool band, and that’s probably aided our longevity to some extent.

Our design language now though is absurdly self-referential. For instance we started putting three little logo marks on everything to add this wry sense of faux-legitimacy, as if LC! were owned by a global conglomerate. But now we’ll often produce fictional historical precursors to them, as if they were designed in 1975 by Paul Rand. Essentially an in-joke at the public’s expense.

If we continue like this, who knows where we’ll end up in another 20 years?

INT: Indie rock has always been at its best when it's tongue-in-cheek, referential (and self-referential), and doesn't take itself so seriously. A lot of Los Campesinos! merchandise references other bands, wrestling, films, etc. How does that flavour the aesthetic of the band and pull fans in closer?

GC: I think the more esoteric designs we do are always either amongst our best, or worst designs, no middle ground. I suppose they’ve sometimes been deliberately ‘bad’, and a challenge to fans to see if they like the reference enough to rep the dumb T-shirt. People that like our band like us a lot, there are very few fair-weather LC! fans. And so it’s become the case that people trust our taste and, if we reference something, they’re inclined to explore it to see if it’s something they might like too. Similarly, it’s fun for fans to think ‘I love this band AND I also understand why they’ve put this image of legendary pro-wrestler Dusty Rhodes on a shirt.’ A lot of our fans are people who’d be our friends if we met under different circumstances, and these pop-culture references act as a way of starting a conversation and making a deeper connection.

INT: There’s something eternally cross-contaminated about alternative rock music – and fans feel closer to the bands due to this. You couldn’t get away with that in mainstream pop music, could you? Where’s the Los Campesinos! Eras T-shirt?

RC: I wonder if mainstream pop is just not as openly self-referential as indie rock tends to be. Pop often feels like its job is to shape the future and destroy the past; samples and cover versions tend to be redeployed without the same kind of nerdy reverence you might get in indie music. And that’s not meant as a criticism – it’s an important function in a world choked by nostalgia.

But there’s something comforting about the way that indie music cycles around every generation. When we do a Sleater-Kinney tee, it’s a little nod to the heritage that lead us here, and an invitation for some of our younger listeners to maybe check them out.

But it’s also a little moment where we still can’t believe how lucky we are to be able to get to do all this stuff. 20 years on we’re still in awe of the bands that influenced us. And I don’t think the songs or images that first opened your heart ever really leave you.