Victorious Festival 2023: St Lundi, aka Archie Langley, drops new single Fall and is to return for a hometown show

At that point he was still performing under his own name – Archie Langley. But this summer he returns as his current musical alter-ego, St Lundi.

Around that period the Hayling Island native was a regular performer in the scene around Portsmouth, but on a whim he decided to leave home and try to make a go of it in London.​

“I didn't plan it at all,” says Archie. “It was a bit of a mad one. I was living with my grandparents and I had a job and car and everything. But then one night I thought, if I don't go, I'll never go, so I said that I was popping out for half an hour or so, and caught a train to London at about 9pm. It was crazy – I wouldn't recommend it, because it was probably quite silly and I didn't have any money!

“I found my way in London and had a couple of years here enjoying myself – I was 21 at the time. A couple of years into that, Tom (Rose) and the label (Good Taste Recordings) found me. At the time I was still performing as Archie, so changing the name was a bit of a clean slate.

“With what I do, we've always wanted to leave it open to eventually form into a band – with that in mind we wanted a name that wasn't just me and that's when St Lundi came about. I've been St Lundi now for three-and-a-half years.”

It’s not been smooth sailing for the indie-pop project – the debut single You’ve Got The Wrong Guy came out on March 12, 2020 right before we went into the first Covid lockdown.

“I had dinner with my manager and a friend that night. My best friend had just moved to London and I was treating him to a show, a Canadian band called Half Moon Run. We were at dinner celebrating the song coming out, and my manager was saying: “I think this (the pandemic) is going to be quite bad, maybe you shouldn't go to the show”. Three days later my manager had Covid!”

Unable to work at his day job in an SEN school, Archie sat at his home in north London and wrote, by himself and with others, long distance.

One of those long distance songs was To Die For with the superstar DJ Kygo.

"That shot things up, it became quite an exciting time, but it was such a strange thing because I was putting these songs out in the world but I was trapped in my bedroom all the time.

“The day the song came out was one of the first days where we were all allowed to go out and socialise in a park again with five or six people – so we did go out and enjoy a few beers in the sun to celebrate it!”

His new single, Fall, is is a message of support to his brother.

"It's taken a couple of years to write that, which is the longest it's ever taken me to write a song, but it was one I wrote with some friends of mine who are in a band called Tors who were down from Exeter. We sat and wrote the chorus in about five minutes – we always loved it, but the verses were never quite there. I always knew what the song was about – it was for my brother. When you have a song about someone and it's special, I guess you're a bit more stubborn and I can be quite stubborn anyway.

“Eventually two years later I fell across this verse – and was like "Wow!" I called up Tors immediately and we finally finished it.”

Thanks to the pandemic, St Lundi didn’t make their live debut until September 2021. But since then they’ve been making up for lost time.

"My first show was in Hamburg at the Reeperbahn Festival, and then I did a London show two days later. Then in the past year I've done about 70-80 shows, but most of them have been out of the country, now I'm coming back to it and have had some space to breathe.”

Now he’s looking forward to Victorious, which will be a hometown show, so his family will be there to cheer him on.

“My mum saw me play once back in 2016 at Al Burrito,” now Back To The Belgrave, on Albert Road, “an open mic thing, but not since then.

“When you move away from home and go to the bright lights and big city it's very easy to get caught up in it. But I've got family down there – and a younger brother who's only seven who's never seen me play, but he knows all of the words!

“I said to my manager that I want to start going back to Pompey a bit more and playing shows down there and building the audience there – it's a special place to me and where I started.

“I put a post on the Hayling Island Facebook page to introduce myself and let people know what I’m doing and the response was incredible, everyone was so kind.”

St Lundi play the acoustic stage at Victorious Festival on the Sunday at 3.30pm. For tickets go to victoriousfestival.co.uk.

They have also announced a headline show at The Wedgewood Rooms on December 15. For tickets go to wedgewood-rooms.co.uk.