Paul Young brings his tex-mex Los Pacaminos to Worthing
Jamie Moses, one of the vocalists alongside Paul Young, said: “We can’t believe we have been going 26 years. It took us all by surprise. Nobody can quite believe it, but really we just think of the band as a social club.
“We all go off and do other things with other bands, and this was something that we just started doing just for fun, and now it has turned into a kind of therapy. If anybody is feeling down, there is always a Los Pacaminos gig coming up. But also travelling together is a lot of fun. The personalities are so diverse. There are seven of us, and no two of us are similar. We started out as a six-piece but we lost our keyboard player and accordion player about two years ago to prostate cancer and then we lost our manager to prostate cancer a couple of years before that. It was very sad.
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Hide Ad“Paul and Mark, the drummer who used to be the drummer for the Paul Young Band and played on all the hits, were the ones that got the band together. They were just wanting to do something different. It was just a fun thing to do for a few one-off gigs at the start, but it kept going. We have now done four albums, two studio albums and two live albums.
“People say they don’t like Tex-Mex music, and sometimes you have to persuade, but once they have come once, people will follow us around the country or around the world. The genre of the music is almost incidental. It is about the attitude that it is put across in. There is so much fun. We just laugh all the time on stage. There is a lot of music, a lot of good music, but there is also a lot of fun and laughter. It is about the atmosphere of the gigs.
“Lately Paul has been doing a lot of solo stuff, and I am in Paul’s solo band as well. We did a couple of American tours last year and a big UK tour, and we just have to jigsaw it all together with Los Pacaminos. Paul and I are the only ones that don’t get a break. If we do actually have a day off during a Paul Young tour, then a Los Pacaminos gig will always get sandwiched in!
“It is great. They are completely different audiences, and sometimes we look out and it feels a bit elderly, but we soon get them going, and also we are getting the children along now of the people that used to come along to see us 20 years ago. It is always a great atmosphere.”
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Hide AdAs Paul himself says, the emphasis is good music and good times. “We sing, we dance, we love…. We drink tequila. Only the good stuff these days!”
The band’s sound came about because of Paul’s love of the music but also the sheer joy of playing it, he said: “I first heard Ry Cooder’s hybrid version of Tex-Mex, and I started to escape into a world of life down by the border, hot weather, good food… we started back in 92 and it was too much fun to stop. I love the lift you get when playing it. We’re all past wanting to play or listen to music that depresses.”