Remington Leith: “If I can still be playing music and touring with my brothers when I’m f*cking 80 years old, I would love that”

Recently, the members of Palaye Royale took a step back into their yesterdays. The occasion was a sad one; following the death of their mother from cancer, the group – brothers Remington Leith (vocals), Sebastian Danzig (guitars/keyboards) and Emerson Barrett (drums/piano) – were required to clear out their matriarch’s apartment. Working their way through a lifetime of memories, the trio discovered a journal written by Sebastian, 15 years ago, in which he had itemised his ambitions in music. On it were written the words: ‘Play and sell out Wembley Arena.’

On November 9, Palaye Royale will headline this very venue. According to the seating map on a popular ticketing website, only a few seats remain available. When it comes to realising dreams written in ink half a lifetime ago, the band might just go two for two.

“It was so cool to see that because it was written in, like, 2009,” Remington says. “It’s taken 15 years to get here, but, fuck. I’ve never even been to Wembley Arena. I’ve seen a thousand shows on YouTube but I’ve never actually got to be in the venue. So my first time setting foot in there will be headlining.

“Let me tell you: there’s nothing better than that feeling.”

As matters relate to being an Anglo-centric rock’n’roll band, Palaye Royale make The Killers look like Lynyrd Skynyrd. It’s not for nothing that the group’s guitarist and keyboardist nominated Wembley as the place to be, rather than other temples of rock such as New York’s Madison Square Garden or the ‘Fabulous’ Forum in Los Angeles.

Lounging in his digs in West Hollywood, the exotically named Remington Leith is sporting a Sex Pistols God Save The Queen top. At one point, this uncommonly unguarded interviewee reveals that he almost wore his Lemmy shirt. He first took a tumble for a band, he says, while watching a Rolling Stones concert DVD with his mother. His second love was Ziggy Stardust-era David Bowie. In August, Palaye Royale released the slinky and sexual Death Or Glory, an album (the Las Vegas trio’s fifth) marinated in the aesthetic of the Special Relationship that exists between rock on the east and west coasts of the Atlantic. It might be helpful to think of its authors as honorary Englishmen with North American accents.

“In a way, I’ve tried to structure my life so that I can come to London, even if it’s only for a day,” Remington says. “I think our first show [in the city] was 2018” – 2017 actually, but close enough – “which was at the Camden Assembly, which I think we sold out by the skin of our teeth. And from that moment, it felt like we were the biggest band in the whole world. We went over to London and sold out a show. Holy shit!”

Holy shit, indeed, because with this, Palaye Royale were off. In the intervening years, the group have scaled the property ladder of British venues with remarkable speed. In London, they’ve gone from a tiny hotspot in Camden, to the Electric in Brixton, the Roundhouse back in Camden, the Apollo over in Hammersmith, all the way to Wembley, the grand old lady of British arenas. Much more of this, and the even larger place next door might be getting a call – that is if Oasis haven’t quietly block-booked Wembley Stadium on every night from April to September of next year.

“I think rock’n’roll is back,” Remington says. “When we started this band about a decade ago, it was a time when not that many people were interested in hearing our kind of music. I don’t know what has changed in the world in the past few years, but guitars are coming back, bands are coming back, and rock’n’roll is alive and well. And I’m happy to be a part of it.”

You gotta be careful with that rock’n’roll high life, though. You gotta take care with the musical mythology of which Palaye Royale are so clearly beloved. Because if you’re not, it’ll kill you, or at least it’ll try. Or maybe it’ll drive you mad. Or else it’ll toss you out, all chewed up by the side of the road, so you can spend the rest of your days wondering how on earth a life in music was stolen away in almost an instant, and likely forever.

On Dark Side Of The Silver Spoon, one of the best tracks on Death Or Glory, Palaye Royale sing, ‘Same me, same you, until the drugs start doing you,’ a line that applies to fast-living music-makers as much as it does to the well-heeled parents of jet-setting teenagers (ostensibly, the subject matter of the song). Certainly, the knowledge that silver spoons can be used to prepare narcotics for both of these demographics, it seems, is not lost on Remington.

“So, yeah, there’s a couple of references in there about drugs,” he says. “It’s kind of money and drugs, so it’s a dual analogy.”

Have you ever taken heroin?

“No.”

But his life did get out of hand. Around the time of 2022’s Fever Dream album and its subsequent tour, Remington was drinking like a barfly while refreshing his nasal cavities with white powder. He reckons he was running from something, something bad, although for the life of him he hasn’t yet figured out what that might be. He was sprinting hard, though, and fast, right into the arms of some bad craziness.

“I got to the point where I overdosed maybe four or five times within about six months,” he says. “I had some doctors come to the house. It definitely got to that point where I was unconscious, where my heart was beating like crazy. There was a couple of points where my mom had to come and take care of me for a few days, which is embarrassing…

“Also, I was so heavily on the road for my entire adult life – I think it started when I was 20 or 21, and I didn’t stop until literally the pandemic,” he continues. “Maybe I’d have a month or a month-and-a-half off every now and again. But aside from that, I was opening [for other groups], I was supporting, I was playing any fucking bar that I could in North America. And when you’re in a band, you drink every fucking night until you black out. Then you wake up the next morning and you do it again.”

Matters came to a boil during a brace of shows in Mexico City in 2022. Perhaps glimpsing a future in which all that he had worked for had slipped away, the singer “had a little talk with myself in the mirror where I was like, ‘Okay, do you want to be the guy at the bar when you’re 50 years old who’s going: “I was this close to having it all?”’ And so, after that talk, I laid off.”

Still, these were bewildering days. Asked about the issuance of a tweet around this time, later deleted, in which Remington pondered the idea of giving up on music altogether, and he issues the kind of heavy sigh that can be heard all the way across the Atlantic. He umms and ahhs a bit, tripping over his words like a newborn foal on wet grass. But this is a remarkably candid interviewee. When asked for the full story, out it comes.

“This girl was saying that I met up with her at a hotel, years ago, and, you know, er, that I hooked up with her when she was underage,” he says. “And this was completely false. I would never do that. Luckily I could disprove it, thank god. She had made all these fake messages [purporting to be] between us, but when I looked at the top where there’s ‘my’ @ handle, she spelled my name wrong. So luckily I caught her on that. And then she was saying that I was at this place on this date and, luckily, I was able to prove that, no, we were halfway across the world at that point. And she said that we [rented] a hotel room and I was like, ‘At that point I couldn’t afford a hotel room.’ So that was also false.”

But…

“But people just jumped on the bandwagon,” he says. “They wanted to believe the lie. It was so fucking mean. People were just doing whatever they could to knock me down and destroy a career that we’ve spent our entire life trying to build. I’ve been working at this career ever since I’ve been four years old playing the piano.”

Remington Leith isn’t taking part in a war. He isn’t some orange-skinned creep trying to overthrow American democracy. All he’s trying to do is entertain. Again, when he received “20 or 30” posts on social media from people claiming to be “glad your mother died for raising you”, the words were aimed at a song and dance man. One wonders at the point of so much unbidden venom.

Realising there isn’t one, Remington stepped back from an abyss echoing with the screams of hateful strangers in order to concentrate on the job at hand. So, please, let him entertain you.

As with the death of any parent, at least the memories remain – including one or two that are pertinent to our story. The first involves a more than month-long trip to London when Remington, Sebastian and Emerson were all kids, a sojourn involving walks across the zebra crossing on Abbey Road on which The Beatles once placed their feet. These were the days when the three siblings first realised that England is where their heart lies. As well as this, there was also the time when, as a 10-year-old boy, the frontman watched a concert DVD by an English rock band whose deathless existence has allowed Palaye Royale to plot nothing less than their own course into a perfect future.

“If we can model our career over anyone it would be the Rolling Stones,” Remington says. “If I can still be playing music and touring with my brothers when I’m fucking 80 years old, I would love that. I can’t really imagine doing this without them, so every day we wake up and get to play music together is a great fucking day. So that’s my goal.

“If I can die on that stage of old age, I think that’s the greatest thing that can ever happen.”

Death Or Glory is out now via Sumerian. Palaye Royale headline London’s OVO Arena Wembley on November 9. This article originally appeared in the autumn 2024 issue of the magazine.

Read this next:

• YUNGBLUD: “The world is ready for rock music and the world is ready for fucking rock stars”
• Black Veil Brides: “We’re really enjoying the fact that we’ve shared our adult lives together. And we continue to do it”
• Måneskin: “We worked our asses off to get here, but we also know this isn’t something that happens every day”