When Westside Cowboy played Later … With Jools Holland earlier this year, fellow guests Duran Duran offered some advice. Le Bon’s words didn’t really help. By 2025, only two years after forming, they had won Glastonbury’s emerging talent competition, supported Geese on the year’s buzziest indie tour and signed to a major label.
Not that you can hear it on their hotly anticipated debut album, It Goes On. Recalling the likes of the Feelies, Parquet Courts and Courtney Barnett, the album touches upon the muscular end of indie-pop, a little midwestern emo and has a chugging drive inspired by the Velvet Underground. There’s unnecessary pressure on new bands to bottle everything on the first attempt.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Just do whatever feels right.” Westside Cowboy are all aged 23 to 26, but – as their taste in music and resistance to the grind may indicate – share an old-school mindset. Most of them have brick phones, use MP3 players and collections of analogue gear, from radios to CD players and cassette decks.
They’re even considering setting up a PO box address for fans to send letters to. These things are designed to be addictive, and it’s trying to find a way to control it, because you don’t have to buy into that.” It’s the same with their music. Bassist and vocalist Aoife Anson-O’Connell finds it “really stifling creatively and personally isolating” being locked perpetually on screens, while Haycocks’ previous band, he says, became frozen by the “option paralysis” of overusing technology.
Starting this band, we thought we’d go for the most simple thing possible and that’s also seeped into our daily lives.” On stage later on, they play an explosive 4pm set to a rammed tent, contrasting sharp, noisy blasts of guitar with layered vocal harmonies. But back in the van, they are a modest and self-deprecating bunch. Bradbury states: “We’re not cool.” All band members share songwriting duties; when Haycocks writes he tries to channel frontmen he feels possess more panache, such as Lou Reed or the Magnetic Fields’ Stephin Merritt (it might explain the American twang to his vocal delivery).
One instruction Murphy gave to Bradbury when working out a guitar part was to imagine early rock’n’roller Link Wray “trying to scare kids”. Their love of folk, skiffle, Americana and early rock’n’roll led to them coining their own genre, Britanicana, to capture this hybrid. Now they call it a joke that got out of hand.
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