At 25, indie troubadour Declan McKenna is used to sharing the top end of festival bills with musicians a generation older than him, most recently 51-year-old Liam Gallagher at Glasgow’s TRNSMT. But in many ways the line-up he joins next will be his starriest yet – though one containing cultural heavyweights of a very different sort to the former Oasis frontman.
McKenna’s upcoming show at the 3000-capacity Edinburgh Playhouse was announced too late to make it into the printed version of the Edinburgh International Festival (EIF) brochure. No matter. He and his band are in the official programme regardless, nestling alongside such storied names as the São Paolo Symphony Orchestra, The Hallé, Berlin’s Komische Oper and its Parisian counterpart Opéra-Comique, and Senegalese legend Youssou N’Dour.
The young Londoner isn’t short of confidence on stage or in person so isn’t likely to be fazed by the prospect of appearing at the world’s most prestigious arts festival. But after appearances in Glasgow and at Glastonbury last month, what does he expect from the EIF crowd in August?
“The TRNSMT crowd is always just up for up for a good time and it’s generally a pretty raucous occasion, but in Edinburgh I don’t know what to expect,” he admits when we talk over Zoom.
“It could be really die-hard fans or it could be a pretty casual audience. It’s good to read the room in the first couple of songs and see what’s going on. But really you’ve got to just set the tone yourself for how you want things to be, and hope people are able to accept it. And Edinburgh is the last gig of the festival season, pretty much, so it’s going to be a bit of a celebration from our end. I feel like that’ll give it a really cool energy.”
Not that McKenna’s relative youth should be taken as a sign of anything. Through his music and his increasingly theatrical stage show he has been doling out that same ‘cool energy’ for nearly a decade now. He was only 16 when he made his first Glastonbury appearance, having won the festival’s Emerging Talent Competition in 2015. His reward was a £5000 cheque, a slot on one of the smaller stages, a rave review in the NME – and an unholy scramble to sign him to a record label. Not bad for a kid who had just finished his GCSE exams.
Debut album What Do You Think About The Car? duly landed in 2017 and features McKenna’s hook-tastic breakout track Brazil, a politically-charged song inspired by the 2014 World Cup. On it you’ll also find his boisterous teen anthem The Kids Don’t Wanna Come Home and the moving Paracetamol, inspired by the suicide of a transgender teen who was forced to undergo conversion therapy (“There’s a girl, 15, with her head in a noose/Because she’s damned to live, she’s damned to choose.”) Channelling the ska-punk energy of The Clash (and not a little of their agit-pop shtick) he later released non-album single British Bombs, a broadside against the arms trade.
Listening to that song today it seems even more relevant than it did in 2019. So does he consider himself a political songwriter?
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“Yeah, at times,” he says. “I came out the gates pretty hard with that stuff and it has kind of set a precedent. But I don’t want it to be something I feel I have to do because people want it, in the same way I don’t want to just make indie rock forever. Creativity doesn’t work that way. When I have something to say that feels new, I’ll say it. Even the stuff that’s more abstract says something about the world, just not necessarily in that direct way like some of the first album, or British Bombs, or tracks like. But you say something by telling a story. A lot of the music I like is somewhat political, or observant, but I want songs to have that subtlety where it’s a story about life, it’s relatable. It’s not just me smacking you in the face with my idea of good and bad.”
Subsequent releases saw him pivot towards a more experimental approach to music-making. Second album Zeros threw in some glam rock stomp and could loosely be described as a concept album centring on an astronaut named Daniel (its cover showed McKenna dressed in a silver spacesuit straight out of the costume department of 1970s sci-fi series Blake’s 7). Then in February, having decamped to Los Angeles, he released What Happened To The Beach?, a psychedelia-flavoured third album recalling everyone from Tame Impala and Unknown Mortal Orchestra to ELO and St Vincent.
He also revealed his love of ABBA by releasing a cover of their Slipping Through My Fingers, from 1981 album The Visitors. It was hearing that album aged 17 which “changed the trajectory of my career,” he says. “I am a big ABBA fan, I have all the records on vinyl … I just think they’re super influential.”
As for the voice-of-a-generation tag which inevitably followed his debut album, it’s a source of amusement as much as bemusement these days. He laughs when I mention it and continues to chuckle all through his answer.
“I feel like it’s kind of gone away now, which is quite good,” he says. “I never really fully embraced it. I think at first I was like: ‘Er, maybe. Like, er, thanks’. But then I was just like: ‘I’m not sure I agree with this. There are more people you can listen to who can talk about issues better than I can’. I’ve always said this. I do think I’m good at putting things into songs, but when I get asked to talk about my perspective I tend just trip myself up because I’m not a public speaker. But I know where I stand now and I can embrace that to the fullest rather than trying to be something I’m not.”
And he reminds me of that David Bowie line: “What I do is not terribly intellectual – I’m a pop singer for Christ’s sake.” But a singer soon to have a foot on the world’s biggest stage.
Declan McKenna is at the Edinburgh Playhouse on August 12 as part of the Edinburgh International Festival
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