If you aren’t yet familiar with Los Pacaminos then we recommend getting familiar. A band that are so infectiously fun as well as being instrumental heaven, this band delight fans with their studio and live music wherever they go.

Los Pacaminos are a Tex-Mex band that were formed by 80’s pop icon Paul Young in 1992. Young formed the band during a break in his music career as a side project and to showcase his love for all things Tex Mex. The band originally consisted of six members, including guitarist Jamie Moses, accordion/keyboard player Matt Irving, songwriter Drew Barfield, bassist Steve Greetham, and drummer Mark Pinder. They played their first gig at a local pub in Richmond in November of 1992 and continued to perform together, growing tighter as friends and musicians with each show.

Playing covers as well as writing their own songs, what was once a side project soon formed into something more permanent and a huge passion of Young’s and the rest of the band.

In 1997, pedal steel player Melvin Duffy was added to the lineup after a suggestion from Jamie, and he quickly became a permanent member of the band.

Los Pacaminos released their first album in 2002, which was a collection of 12 original songs that drew inspiration from their Tex-Mex influences, including the Texas Tornados, The Sir Douglas Quintet, Flaco Jimenez, as well as Ry Cooder, Calexico, Roy Orbison, The Band and Chuck Berry. The album received positive reviews and helped to establish the band’s reputation as a force to be reckoned with in the Tex-Mex music scene.

Sadly, Matt Irving passed due to cancer in 2015. However, the band continues to thrive and explore the music of the Southwest.

Los Pacaminos have now been together for over 30 years and won’t be slowing down anytime soon.

A reputation for being a ‘must-see’ live band, with loyal fans attending various shows on tour, Los Pacaminos will undoubtedly have concert goers dancing and in good spirits for years to come.

The band have released three studio albums and two live albums. Their music has grown from a Tex Mex sound to a more Americana/Tex Mex mix which has broadened their music and fanbase to an impressive scale.

With a huge tour on the way which spreads all the way into next Summer, Los Pacaminos will be playing a two night residency at Half Moon Putney as well as various other dates across the coming months that will likely have a Christmasy theme!

Next year the band embark on a tour that covers shows at the fairly new The Forge in Camden, London on Sunday 3rd March. Tickets here

Their most recent album Seven is full of well crafted tunes with the perfect Tex Mex/Americana blend! Songs such as Healing Hands and Cheap Tequila are fast favourites.

We caught up with Paul Young to discuss Los Pacaminos, their tour, new album and much more!

Paul was great to speak with! Admittedly a late fan to Los Pacaminos myself (living under a rock, I know), I am certainly a new fan now! Paul has so much passion for his band (Los Pacaminos) and their music and what they represent -it was inspiring to listen to. Paul and his family love country and Americana music and some were even at the recent Luke Combs gig. With Los Pacaminos fitting within the Americana/country genre as well as Tex Mex, we hope to see them at many festivals in the future including Black Deer. Let’s get those requests out!!! We hope that Los Pacaminos will soon have a solid home within the Americana fan base here in the UK!

Enjoy!

Hi Paul, how are you? I am going to jump straight in talk about the album and tour and ask if you are ready for the Los Pacaminos tour and promoting the new album?

Yeah! The album took a little bit longer to record because it had to be put on hold because everything was backed up. My Paul Young stuff was needing to be completed. First of all it was the album and then the idea of the book tour came up so I had to put the Pacaminos back again which I wasn’t really pleased about. But now, everything has car crashed into 2023 and I had the Paul Young album out in May, I’m doing the book tour now and then the Pacaminos album came out a matter of six to eight weeks ago I think and so as soon as this Paul Young tour ends, we’ll be out to promote the Pacaminos album!

Barely get time to rest then?

Very little time this year!

The tour looks amazing! It’s stretching over a few months including December so can we expect a Christmas theme around then?

Yes, I don’t know if you have seen our poster?

Yes I have! (See tour poster at bottom of article)

Haha! So we always make the effort to try and do a couple of Christmas songs. We get a little bit tinsled up haha!

Oh nice! Do you ‘Tex Mex’ the Christmas songs up a bit?

Yeah we do! Well in the past we have done an instrumental – a mixture of Frosty The Snowman and Santa Claus is Coming to Town, so that is like an instrumental run! There was a song that we did called Christmas on the Range and we recorded it as a ballad a couple of Christmas’ ago. The old way that we used to do it was is it turns into like a tex mex version of Slade by the end haha!

That’s amazing! One of the places you will be playing at is the Forge Camden! I have never been there..

You and me both! I think it’s a new venue! It’s on the 3rd March!

It looks like a great place. The tour is going all the way into June 2024 so far!

Yeah! What it is is, if there’s a gap that can noticeable, fill it. So they’re filling all the weekends now leading up to when my Paul Young tour starts up again in March. Pacaminos tours are never like a proper tour because it’s difficult doing a 70’s band low budget and come away with money so that’s why we are doing little shows. Having said that, December is rammed. We have a lot of shows November and December time.

The Pacaminos tours must be different from your solo tours, they look like they are a lot of fun! I mean, not to say the solo shows aren’t fun haha but Los Pacaminos just look like they would be a real laugh! Very enjoyable!

It is yeah! I don’t have to be on 100 per cent of the time! Jamie is there, sometimes I will introduce a song and sometimes Jamie will introduce a song, sometimes we will just go straight into it. We’ve got instrumentals to play, so the whole thing is a very different experience for me, quite pleasurable you know? Sometimes I am just playing the guitar and doing a few harmonies, it’s such a nice change for me. I love music, but because I’ve carved out a solo career, there’s certain things that I can’t do like write instrumental songs, no one would like it if I put an instrumental song on a Paul Young album. I am allowed that freedom with Los Pacaminos.

Yeah I love an instrumental in live music, it’s just lovely being able to see the entire band showcase their skills.

I keep hoping, we need to get a foot in the door for people to really get to know us on an international scale. I am really hoping that the music will find its way into the movies as I think it will fit in really well.

I completely agree with you! Do you ever get out to Nashville and do the Americana fest?

We wanted to but once again it’s the cost of getting all seven of us there, it makes it really difficult. We’ve got no record company so no financial help, we would have to find the money ourselves.

I always forget about that part, I think many of us fans do – we always demand an artist to come to the UK but don’t necessarily realise the financial costs behind it.

Yes haha! Flights have gone through the roof! It’s all hidden too, so flight £139 great but then pay for your bag, pay for a particular seat, tax, it ends up being as expensive as what they used to be years ago.

One of the other venues that I have seen on this tour is The Half Moon in Putney which as a band you describe as your spiritual home!

Yeah! I know what it is. We started playing there and we really like the venue. The venue has got a personality of its own. We have always liked being there but now we find that we put the tickets on sale and when we get there it’s exactly the same people that we saw last time. For them, it’s like a family outing.

I love that!

We are a lot more relaxed at the Half Moon and talk more to the audience. We have a joke and things like that. Somebody had obviously come to see us for the first time and he went “play some more music” and someone turned around and said “oh shut up” haha “that’s what we’ve come here for” (as in the banter between artists and audience). When we go there it’s just a fun night! It’s very happy music, up tempo tex mex music. The ballads are quite romantic and beautiful really!

Yes, I have been listening to the album Seven and it’s lovey!

Yeah it’s a nice album. Because we don’t live in Texas, it’s very hard to stay tex mex, that’s why we are more Americana now. I am really glad that we got to get that first song Rosalie on and get straight back to Tex Mex basics.

It’s a great song! I like Together Again too which sounds like a song you would definitely have on the set list? I can imagine that being a closer of a show or half way through.

We do it fairly towards the end of the show but we have to end with Wooly Bully, it’s the tex mex national anthem. We like to end on a high note!

Healing Hands is one of my favourites.

Ah is it? That’s good to know!

Bitter Blue is also really beautiful.

The other one I really like is No Friend of Mine, that sounds like it should be in a movie.

What was the song that took the longest to write or the quickest to write on… or did they all come quite easily?

No they all took around about the same amount of time because all of the songs had been written shortly after lockdown. Over the 30 years, the bands moved a lot. So Drew moved back down to the South Coast, I moved further North and Jamie’s gone to Somerset. We are all over the place at the moment so it’s hard for us to get together. When we did record this album, we kind of demoed the songs until they were almost complete and then we played alongside the demo and if we played it better in the studio, we kept it but if there was anything good in the demo then we would drag it across so we had the best of both worlds. It just takes time because of the situation and the places where people live.

We recorded the songs around Jamie’ house and they sounded fairly complete but then we played in the studio as well so in the end, what we did with Bitter Blue, we got Mark Pinder to replace the computer drums with real drums. The tracks end up being a little bit of this and a little bit of that, they are all done in different ways.

When you play live, you do a lot of instrumentals so I imagine some of the more vocal songs are extended on a live version to play more of an instrumental? More extended solo’s?

Oh yes! Sometimes we stretch the solos. We aren’t tied to a song by any hard drives or anything like that. We refuse to go into that kind of technology until we have no choice. What is great is, we wrote a song called Razor Wire and now our walk on music is our own song and what happens is, the song goes half way through and then when we are ready we turn around and take over and play the rest of the song live. It jumps from being the recorded version to the live version.

That sounds amazing!

Yeah it works really really well!

Do you have any tour traditions or anything specific on your rider? I would love to think you have a tex mex spread and Tequila at every venue but that may be a bit overkill haha!

Haha, there are certain venues that supply us with warm food and if they do, it’s generally a Chili.

Oh really?

Yeah but that’s ok because it doesn’t happen everywhere. I wouldn’t say we eat mexican food every time that we are away but we certainly drink good Tequilas. We won’t go near the cheap stuff so we but it ourselves. We’ve got a merchandise couple and they are a husband and wife team. They actually go to Tequila tasting places and find new ones for us.

Wow! What’s a good Tequila? I am not a big drinker so am clueless on the subject.

Well you should really stay away from the bad stuff because you taste that and you will think it’s horrible. You’ve got to start around £18 to £20 a bottle mark. The good ones, Patrón is the biggest Tequila family known worldwide and then you’ve got Don Julio but the more you spend…I’ve got a bottle downstairs that’s £140. It’s like most things, if you want the best, you’ve got to pay for it! George Clooney…Randy Gerber, his business partner was the son of one of the most successful bar owners in America, he had them all around the country. So he and George Clooney started a Tequila company called Casamigos. He sold it for a fortune! So there’s big money in Tequila.

I will have to try some! Back to the band, you have been together 30 years now, is that 30 years this year?

31 years this year!

That’s impressive and I love the fact your sound hasn’t changed much! It’s quite timeless really and I have been living under a rock but am a new fan now! What are the artists you are listening to in the Tex Mex world?

I am bit out of touch with tex mex at the moment, it’s a bit of a dying genre which is why I am trying to keep it alive. Country players tend to dig into it a lot! Dwight Yoakham, he did a song Carmelita. There are still some country stars that will slip into a bit of Tex Mex.

Yes, and many country singers that I love hail from Texas and like to put a bit of that in their music from time to time. Whether that be Tex Mex or Texan country but artists and writers like Shane McAnally, Miranda Lambert, Kacey Musgraves….

My partner is a big fan of Miranda Lambert. She’s country mad! Her sisters went to see Luke Combs. They videod it and we were watching it last night haha!

Oh that’s cool! Well hopefully I will catch a show and I really hope to see you at some of our Americana festivals next year!