For his most recent headline London gig, Lewis Capaldi employed topless male dancers and crotch-activated fireworks. Now ahead lies Lewis’ biggest shows to date, sold out in mere minutes and constantly in demand. The figures and chart positions are now bringing themselves to the fore in the space he first got into songwriting for, to play live to as many people as possible, to feel that buzz. It’s no longer ‘We Will Rock You’ and ‘We Are The Champions’ - Lewis has his own anthems to blare now.
“To watch those tickets fly out in seconds was fucking mental,” he jumps. “You think back to all your favourite bands and sitting there waiting on Ticketmaster for tickets, and they sold out really quickly, and you’re like ‘fuck me’ but at the same time you thought, how fucking mental is it that you can’t even get a ticket for them? It’s weird to be in the same position as the people you used to go and see and try and get tickets for.
“It’s very strange but definitely cool, and it also means I’m definitely going to get paid some money.”
He laughs about saving as much money as possible on the stage show, potentially bringing back some of that bowling alley champagne he first celebrated his Number One with - “It sounds like a band from Brighton, right? 'We’re Bowling Alley Champagne, and this is our Burberry Acoustic',” he cracks - as well as fairy lights and a cardboard sign with ‘L E W I S C A P A L D I’ scribbled on it. You can guarantee the sold-out rooms would be loving it either way, but it’s pretty clear there’s something up his sleeve there.
“It was never meant to get this far,” Lewis reflects. “I would have been happy playing those cover gigs for a while and playing my own gigs at the weekend.”
He stops.
“So this is a bonus, really.”
Breaking hearts, smashing charts and enjoying the rise - Lewis Capaldi is the figure pop needed right about now, and you can guarantee that we’re all invited along for the ride.
“I just kinda want to see how far we can push it before people go ‘right you, you fucking prick - that’s enough. You’ve had your fun’.”
He’s planning on taking full advantage of the here and now. He wants to headline an arena at some point, potentially in Scotland, and tour the US along with the rest of the world. “I just want to get the music to as many people as possible, and I mean - there’s quite a lot of fucking people over there."
Most importantly for Lewis though, his goal is to not to embarrass his mum. “As long as my mother’s not embarrassed, then it’s all good.”
Stay glued to your social media accounts. In the ridiculous world of pop, Lewis Capaldi is taking over. That’s no joke.
Taken from the May issue of Dork. Lewis Capaldi's debut album 'Divinely Uninspired To A Hellish Extent' is out 17th May. He’ll play Barn on the Farm, Truck and more this summer, and a UK headline tour from 21st November.
Words: Jamie Muir
Lewis has always been mischievous, a joker in the pack with a laid-back view on the world that finds him making light of a situation whenever possible. “I was definitely as much of a gimp back then as I am now," he says.
At school, he'd make the rest of his class fold over in fits of laughter regularly. "I’d know when to cut it before I got into real trouble,” he recalls, “but I was a bit of a nuisance sometimes. I got a punishment once in French because I farted - the teacher was teaching a lesson I went ‘SHHHHHHH’. She turned around and was like, 'what?' And then I farted and got sent outside.
“I wasn’t one of those kids throwing chairs at teachers, it was light-hearted really,” he points out. “I was just a mischievous young man.”
He was quite happy floating along through school, admitting he probably would have done better if he had applied himself and studied a bit more - but had his mind on other things like having a laugh and playing music.
“Even in music I never got an A, I was just swanning through and having fun at everything.”
He ponders what his music teacher’s reaction would be now he has the biggest song in the country.
“Yeah, I’m going to go back and appeal my B! 'But I’ve got a Number One sir?' 'Fuck off!' God loves a trier though, eh?!”
That first glint of music came at an early, early age. Growing up in the small town of Bathgate, spread halfway between Glasgow and Edinburgh, to Scottish-Italian parents as the youngest of four children, it was on a family trip to a holiday camp at the age of four when he first took the stage.
“We got there, and there was this band up playing some song like ‘Be Our Guest’, and I got up and gave them a Queen CD with ‘We Will Rock You’ and ‘We Are The Champions’ on. I sang them on that stage and immediately I was like, can I do another one? I just experienced this weird rush. I mean, I was four so I hadn’t experienced that many rushes before, but it was this buzz and from there all I wanted to do was sing live to people. From that, my love of music came from this idea of - right, if I want to play live to people, I need to write my own songs. In my head, that was just what you did.”
“Everything I did was trying to facilitate playing live in front of people, y’know what I mean?” continues Lewis. “I picked up the guitar because I wanted to play the songs in front of people. Started writing songs, so I wasn’t just playing covers. At the time it was like, right, how do I get from Point A to B. It was learning all this stuff so I could get up on stage and play in front of people.”
By the age of eleven, he’d picked up the guitar, written his first original song and had begun gigging around various pubs and venues around Bathgate, Glasgow and Edinburgh. He caught the tail-end of a vibrant music scene with a range of bands playing a range of venues, but as his teenage years continued, those bands began to fade away, and venues started to close. It meant more than ever; he was heading to the likes of Glasgow and Edinburgh to get up on stage whenever he could.
“I would play pub gigs for money where I would go on stage and do a load of covers for like three hours. Mate, fuck, you name it, and I played it at those shows. ‘Mr Brightside’, ‘Not Nineteen Forever’, ‘Pumped Up Kicks’, anything by The Kooks. Remember The View? I basically did their whole back catalogue,” Lewis laughs. “Think of me as an indie music prophet, going from town to town spreading the word of these bands fucking from anywhere between fucking 2005 to 2012!”
In every facet of his life, music was there as a constant.
“I always see people in interviews say if you want to be successful in music and you really love it, you’d do it every single day - and I was like, I’m pretty sure I didn’t do it every single fucking day, and I was doing gigs all the time. Looking back now though, I realise so much of my time that I didn’t even realise, in that moment, was doing music and playing gigs. All those formative things that didn’t even register, like my first underage drinking thing was when me and my mates would put on our own gigs and get pissed. It was, right, we’re 16 and 17 years old and we want to get drunk, how do we do that? Okay, let’s put on a gig. That was facilitating something else - my burgeoning alcoholism - but music was there as an important part of my life to make that happen, more than I realised at the time.”
Lewis pauses. “Fuck me, I did spend an awful lot of time playing in the dark.”
Throughout his journeying and drive to be a musician, his parents were hugely supportive. “If I was appearing to give it my all and was going out there to play shows and better myself, then they were fully supportive. They knew the score after having three other children before me.” Lewis changes his tone. “Look, we’ve raised three kids already - you’ll probably be fine. We’ve done this before; this isn’t our first rodeo,” comes his impression of his parents' philosophy.
“They weren’t as strict on me,” Lewis reverts back. “They must have thought, well, he hasn’t eaten glass once in his life so he’ll probably be okay so long as he doesn’t start trying to chew on a bottle of Irn-Bru.”
Rather than chewing on Irn-Bru bottles, Lewis went about working on and pulling together the songs that have come to define his past 18 months, uploading tracks to YouTube and slowly building a loyal audience. It was ‘Bruises’ that truly took things to a new level, a favourite that he had played live for years was released into the world and found a, well, decent response.
“I woke up on the day ‘Bruises’ came out and it was Number One on New Music Friday in America. Like Kendrick Lamar’s ‘HUMBLE’ came out that week and I was above him... Christ,” exclaims Lewis. “I was still doing those gigs in pubs, but I think that was a big shift in perception. It was mental, and all happened quite quickly. I look back on it as the peak of that time in my life - a peek into what’s happening now with ‘Someone You Loved’, except, of course, this is even more ridiculous.”
With ‘Bruises’ he became the fastest ever unsigned artist to reach 25 million plays on Spotify and it had him snapped up in no time. “For so long after, we never had a song do as good as ‘Bruises’ which was a pain in the fucking arse. I felt like, ahhh fuuuuuccckkiiinnggg hell we shouldn’t have let that song go out there first.”
“It was never meant to be as big as it got on streaming,” notes Lewis, taking a deep breath. “I mean, neither was this one! I think that’s what’s good about streaming in general though; people decide what they’re into. You can have the song and take it to radio and do a big video - and trust me, we’ve done a few of them over the past couple of years - but if people decide if a certain song is the one, then they have the power to make it huge. Personally as an artist…” Lewis stops and cracks a laugh, “fucking hell, an artist! What on earth! As a singer, I think a lot of the music industry is saying, like, well this is an exciting time - none of us know what the fuck is going on! I sound like a politician, but I think it’s a good thing that the power is back in the hands of the people.”
