“I don’t get genuinely angry very easily. “All the stuff on the album for the most part is first take – maybe I fixed the drums and bass or whatever, but I just kinda let it be, I was trying not to fuck around with it too much,” he says. Three hundred youthful-looking people have wangled tickets to see Canadian singer-songwriter Mac DeMarco perform a rare intimate gig at a tiny pub called Nambucca. Soon after his birth, the family moved to Edmonton, Alberta, where Mac spent the rest of his adolescence. “If we got nuked I’d probably be fried before I even noticed it, which would suck, but would I know?
It’s more like, ‘Oh jackass, what are you doing?’”For the record’s sound, DeMarco wanted a pared-back feel to match the songs’ introspection. “A lot of people are really put out, sad, disappointed… but I dunno. “Well, yeah – smoking, drinking, partying, that kind of shit,” he says, trailing off into a yawn. For the rest of the year he’s on a massive tour of the US and Europe – including two sold-out nights at south London’s 5,000-capacity Brixton Academy and headlining End of the Road – but tonight he’s performing solo, no backing band, “just Mac”.Mac DeMarco crowdsurfs during his gig at Glastonbury, 2016. He has just bought his first house, which made him feel “kind of weird and old”, after moving from New York to Los Angeles last August (“No real reason why – it just seemed a happening place, so it was like, ‘let’s go give it a shot’”). It doesn’t matter – it’s a pop song.”The album was written months ago, when his father had become very ill: the last song goes: “The thought of him no longer being around / Well sure it would be sad but not really different / And even though we barely know each other / It still hurts watching him fade away.” Although his father’s health has now improved, the two are still not in touch. Mac DeMarco and Father John Misty first headliners of End of the Road 2017. He met Mac rarely. Recently he said in an interview that he had become a father, prompting family members to get in touch to congratulate him; his mother said it almost gave her a heart attack. We’ll find out.” Back at Nambucca, Kiera gets several cheers, and audience members ask about his mum, Agnes, (who has developed something of a cult following online). “What I try to focus on is try and play as well as I can and make sure everybody’s happy.”It has just been announced that later this year DeMarco will be Until then, does he have any pearls of wisdom to impart? “But I don’t know if I’m really a good person to be giving advice.
“Um, no. Musician Mac DeMarco has garnered the image of an impish pop-rock troubadour, but many of the songs on last year's This Old Dog tackle his conflicted relationship with the father he never knew.
“But when they come up on the stage and wanna do it, it’s like, you’re right How does he feel about social media? I learned how to wipe my own ass last week,” he guffaws (the joke is later reprised several times). It’s like, ‘Ahh, I don’t really like writing choruses any more,’ or, ‘Ehh, I don’t really like writing bridges any more.’ I just like to simplify things as much as possible. There are so many things better than feeling nothing at all. “The whole thing with the internet,” he says with a groan, “it’s the wild west. I mean, I was trying to understand it. His style of music has been described as "blue wave" and "slacker rock", or, by DeMarco himself, "jizz jazz".
It just solidified [the fact] that I don’t understand.”A much happier relationship is with his girlfriend, Kiera McNally. “I think that just being in love – being out of love, being in love, being confused by love, wanting love, not wanting love, being scared of love – it doesn’t matter which. It’s 9am in LA, and DeMarco has just been summoned from his bed to contemplate, among other things, his strained relationship with his dad to a stranger on the phone. I don’t know. He politely asks her to stop but she is undeterred, pouting away into her camera; eventually he clears the stage. When I remark that the album has more darkness and meditations on mortality, he yawns and says, “Maybe, I dunno. I’ll probably get some weird phone calls from my family but, hey, maybe those phone calls weren’t gonna come unless I made it” – Mac DeMarcoStill, you don’t play back-to-back shows in London to 10,000 fans (as DeMarco will this month) without some serious songwriting smarts. But I wouldn’t even consider myself a songwriter really, I’m just like a bedroom musician.”“Maybe making the record is the conversation, I have no idea. They met aged 14, got together five years later, and are still together seven years on (“almost eight”, she chirps in the background). When he was 5 years old, his father left home. The result is This Old Dog, easily DeMarco’s most sober and serious collection of songs to date, and a touching attempt to come to terms with a father-son relationship that never got off the ground (DeMarco’s dad was kicked out of the family home by his mum when Mac was just five). The playlist The playlist: the best indie of 2015 – Mac Demarco, This Is the Kit and more. Did exploring these issues on the album change the way he views his father?