I can’t be a teenage protest singer for ever
Declan McKenna started out as the voice of a generation but now he’s doing his own thing
D‘Really, I don’t want to come off as some perfect influence – it is just not possible’
eclan McKenna has made the journey from a teenage protest singer to a mature artist of invention and importance in his mid-twenties with such apparent ease that is both heartening and even startling. To recap, Declan, who was born and raised in London and whose grandparents hailed from Cavan and Cork, at age 16 won a competition to play the 2015 Glastonbury Festival and later that same year played the Electric Picnic for the first time. His earliest singles Brazil, Paracetamol and Isombard were socially aware, politically savvy songs that delivered their messages with no shortage of hooks.
His 2017 debut album What Do You Think About The Car? laid down further markers as to his talent. Zeros released just over three years later was even better. It revealed an artist who had learned well from his heroes David Bowie, The Waterboys and Ray Davies of The Kinks.
For his third album, Declan left his Brighton home (which he shares with his friend former Strypes guitarist Josh McClorey) for Los Angeles and returned with What Happened To The Beach? an album that reflected that city’s sunnier climes and also a diverse-sounding collection of songs that embraced experimentation but on which he rarely puts a foot wrong.
‘LA is a more relaxing environment to work in and that kind of energy did feed into the album,’ he says.
‘The songs that I had written this time were a little more abstract. The producer that I worked with, Gianluca Buccellati [Lana Del Rey, Arlo Parks], seemed to go for those kinds of songs. It is a completely different experience to working out of London or Brighton but it wasn’t a complete U-turn. It’s kind of a new approach mixed with going back to my roots a little bit.’
He will play a mix of both when he takes to stages in both Belfast and Dublin this week. One of the new songs in the live set is an album stand-out, Nothing Works. On it he sings, ‘I don’t relate to the kids no more. I feel like I’m letting them down’, and also, ‘so what if I sing ‘I love war’.’ It seems to contradict another of his early songs British Bombs which criticised his country’s policy of armament sales.
‘It’s not that I will not write anything about social injustice or whatever issue it is again, it’s just that I don’t want to repeat myself,’ he says.
‘Nothing Works is kind of justifying what I was doing with this record. It would feel wrong to me to allow my writing to always veer in that direction when I have already done it quite a lot. It is a bit tonguein-cheek obviously when I sing “so what if I sing ‘I love war’”. Really, I don’t want to come off as some perfect influence – it is just not possible. My label did suggest that I go back and work in the same way that I had before but I said I can’t really do that. I can only really do what I’m inspired to do now. It’s the only way that it’s going to be any good.’
Declan is another artist who has dialled down his presence on social media. ‘I don’t see a functioning revolution coming out of these apps,’ he says. His change in attitude partially inspired I Write The News another excellent song from the album, which followed its predecessors into the Irish and UK top 10s.
‘You see things on the internet where two sides of a debate can have two completely different sets of what they think the truth
is; there is nothing unifying or productive about getting involved with that,’ he says.
‘Social media sites probably aren’t owned by people who care as much as a lot of their users do about these issues. The fact that many people are logging in is probably the most important thing for them. That’s why I feel a bit weird about using social media at all.’
Declan now releases his music on his own imprint, Tomplicated Records, but still through Columbia, which won the bidding war to sign him nine years ago.
‘I probably have a bit more control because I’m a bit more demanding than I was when I was a teenager,’ he laughs.
‘You know the way the industry is. Conversations get had and you get swayed into doing things the label’s way. It is a constant push and pull. But I have fought for this album to be the way it is. There is a level of experimentation but we’ve kept the balance of something organic and the digital process that we’ve used. A lot of laptops but a lot of heart as well!’
Declan McKenna plays the 3Olympia Theatre on Tuesday and Wednesday. His new album, What Happened To The Beach? is out now.