The teenager who’s mixing politics and pop music
Is 18-year-old Declan Mckenna the voice of Generation Z? Alice Vincent meets him
With his mop-top haircut, guitar and radio-friendly sound, Ed Sheeran has created the template for boys who dream of world domination in the pop industry, as the dozens of hopefuls who imitate him on X Factor every year suggest. But, while most of the emerging teenage wannabes sing about clubs, girls and thwarted romance, one of them is reviving the dusty old art of the protest song with music that riffs on politics, corruption scandals and fake news.
Declan Mckenna wrote his breakout hit, Brazil, when he was 15, as part of his music GCSE. A polemical attack on Fifa corruption and the 2014 World Cup, it helped him bag the Glastonbury Emerging Talent Competition, a slot at the festival and £5,000 in prize money. Since then, he has become the reluctant voice of Generation Z, with songs about how transgender teenagers are misrepresented in the media (Paracetamol), police brutality
(Isombard) and the use of religion to justify war (Bethlehem). With a shortlist nomination for the BBC Sound of 2017, a critically acclaimed 2017 debut album What Do You Think
About the Car? (named after his family’s Toyota Previa) and a knack for marrying thoughtful, politically engaged lyrics to upbeat indie pop, this 18-year-old from Herefordshire has won the hearts and minds of thousands of teenagers across the country. “There’s not really much going on in my life, so I [write songs] along the lines of what’s in the news, what I want people to talk about, what I want people to know, what my views are,” he has said.
I meet him as he gears up for his biggest live gig to date, at Koko in Camden, the same venue where, five years ago, his sister ushered him through that teenage rite of passage of going to a first gig and which marks the high point in a string of nationwide tour dates that sold out in less than a day. “So much stuff we’re told is terrifying,” he says, referring to the slew of diverse footage – an amusing cat one minute, someone being tortured the next – that fills his and millions of other teenagers’ social media feeds every day. “My generation is confused and scared.” He upholds his friends, rather than any pop cultural or political figure, for giving him the confidence to write songs about social issues rather than his love life. Yet he doesn’t think the views he pours into his songs should be influencing others too much: “It would be unfair for me to be like, ‘Yeah, I’m the voice of a generation’. I don’t want that responsibility.”
Many members of that generation are now embarking on their first term of university around the country. In contrast, Mckenna, whom I suspect when we meet is struggling with the remnants of last night’s excess, has just moved out of his family home into “somewhere really nice” in Finsbury Park with his bandmate Will Bishop. When he told his parents – both teachers, although his father is now retired – that he was abandoning his A-levels to pursue music, they were supportive. “But I suppose when you’re the sixth kid, they can just be like, ‘Leave, do it!’,” he adds.
Clearly, such independence holds greater scope for partying. But Mckenna is more excited about no longer having to make albums “in a claustrophobic little cupboard”. “I’m the youngest of six kids so I got the short straw in terms of bedrooms,” he explains, a thick slick of kohl surrounding animated brown eyes. Up until now, all of the music that Mckenna has released emerged from that childhood bedroom. “I was going into the second album with all these ideas and was like, ‘I need space, I need instruments’.”
Mckenna started writing songs on the brink of his teens. He received a loop pedal for his 13th birthday and released Brazil online two years later. The ball was swift to roll. “By January, February, I started getting emails from Sony, from all sorts, all over the place,” he explains, while mussing his dark thatch of hair with fingers tipped with chipped black nail varnish.
Until recently, his father was his tour manager. “Before I was signed, and for the next 18 months, Dad was still driving us around.” His mother adds “’s mum” to his official merchandise and wears it to his shows (“she eats it up, it’s so cute”).
She would have been bursting with pride last September, watching her youngest steal the Later… With Jools Holland spotlight from Norah Jones and Barry Gibb after stripping off to reveal a “Give 17-year-olds the vote” T-shirt. “The funny thing was that the producers told us, ‘If you’ve got any surprises you need to do it in the rehearsal because we need to know where to put our cameras’,” he recalls. “So I was like ‘All right, they know what I’m gonna do,’ but I just still had my blue shirt on and ran into the middle. [Punk duo] Slaves were like, ‘Yeah, that was pretty punk rock. We have to up our game’.”
Mckenna is undoubtedly a good boy, however. One of the first things he bought with his newly disposable income was not drugs or flash guitars, but a copious amount of glitter – “it’s a staple part of my shows”. His demands of the music industry are simple: “As long as I make good songs I’m happy with, the rest is just b-------. I just want to pay off my family’s mortgage.”
Mortgages are not, I offer, hugely rock ’n’ roll. “There’s only so much ‘cool’ you can try and pretend to be, before everyone realises you’re not actually that cool,” he says. “I can go around wearing all black and pretending to be Billy Big B----, but at the end of the day, your mum’s still seen you in your pants,” Mckenna continues. “There’s no changing that and I don’t see any point in ever trying to put up that kind of facade.”
It all backs up a typically catchy Mckenna lyric: “Don’t lie to me/i know I’m not as cool as I’d like to be,” from Why Do You Feel so Down?, his latest single, which he’s filming the
‘I would absolutely happily tell people where to go if they tried to mess with the songs’
video for the day after we talk. He’s got a 7am pickup, he grumbles, and has to do an Eighties dance class in a park. “It’ll be interesting,” he says, unconvincingly. While he can be persuaded on video concepts, there is one thing Mckenna won’t be pushed on: “I would absolutely happily tell people where to go if they tried to mess with the songs.”
It has clearly not taken long for him to learn to get the measure of the music industry. “I did have a year or two to get my bearings,” he admits. “You have to learn what’s real and what’s not. It’s a bit of a weird time.” Puberty didn’t help matters. He rattles off the changes he’s been through in recent years – “within my body, within myself as a person, adapting from school life to touring”.
Mckenna gets recognised in public now, and though he’s getting used to the notion of “people having opinions on you without knowing you personally”, it’s still new to him. “I think I’ve got through it quite OK,” he says, thumbs pressing at his jumper cuffs. “But I’m still learning.”