Having already supported the likes of Jack White, Queens of the Stone Age and Royal Blood, Demob Happy have amassed some impressive stamps of approval on the road.
Such big-name endorsements are no surprise given the continued quality of their back catalogue, filled as it is with pulverising, snappy alt-rock that continued in February with the arrival of the trio’s fourth album The Grown-Ups Are Talking. Recorded at the famed Rancho de La Luna Studio in California’s Joshua Tree, the process furthered the band's love affair with the US nearly a decade on from their first visit.
That inaugural trip in 2016 was funded by a grant from PRS Foundation’s International Showcase Fund that saw the band — comprising frontman and bassist Matthew Marcantonio, guitarist Adam Godfrey and drummer Tom Armstrong — play at SXSW Festival in Austin, Texas.
‘That funding made SXSW possible,’ Matthew tells M. ‘I don't think our label would have dropped the money required. Getting over there and doing SXSW, I’m sure, helped move the needle for us.’
In the following decade, the band have seen it all: from the highs of those big-name support slots to the gruelling realities of touring life, including a European jaunt in 2024 that they now half-jokingly refer to as their ‘tour of terror’. For the latest edition of our On The Road series, Demob Happy tell M about their changing relationship with touring, being in charge of their own destiny and the impact of PRS royalties on their ambitions as a band.
'PRS royalties have saved my bacon at times.' - Matthew Marcantonio
Tom: ‘Since that first trip to the US, we've learned all too well how expensive, laborious and intense it is to tour in America. The International Showcase Fund unlocked it for us: we hadn't been before, and SXSW is a carousel of madness you can get swept up in. It wasn’t until later on that we realised that it was a pretty amazing thing, [having] that door open for us.’
Matthew: ‘Every time PRS pays in [royalties], it's like a little treat. You never know quite how much you’re going to get, and when you do get more than you expect, it's very nice. We're totally independent [as a band] now. Before that we were sharing it with the label and publisher, but now we get 100% of everything. PRS royalties have saved my bacon at times, really.’
Adam: ‘A few years ago, I looked at my bank account and realised rent was coming out the next day, and I had -£10. My bank would also show you if there was an upcoming payment, and I remember there was a big PRS payment about to come in. I was like, “Oh my God, I’m saved!”’
Adam: ‘[Touring] has definitely been a learning curve. Booking agents really do work for their money, their 10% [cut]. There's a lot of moving parts to booking a tour.’
Tom: ‘We've talked a lot about jumping in and taking more risks, such as going to play at a strange, far-flung festival. If you have a team [working with you], sometimes they push back against those more risky things. But now, as an independent band, there's a little more flexibility.’
Matthew: ‘We're planning a European tour in September. Someone got in touch on Instagram and was like, “I don't think you realise this, but you're really important in the underground rock‘n’roll scene in Warsaw. We should do a gig”. In the past, it would have been a case of, “Let's run it by management,” and, invariably, it would have got shot down. Now, though, we don’t have to do that. I think it's going to be amazing.
‘It's [about] being able to move at the speed of chance and inspiration, really. The way we've experienced it is that when you come up against roadblocks, but we can see the sense in doing it, we can make it work. We're savvy, we know how to do it cheaply and we do a lot of the work ourselves.
‘That’s where financial support from PRS royalties and funding can really help a band like us. That money is the difference between us breaking our backs and doing literally everything ourselves [versus] being able to afford to take a [guitar] tech, someone to do merch and a photographer on tour.’
'As an independent band, we've talked a lot about jumping in and taking more risks.' - Tom Armstrong
Tom: ‘In the last few years, it’s come down to us taking help of some sort. We've been pretty creative, but it gets to the point where that in itself ends up becoming unsustainable. You're getting by through begging, borrowing and stealing — by hook or by crook — every day.’
Matthew: ‘It's the reality for a band of our size, despite selling the amount of tickets that we do. Until you push through into that next strata of success, if you want to tour with the degree of comfort that you would [hope to] expect at a minimum, you've got to be prepared to either lose or sink money [into it].’
Tom: ‘We haven't necessarily broken through to that level yet, but we have got to a point where we want to put on a certain calibre of show. It’s therefore become a funny thing of having to be creative to make that happen. We do so much on our end that even [working with] a completely random sound engineer can make it sound great for an audience.’
Matthew: ‘As everything goes through our in-ear monitors, it means that we can pre-EQ our vocal sends. We've got everything to a degree of completeness, so that whenever we rock up to a random venue in Belgium and it's an in-house sound guy, at least what we're giving them is the absolute best it can be. There's only so much that they can fuck up at that point!'
Adam: ‘In an ideal world, we’d have a whole [touring] team.’
Matthew: ‘But what are you going to do? You have to make it foolproof.’
Adam: ‘We're pushing the limits of what we can do as a three.’
'We had an offer for a month-long tour that didn't work for us. Instead, we looked at it from a different angle, downsized and did a week-long tour. It was absolutely lush!' - Tom Armstrong
Matthew: ‘While touring, we do plan to have downtime and time off so it's not completely arduous and non-stop. If you can, with a sense of priority, actually build things in which are fun [to do], or approach [touring] with a sense of carefreeness. It is, at the end of the day, a privilege and something fun to do, especially when we can make it balance itself out and come away no poorer than when we left. That's a ridiculously low bar, but it’s the reality.’
Tom: ‘We've had so many conversations since our “tour of terror” [in 2024]. For our whole career, we've always put ourselves last in the order of priorities. You’d say yes first, and then work it out later. But recently the shift has been, "OK, we can actually stop for a second, run the numbers and look at what this might be like for us". If it looks really difficult we can actually say no, which we did in February. We had an offer for a month-long tour that wouldn't have worked for us, so, instead, we looked at it from a different angle, downsized and did a week-long tour. It was absolutely lush! We had a great time, drank loads of wine and went around France.’
Adam: ‘Touring can get overwhelming when you’re doing 16-hour days for months, and you've got no one helping you. But when all goes well, and if you have that balance, it's a privilege.'
Demob Happy’s latest UK and Ireland tour kicks off on 22 April in Norwich — you can see their upcoming tour dates here.
