00:00One, two, three, four.
00:08Hi, I'm Andrew Trendle. You're watching NME.
00:10We're here at Reading Festival 2026, the final day with Westside Cowboy.
00:14Hello.
00:15Hello.
00:16How are you doing, Jimmy and Robin?
00:17Good, good, good. Thank you.
00:19Yes, very good. Thank you.
00:19You were saying just before we turned the cameras on that you aren't certain of your existence right now.
00:24No, we're at that stage in a tour where we've been away for a very, very long time and we're
00:31questioning our own existence.
00:33Is this real? Are we real?
00:35But we've just done a show. We're feeling pretty good.
00:38We've got really sweaty jeans on a leather sofa.
00:42I don't plan on moving because there is definitely going to be some sort of...
00:47You can have a nap if you want, that's fine.
00:48Residue. Yeah, sorry. I'm sorry.
00:52But am I right? Is this your first Reading and Leeds combo?
00:58It's the first time we've played, yeah. I came here in 2019 when I was 16 and it sort of
01:05got like PTSD as we drove into the site.
01:08I was like, oh no, I saw Cavetown here, you know. That's no shade on Cavetown, obviously.
01:14But just a thing that I remember.
01:18I think I remember that year. Was that the 975?
01:21Yeah. And Charlie XCX was there.
01:23Billie Eilish.
01:24Billie Eilish, yeah.
01:25And Royal Blood.
01:27Yeah.
01:27And Foo Fighters. What was his name? Thingy Hawkins. Taylor Hawkins went up on like a big elevator riser and
01:36did like a 10-minute drum solo.
01:38Oh, that's so cool.
01:39It was kind of awesome.
01:41Can Westside Cowboy afford that yet?
01:42Not quite.
01:45But so having been here, you guys feel the magic, the legacy, the insanity of playing Reading and Leeds.
01:52Yeah. I've never been here before, so this is my first time. Hello, Reading.
01:56It feels very exciting. There's so much going on. Music from every corner, including food vans, really loudly through quiet
02:05portions of people's sets.
02:06Yeah. It sounded like there was someone with a speaker in the audience, like close to the front, because we're
02:15still on monitors and whatnot.
02:16Basically, we could hear really loudly, like sort of like trap beats going through the whole set, which was just,
02:23you know, it's just a hurdle.
02:25We had to get over it and carry on.
02:28And from, let's just go, from winning the Glastonbury Emerging Talent Competition to then smashing Glastonbury and then becoming one
02:33of the most talked about bands at Reading and Leeds, does anything faze you anymore?
02:38A lot of things phase us every day, including monitors. I don't know. It's a strange one.
02:46We have a very, very lovely team of people around us who help keep us sane.
02:53But I feel like we're still playing music with our friends. You know, it still feels like that. And that's
02:59the way I hope it stays.
03:01Been a series of big moments. I saw you guys at the Geese tour. Just tell us about that for
03:07a second, because I was at the Hammersmith show and just the sense of like occasion and momentum was pretty
03:12huge.
03:13So what was it like to be in that bubble of insanity?
03:15I mean, we were sort of, yeah, we were sort of leeching off the bubble. Like we were, we were
03:22very lucky to be able to, you know, get, get that tour.
03:24And they were so lovely. And, and generally the atmosphere of the whole tour was great. And all the crowds
03:32were amazing.
03:33Hammersmith was the first time where I was the first time I ever walked on stage and, and like noticed
03:40how big it was.
03:42Like I think it's five, 5,000 or something. And, you know, there probably wasn't the full 5,000 in
03:48there when we played, but, but it was, it was somewhere close.
03:51And it was enough to make me sort of look twice. And, and, and, and it was just amazing. And
03:57yeah, we, we're excited to hopefully one day play our songs to, to that many people who know them.
04:05And now that the album's out, I guess, that was one of like the first, uh, stages where like you
04:12go on there and you immediately notice, and you take in the history that's been there.
04:17Springsteen's first London concert, the last ever Ziggy Stardust concert, which I was watching the other day.
04:23And Mick Ronson in that, um, David Bowie's guitar player is amazing.
04:27And there's a moments where it's like really, really dark and the lights flash and you can see Bowie being
04:31projected onto the side of that place.
04:33And it still looks the same today. And it's such a cool venue.
04:36Again, Westside Cowboy, can you afford that yet?
04:39No.
04:39Lights. Hopefully we can get lights.
04:41At least some lights. Yeah.
04:42Not Lycra yet though.
04:43No, not quite.
04:45And, um, what else, given everything you guys have been going through, I mean, what have been the other pinch
04:49me moments of the last couple of years?
04:51Putting out an album, maybe.
04:53We've just done that. We've put out an album last week called It Goes On.
04:57Um, again, I don't know if we intended to go this far, but we're here and we're liking it.
05:03And it's, um, it's one of those moments.
05:05There's so many different stages to putting an album together to like finding which songs and then recording the songs.
05:11And it's like, okay, well they fit, but then you mix them and, and you get all your masters back
05:15and you go, we've done it.
05:16And then you get the cover and it's like, you've done it again.
05:19And then by the time it comes to releasing it, you feel like you've done it already five times, but
05:24it's, it's a, it's a moment of, of, it's finally all just clicked together.
05:32You have all the pieces of the cover and the music and I'm really excited for it to happen.
05:37You know, we've been living with the record for a couple of weeks now.
05:39Great album. You should buy it.
05:41Um, yes, you really should.
05:42How does it feel to just have it out there in the universe and be able to show that kind
05:46of your true selves to everyone?
05:47Yeah, it's great. Uh, we're, we're making an effort to, to, to read reviews as little as possible, considering we
05:55are on tour and we're already questioning our existence.
05:57You know, my dad will send me the occasional sort of bit of a review. That's really nice. And then
06:03just to ground me, he'll send me a really like horrible comment.
06:06Just so, just so, just so I, you know, don't get above my station. Um, but it's really nice. I
06:12mean, we've just played before and I've just sort of, I've just sort of dried out at top upwards.
06:18This, this sort of portion of me is now dry. Yeah. It was nice to see like people sing the
06:23words to songs that are even sort of new to us, you know, and it was really like, it was
06:30really noticeable today in, in a song called coyote.
06:32And it was really lovely that, that people, uh, have spent the time to, to, to listen to it enough
06:38to even have some grasp on the words and, and, and yeah, seeing people with their arms up in the
06:43air and whatever.
06:44It's just like, I guess that's a, that's a pinch me moment. People knowing these songs that would just sort
06:50of like a thought seven months ago, you know, just like, oh, that could be cool. Now it's here.
06:56And you got, when you guys were on the enemy cover, you talked about how you were really making it
07:01your mantra mission to kind of bring fun back and not take things quite so seriously in that sense.
07:05But in terms of just the need to spread joy, are you feeling that reflected back at you? Because it's
07:10rarer than you'd think in music at the moment.
07:13When we don't read the reviews. Yeah. When we're not reading the reviews, but, um, yeah, we, I think today
07:19I feel like we, we could feel it today.
07:21There's bucket hats going off in the air. There's like kids on each other's shoulders and stuff. And people had
07:26some signs that were really lovely. Um, yeah, we try and keep it, we try and keep it lighthearted.
07:33You know, there's so many instances we've been in bands before where you take it so seriously. You just, you
07:38just, you run yourself into the ground trying to do something.
07:41And I think with this project, we re everyone just sort of really let go of all that before, and
07:46we're trying to do the best we can with what we have and with as little chords as possible.
07:52Are you noticing a rise in more new bands wanting to kind of release the pressure a bit and spread
07:55the love?
07:56There's a load of great bands sort of around us, um, like that are in the scene that we come
08:03from that I do that, you know, amazingly there's, there's, uh, push bike, Bramwell, um, Hollyhead.
08:11There's, there's like this, there's just countless, countless bands that, that have that sort of, uh, yeah, idea that sort
08:19of woven in, you know, um, it's, it's really, it's really lovely to see.
08:23I, I, it's nice to see bands smiling on stage again, you know, it's, it may be, it was a
08:29little fashionable to be smoldering for a while.
08:33I think it's still, some people can still, smolder, I don't even know.
08:38Blue steel.
08:39Yeah.
08:40Um, but, uh, yeah, some people can do that really well.
08:44And there are some bands that I love that can do that.
08:47But most people, especially people who are similar to us, just look like idiots.
08:52So, yeah, it's nice to see people smiling and looking like they're enjoying themselves because, because, you know, that should
08:57be the thing that they want to do, you know, so it show it.
09:02And I ask you only because you guys seem pretty restless and on it all the time.
09:06Have you had thoughts about the next record?
09:07I know it's a selfish question because you just dropped one, but have you thought about what's coming next?
09:11Yeah, I mean, we were driving down, we were driving down to London.
09:17Was it London the other week?
09:18The other day when the album came out?
09:20We were in the van at midnight.
09:22The album came out.
09:24We all stood up, shook each other's hands while the van was moving.
09:27It's like, cool, we've got until we get to the hotel and then we'll start thinking about the next one.
09:32We've got a few things like floating around, but we're excited to crack on with it, really.
09:37We've been, we've been nattering about it in the van lots and there's lots of things floating around.
09:42We'll kick it about for a bit and see when we end up.
09:44Anything you can say about what you want to, where you want to take it?
09:47Currently, we've been really, really loving a band called Women and we've been listening to loads of the Magnetic Fields
09:53and we love the drums.
09:56And so we would hope that the next album is both poppier and weirder.
10:04We're going to try, you know, you never ever know how it's going to turn out until you start doing
10:09it.
10:09But, you know, we want to just continue the road that we have been, you know, the journey that we've
10:19done from the start.
10:20And I think some level of, the way I described it to Paddy the other day was that it felt
10:28like if the mists were appearing, you know, you can't quite see it.
10:33It's not quite tangible yet what the album, second album is going to be, but, but there's the, you know,
10:39there's maybe a faint outline there, which is really exciting to us.
10:42And I think the way you described it before, we're restless.
10:46We, we, we, I think that's a good, that's a good descriptor.
10:50We are, it would, yeah, we really want to get on, just get on it and go.
10:54And finally, you've got some huge shows coming up.
10:57The Albert Hall in Manchester, Kentish Town Forum, big rooms.
11:00I mean, what have you got planned aside from drum risers, which we can't afford yet.
11:04What's on there?
11:07Fireworks, explosions, backing dancers, I've seen circus performers with fire spins round.
11:13We, we, we played a show in Sweden the other day and there was a, the floor lit up.
11:19Oh, wow.
11:20So maybe one of them.
11:21That was really cool.
11:22I, I felt like the strokes that night.
11:24That was so much fun.
11:25Yeah.
11:25We should get one of those.
11:26We should, that, that definitely made us feel, feel kind of, kind of like a baller.
11:32Yeah.
11:33And so, so yeah, we're just going to try and make ourselves seem like cooler with, with lots of add
11:43-ons.
11:43I hope.
11:43That's the, that's the, that's the, that's the, that's the aim anyway.
11:46I don't know whether we can achieve it.
11:47Sweet.
11:48See you there.
11:48Westside Cowboy, thank you so much.
11:49Thank you very much.
