Breakout indie band Westside Cowboy on rejecting tech and loving imperfection: ‘We’re not hermits!’

Despite their fast rise, the Manchester indie-pop band are happily going at their own pace. But what – if anything – did they learn from the advice of Duran Duran’s Simon Le Bon?

When Westside Cowboy played Later … With Jools Holland earlier this year, fellow guests Duran Duran offered some advice. “Nerves are just your mind telling you that you’re about to do something extraordinary,” Simon Le Bon told the band, who were “cacking their pants”. Le Bon’s words didn’t really help. “I was hoping for some real advice,” says vocalist and guitarist Reuben Haycocks, laughing. “Like, where do I look?”

The Manchester band have had to learn the ropes quickly. 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. “We’d be lying if we said there wasn’t a little bit of pressure,” says vocalist and guitarist Jimmy Bradbury.

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. “We weren’t trying to make some career-defining thing,” says drummer Paddy Murphy, as we cram into their tour van backstage at Tramlines festival in Sheffield. “We love the way debut albums sound when a band feels hungry but still not quite settled. 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. “We’re not hermits,” insists Bradbury. “We still have laptops and send emails, but taking away that single-use device, like a phone, really helps free up headspace. 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. “It feels like the only way for people of our age, but we reject that. 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. “We’re not doing anything revolutionary,” says Anson-O’Connell. 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). “I’m not someone who feels at my coolest when I’m Reuben Haycocks,” he says. “There’s a certain level of bravado you need to try to write a song, so to get myself over the line, I’ll be X person for an hour – as I will never be able to reach that level of awesomeness.” This role play works for figuring out tone, too. 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. “A very tongue-in-cheek thing,” says Murphy.

“If people want to use Britanicana, be my guest,” Haycocks adds. “It’s as equally pointless as all other genres.”

As much as Westside Cowboy feel like a band happily at home in the past, they’re just as invested in improving their own era. Alongside the indie bands Holly Head, Pushbike and Martial Arts, they run a night called No Band Is an Island, which programmes bands and leftwing political speakers to raise money for Medical Aid for Palestine. Although you won’t find explicitly political lyrics in their songs. “We are all political people,” offers Haycocks, who is wearing a T-shirt calling for animal liberation. “But we don’t think our music suits going on stage and shouting about politics because that’s not who we are, personally.”

In hindsight, the fabulously slick Le Bon was probably never going to have much good advice for a band like this. Westside Cowboy’s own musical heroes are artists who have embraced imperfection. Haycocks scrolls through his MP3 player and finds Tom Waits’ Mule Variations. “It’s like, oh my God, how has he managed to write two of the most goofy songs in the world among five of the greatest?” he says, comparing the likes of Chocolate Jesus with Picture in a Frame.

Bradbury jumps in: “You’ve got to have your duds!” Haycocks agrees, inadvertently summing up the band’s MO. “Duds are what make music human.”

• It Goes On is out now on Island