Glasvegas: how they thundered to greatness

Glasvegas combine singalong populism and soulful artistry on their self-titled debut album.

By Neil McCormick
The Daily Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
Last Updated: 5:25PM GMT 17 Dec 2008

Conjuring uplifiting rock from brutal realism: Glasvegas


In a student hall in Nottingham, a crowd sing along to the refrain of "Go Square Go", a song about a violent confrontation at the school gates. It's delivered by singer James Allan in a thick Scots accent, while his black-garbed gang of rockers produce a maelstrom of distorted sound.

For all its lairiness, somewhere at the heart of the reverb-heavy drums and overdriven guitars lurks a painfully sensitive observation of bullying and fear. It is a song for our times and just one example of the complex mixture of singalong populism and soulful artistry that make Glasvegas one of the best new groups of 2008.

On their self-titled debut album, Glasvegas conjure uplifting rock from a kind of brutal social realism. Allan sings about knife crime, social workers, depression, jealousy and parental failure in a language that is at once gritty and poetic, while lifting the spirits with old-fashioned melodies and a big, dramatic wall of sound. It is as if Oasis had been imbued with the spirit of the Smiths and produced by Phil Spector.

Backstage, after the performance, I meet Allan. Despite flashes of bravado, he is a thoughtful, self-questioning character. "Do you know what I like?" he says as we discuss Glasvegas's music. "When all the sounds merge together and it gets quite furious. You get it with a lot of classical music. You almost can't pick out every tiny sound because everything is blended, and you have to use your imagination more.

"Sometimes, jangly rock bands can seems flat, like a white sheet of paper. The thing I like about Phil Spector records, you'd almost fall into it, your imagination would float downstream and slip into the milky way, because its got a depth. "Ebb Tide", the Righteous Brothers – when it gets furious it's so heavy metal, and when it gets tranquil you just float away. It's the same if you listen to Tchaikovsky."

Allan actually uses Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" to declaim spoken lyrics to "Stabbed", the grim monologue of a victim about to be attacked. "All we had when we started was two guitars, but I wanted to make it sound orchestral. I always felt classical music would have worked just as well as the backdrop to the words."

Classical music, he says however, was not a significant part of his life: "I might have heard it in a shop." Allan and the other band members grew up on rough Glasgow estates. "I was really bad at school – rubbish at reading, quite slow, restless."

Football was the sole focus of his youth, but, in examining what brought him to this point, he recognises a sensitivity to chords and melodies, recalling the ghostly sounds of Roy Orbison heard through his mother's bedroom wall.

Phil Spector's 1963 Christmas album made such a big impression that Glasvegas have recorded their own Christmas mini-album, A Snowflake Fell (And It Felt Like a Kiss).

When he hears Spector, he says, he can "almost taste the selection box. That's what Christmas meant to me – sweeties and a new football strip."

His own offering is likely to conjure up rather different associations, from an ethereal "Silent Night" recorded with a Transylvanian choir to a brutal ballad of domestic loneliness entitled "F--- You, It's Over".

Despite what you might assume from such prosaic language, there is something poetic in Allan's lyrical directness. There is no hiding place, no artifice, but he conjures up voices and characters with the ear of a playwright.

"You've gotta have a toughness to say there's a purpose to this. I never sat down to write the songs. It came through being a really extreme daydreamer. I was unemployed for years; I could go days without seeing or speaking to anybody. But having that time for your imagination, it can drag you through some blackness and gutter, but also can go through blue skies and angels.

"When certain thoughts come to me, I try to take it, the sound and the colours, without watering it down, without compromising any of it."

The song that brought Glasvegas to the world's attention is "Daddy's Gone", which has the musical form of a girl-group, doo-wop ballad while spilling out a tale of parental abandonment. It's a strange and touching thing to see a crowd of young people, arms aloft, singing the heartbreaking coda: "Forget your dad, he's gone."

"I remember going to a friend's house when I was younger," says Allan, "and I walked in and his mum and dad were sitting on the couch together, and I thought that was so strange. They were just sitting holding hands: it was like aliens or something.

"I'm not saying, 'Oh, I've had it bad' because it was common in the east end of Glasgow. Growing up, I have seen people who would probably be quite regretful about the past. It forces you to think. I would like to get to an age where there was tranquillity and blue skies. I don't want the blackness when I'm 50. I've seen enough of that in my life."