Showing posts with label Glasvegas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Glasvegas. Show all posts
Sunday, May 20, 2018
Tuesday, July 09, 2013
Glasvegas release 'If' EP and announce UK tour
9 Jul 2013 // by: Music-News.com Newsdesk
http://www.music-news.com
'If', the new single from Glasvegas is out now.
Taken from their forthcoming album 'Later.When The TV Turns To Static' 'If' melds trademark Glasvegas' soaring choruses to a martial drum and Phil Spector inspired opening.
'If 'is accompanied on the EP by three exclusive recordings from the band. A cover of PJ Harvey's 'The Words That Maketh Murder', 'Press
'A lot of thought went into this EP' says James 'from the decision about the cover track right down to the wee <> symbols in the 'Press
The reason for choosing 'The Words That Maketh Murder' was that some of the covers we have done in the past have been older songs, so we wanted to go for something newer. The PJ Harvey album 'Let England Shake' is a record we had been listening to and it seemed an obvious choice to pick a song from this record.
Press
The new video features the legendary William Shatner and is Glasvegas' take on the Old Grey Whistle Test.
The new album 'Later.When The TV Turns To Static' will be released on September 2nd 2013 on Go Wow Records via BMG Chrysalis and is available to pre-order now from the band's website http://glasvegas.net/ and all good retailers including I Tunes, Amazon and Rough Trade.
To support the album release Glasvegas have today announced a UK tour. Dates are as follows:
Sunday 29th September - Cockpit, Leeds
Monday 30th September - Fleece & Firkin, Bristol
Wednesday 2nd October - Scala, London
Friday 4th October - Slade Rooms, Wolverhampton
Saturday 5th October - Plug, Sheffield
Sunday 6th October - Rock City, Nottingham
Monday 7th October - Academy 3, Manchester
Wednesday 9th October - Whelans, Dublin
Thursday 10th October - Limelight, Belfast
Sunday 22nd December - The Old Fruitmarket, Glasgow
Tickets go on sale via Ticket Master at 9am on Thursday 11th July
Thursday, August 02, 2012
Doubters and Haters
What drives Barack Obama’s “doubters and haters”?
So asks Obama biographer David Maraniss in a recent op-ed article for the Washington Post. By doubters and haters he means the people who think Obama wasn’t born in the U.S., that he’s a secret Muslim, or that he’s a closet socialist.He has an answer: “Some of it can be attributed to the give-and-take of today’s harsh ideological divide. Some of it can be explained by the way misinformation spreads virally to millions of like-minded people, reinforcing preconceptions. And some of it, I believe, arises out of fears of demographic changes in this country, and out of racism.”
True enough! Some people are no doubt driven by such motivations and anxieties; “some” is a gloriously accommodating word.
But that hardly settles things. For an essay titled “What Drives the Obama Doubters and Haters,” Maraniss offers no explanation until the last paragraph (the quote above). And even then he offers no evidence, just assertions.
I think Maraniss is a great reporter, and I don’t believe for a moment he is in on a cover-up of Obama’s “real” place of birth or his secret Muslim faith. (Nor do I think either allegation is true.)
As to Obama’s closet socialism, I’ve never found it unreasonable (never mind racist or paranoid) to think Obama’s more comfortable with European-style social democracy (a.k.a. socialism).
Still, let me add two culprits to Maraniss’s list: The first is Barack Obama. The second is the journalistic establishment that worked so hard to get him elected.
As Maraniss demonstrates quite effectively in his book, Barack Obama: The Story, Obama’s identity has long been a cultivated political project. Much of the poetic license — to use a kind phrase — Obama deploys to tell his own story is plausible only to those eager to take him at his word.
Maraniss couldn’t authenticate Obama’s tales of racial hardship as a young man. His grandfather being tortured by the British, the bigotry of his high-school basketball coach? Untrue.
Moreover, Obama’s explanations about the aspects of his past that have managed to become controversies have always seemed insufficient to people not disposed to root for him. Bill Ayers — a former domestic terrorist — was “just a guy living in my neighborhood.” Obama’s word that he wasn’t a member of the radical New Party was enough for the press corps to stop digging for evidence that he was (as reported by my National Review Online colleague Stanley Kurtz). Jeremiah Wright? Only right-wing crazies care about him.
Even Obama’s more recent embellishments about, for instance, being outspent and outgunned in his previous political races strike many people as the sorts of fibs that would create journalistic frenzies if uttered by a Republican.
And then there’s the huge divergence between the president Obama said he would be and the president he’s actually been. In 2008, Obama insisted that he was a unifier, a pragmatist, and a non-ideologue. You don’t have to be a birther or a secret-Muslim conspiracy theorist to feel like that was all a big con job. That’s politics and not deceit (a subtle distinction!), but dismay at how Obama has governed doesn’t amount to racial panic either. And blame for the widespread feeling that we were sold a bill of goods by a cheering press does, in fact, belong to the press.
Yes, Obama also signaled to his base that he intended to be a “transformative” president, a progressive Ronald Reagan. But that message was intended only for his base. Whenever conservatives picked up on those notes — when he said he wanted to “spread the wealth around,” etc. — the immediate response from the Sunday-talk-show crowd was that conservatives were being paranoid for misreading Obama, the pragmatist.
It’s fine to beat up on conspiracy theorists, but journalistic muckety-mucks who are mystified by their ever-shrinking credibility — and profitability — might wonder what they’ve done to fuel a climate of distrust. There’s a reason why ABC’s Jake Tapper is one of the few nonconservative reporters respected on the right: He’s stayed as skeptical of Obama as he was of George W. Bush.
Meanwhile, it’s fascinating how much attention the conspiracy theorists get. It’s almost as if some journalists want to use them as bogeymen to discredit all criticism of Obama. That’s some journalists, not all.
— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large ofNational Review Online, a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and the author of The Tyranny of Clichés. You can write to him by e-mail atJonahsColumn@aol.com, or via Twitter@JonahNRO. © 2012 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
Monday, April 04, 2011
Glasvegas: 'Euphoric Heartbreak', CD review
Glasvegas's Euphoric Heartbreak has passion and purpose.
By Neil McCormick
The Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/
5:04PM BST 01 Apr 2011
Rating: * * * *
Columbia, £12.99
Working-class rock heroes: Scottish four piece Glasvegas
Rock may be in creative and commercial decline but there are still some things it does better than any other kind of music: big, anthemic, emotional commitment and release. Scottish four piece Glasvegas do these simple things better than most.
Built around the vulnerable, angst-filled crooning of frontman and songwriter James Allan, Glasvegas play straightforward, melodic songs constructed around familiar chord changes amped up so that effects-laden guitar distortion crashes out of the speakers with all the sonic grandeur of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound, a sparkling bed of harmonic spikes and melodic accidents.
On their second album, Glasvegas evoke the ambient intensity of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music while anchoring it in songs that demand actual commitment from the listener. I worry about where they can go next with such a restrictive musical template, but here they have managed subtle refinement without sacrificing the essence of their primitive appeal.
There is a sense of flow to this set, building from intimate beginning to a genuinely euphoric climax before tailing off with wistful beauty. You have really to listen to penetrate Allan’s thick Scots accent, but as the sound opens up you discover nuances amid the noise.
Allan’s swooping melodies hint at a Roy Orbison style flair for reshaping classic rock into heartbreaking epics, and lyrics enacting the political as highly personal dramas.
It’s like a marriage of the Clash, the Smiths, the Pixies and the Jesus And Mary Chain, delivered with a passion and purpose that makes much-hyped rock saviours the Vaccines sound as vacuous as they really are.
At a time when questions are being asked about how posh rock music has become, Glasvegas are staunchly working-class heroes. Allan grew up in a single-parent family on an estate in Glasgow, experiencing years of unemployment and poverty before forming this band with his cousins. He is a tortured, sensitive soul, who clearly struggles with a lot of the prejudices of his environment.
The heart of their superb 2008 debut was 'Daddy’s Gone', a song of abandonment. Here too he sings with aching bewilderment about such themes as desire and loss, but he also embraces the kind of difficult topics that might force some sections of his audience to confront their assumptions.
'I Feel Wrong and Stronger Than Dirt' are subtitled 'Homosexuality part 1 and 2'. As the titles suggest, there is nothing arch or clever about Allan’s writing, but in its bold stating of sincere feeling lies its true power. Glasvegas are a band their audience can believe in, and that is exactly what rock needs right now.
Related:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturecritics/neilmccormick/3814349/Glasvegas-how-they-thundered-to-greatness.html
Fear and loathing in Glasvegas
By BRIAN BOYD
The Irish Times
http://www.irishtimes.com/
Monday, March 28, 2011
Life in a goldfish bowl: Paul Donoghue, Rab Allan, Jonna Löfgren and James Allan of Glasvegas
After the immediate success of his debut album, footballer-turned-rock-star James Allan found himself in a Chicago hotel singing ‘Close To You’ to his pet goldfish. This time around there’s less pressure . . .
AS HE WAS carried out of the backstage area of a rock festival on a stretcher due to a drug overdose, Glasvegas singer James Allan told people staring at him, “It’s not how it looks.” Unfortunately it was exactly how it looked.
Glasvegas were one of the big draws at the 2009 Coachella festival (the US equivalent of Glastonbury) and at the time, the official reason given for Allan not being able to perform was the old reliable “exhaustion and dehydration”.
In rock terms you can break the code of the euphemisms easily enough. “Fruit and flowers” (as on a backstage rider) is cocaine and groupies while “exhaustion and dehydration” can be anything from a psychotic breakdown to a Class A overload.
Allan’s crash and burn came six months after the release of the band’s self-titled album – a magnificent work that artfully combined the guitar noise of Jesus and Mary Chain with the orchestral production of Phil Spector. Easily the best album of 2009, Allan, now 31, says it was too much success too quickly.
“My head just wasn’t in the right place. I was exaggerating all the bad things about success,” he says. “I had been a professional footballer all my life [he played for Cowdenbeath and other Scottish league teams] and while most people who want to be in a rock band practise for a few years and learn how to write songs, all the songs on the first album were my very first attempts.
“One moment I was on the dole, the next I was on the front cover of music magazines. In fact, I remember signing on one day and producing a newspaper with mention of my name in it to the woman behind the counter. She hadn’t believed me when I told her I was in a rock band.”
What distinguished the first Glasvegas album was how, despite lyrically coming across as particularly bleak, it was so sonically extravagant. Allan wrote about racial murder ( 'Flowers and Football Tops '), absentee fathers ( 'Daddy’s Gone' ) and heroic social workers ( 'Geraldine' ).
“All music is influenced by your environment,” he says. “I wrote those songs while on the dole in Glasgow and I honestly never knew they would end up on the record – or even that there would be a record. The press said they were ‘theme’ songs but it was what I saw happening around me. I was never into the usual sort of ‘escapist’ lyrics – I prefer real events. 'Flowers and Football Tops' is about a true story – a teenager in Glasgow was stabbed to death then drenched in petrol and set alight near where I lived. I just couldn’t shake that story off.”
He found himself feted by the indie gods and traipsing from one award ceremony to the next – and it didn’t sit well with him. A desperately shy and ferociously intelligent character, Allan found “the road” hard going and on a Kings Of Leon tour in the US he became strangely attached to two goldfish.
“My sister gave them to me as a birthday present and I think I was going a bit mad at the time with the constant touring. I remember taking the goldfish to the zoo in Chicago with me and there’s some video footage of me somewhere on the 33rd floor of a hotel singing The Carpenters’ 'Close To You' to them. Yeah, that was strange alright.”
He went missing for a week in September 2009. He was supposed to show up at the Mercury Music Prize Awards (Glasvegas had been nominated) but neither bandmates, management nor label could get in touch with him.
“I wasn’t being disrespectful to the Mercury, I would have loved to have been there – I used to love sports day at school,” he says. “It’s just I was supposed to fly down to London to meet up with the rest of the band but at the airport I just decided to go and visit a friend in New York instead. The problem was I had no mobile phone – so no one could get in touch with me.
“The worst part of that, though, was my father going down to his local shop in Glasgow. The headline on one of the newspapers was ‘Glasvegas singer is missing for past five days’ and they had this on the billboard thing outside the shop. He was really upset. But I got in touch with everyone and now I do have my own mobile phone.”
TO RECORD THE follow-up album, Allan decided to write it well away from Glasgow.
“I wanted somewhere completely different and when we were touring around the US I remembered getting off the bus in Santa Monica one time and having the feeling it would be a great place to write an album. I wanted to see what would happen if you took a person out of his natural environment – and how that would effect the music. So I hassled my manager for ages and eventually we got this big beach house and moved in for a few months. I remember it being horrendously expensive so feeling under pressure to come up with the songs quickly.”
Endless strolls at night on Santa Monica beach helped him get over the overdose, and over the goldfish. “I had gone from being a nobody on the dole to a somebody and this was the first time I had to slowly and surely put myself back together,” he says.
“As a rock star you can think of yourself as important but when we went into Los Angeles you’d find yourself sitting beside Dustin Hoffman in a restaurant. And then you think of all the darkness of the rock ’n’ roll persona and how certain people are attracted to and fascinated by that. I remember walking along that beach – and it was a place of such natural beauty – and asking myself why I wanted to be in a band in the first place and trying to get back to the start again somehow. And it’s a funny thing but places of great natural beauty can make you very sad – there had been heartbreak in my life and that’s what came out on the album.”
Entitled Euphoric /// Heartbreak \\\ , Allen explains the slashes are all important as they represent “the ascent, the crest of a wave and then the crash”. Eschewing the bruised social commentary of its predecessor it’s just as musically lush but a lot more introspective lyrically.
“There was a lot of uncertainty because the canvas was so blank,” he says. “But then I starting digging very deep – maybe in an unhealthy way – and then I got myself into this position . . . it’s hard to explain but it’s like as if everything around you goes silent, the sort of feeling I used to get when I was dribbling around players as a footballer, and the songs just came.
“ I really felt a lot less pressure with this one because now we’re sort of an established band – with the first one we just had no idea what was going to happen.”
Regret and contrition bleed out of almost every track. “They’re very personal, they’re very honest, but I felt that was the only way,” says Allan. “You’ve probably gathered by now that I’m a bit impressionable and the songs here are from the last two to three years when I was at my most impressionable. I did a lot and I learnt a lot. And I think the title of the album says it all.”
Euphoric /// Heartbreak \\\ is out now
Glasvegas get euphoric over second album
James Allan and his bandmates return after a long lay-off.
By Alan Morrison
The Herald (Scotland)
http://www.heraldscotland.com/
29 Mar 2011
With Glasvegas it's always about the clash of extremes. It starts with the band's name, as the grit of Scotland's west coast slaps up against the glitz of the American Dream. Then it becomes a statement of intent within the music itself, as distorted guitars and a thumping beat envelop doo-wop melodies and Phil Spector soundscapes.
This was the lifeblood of Glasvegas's self-titled debut album, and it's even more prominent on the follow-up. EUPHORIC///HEARTBREAK\\\ goes one step further than its predecessor, forcing those extremes, those contradictions, into its very title. Again, it's there in the music, as heavy textures of guitar, keyboards and adrenaline-rush drumming contrast sharply with the raw emotions of fragile lyrics.
"For good or bad, I try to avoid mediocrity and things being in the middle," admits singer and songwriter James Allan. "But that can sometimes get us into trouble ..."
This approach has split audiences into those who are set alight by the fire in the belly of songs like 'Daddy's Gone', 'Geraldine' and 'Go Square Go', and those who think Allan, hidden behind his rock-star Ray-Bans, is a bit arrogant and pretentious. It has also seen Glasvegas's debut album go platinum and pick up a much-deserved Mercury Prize nomination while the band dipped a steel-capped toe in the stadium lifestyle via support slots with U2 and Kings Of Leon.
It's a truth, not a cliche, to say that such success carries an emotional toll. Rather than join his band mates at the Mercury Prize ceremony in September 2009, Allan went awol in New York. A few days later, however, they all met up in Boston for the beginning of the Kings Of Leon tour, and although the band claim that reports of a later incident in Chicago were much exaggerated and merely the end product of Allan larking about on his birthday (the music gossip pages made much of him wearing only a bathrobe and singing Carpenters songs to his goldfish), exhaustion was clearly setting in. So much so that drummer Caroline McKay called it a day in March 2010.
Now, after a year away from the media glare, most of it spent writing and recording in a three-storey beach house in Santa Monica, Glasvegas are back with a new album, a new drummer and an escalating series of live dates. They've been easing latest recruit Jonna Lofgren in with low-key gigs (including a Scottish tour in early January that stretched from Orkney to Hawick), testing out new material along the way. But it's the album (released on April 4 with U2 and PJ Harvey producer Flood behind the desk) that's going to be the real focus of attention.
Musically, it's more ambitious, more layered, than the debut disc. Words-wise, it's a world apart from what typically passes for rock lyrics today. 'The World Is Yours', 'Shine Like Stars' and 'Euphoria Take My Hand' thrive on punch-the-air choruses set to ecstatic surges of energy; 'Lots Sometimes', with its vocal repetitions and acceleration of pace, is a set-list classic-in-waiting.
But it's on other tracks, where Allan strips his emotions bare then goes deep inside himself to make dark and personal discoveries, that EUPHORIC///HEARTBREAK\\\ distinguishes itself. More often than not, the singer then filters those feelings through different voices, reaching for understanding or forgiveness and finding empathy by crafting characters and poetic short stories in song. These might be the perspectives of gay characters (on 'Stronger Than Dirt' and 'I Feel Wrong') or a prison inmate (closing track 'Change'); but they're the means for Allan to comfortably express and examine his own feelings.
"If you're too detached from the song, the bottom line is going to be hard to find," he explains. "But if you're not arm's length away from it, I think it becomes over-emotional. The direction, the focus, the execution of words on any poetic level - you're never going to deliver them the best way. I was right in the moment writing some of the songs on this album but, in a lot of ways, I sort of wasn't there. I was arm's length away from it, so that I could actually see it and execute it in the right way.
"It was the same with the first album. I wasn't sitting writing 'Daddy's Gone' crying into a sheet of paper. I actually had quite little emotion in me when I was writing that song. But I had a daydream, though; it was a total daydream. There's a difference between losing yourself in that little wormhole-imagination thing and being totally emotional when you're writing. There's a total hardcore focus, but it's not a total over-emotional focus."
The crossover point - and arguably the emotional high point of the album - is 'Dream Dream Dreaming', in which Allan puts words into his own father's mouth concerning the suicide of the singer's uncle. Initially the song came about as a response to 'Daddy's Gone', probably Glasvegas's best known track, which articulated, in uncompromising terms, a boy's bitter frustration with the father who had abandoned the family home.
" 'Daddy's Gone' was only one side of the coin with my father," Allan says now. "I felt a bit guilty about that song because who's to say what's round the corner for all of us, you know? I'd go on TV shows, and people would ask about it and say things about my father, and although it was only a snapshot in three minutes or whatever, it sort of ran away with itself. And I felt bad about that.
"But there were times when I'd be walking down the street, and a guy would come up to me and say how the song is about his life, how it relates to him so well, how it recognised the pain in him. Who am I to argue with those things? Who am I to say if it's right or wrong to write that song? A lot of other people have connected with it, so I'm still a fortunate person for that."
Through his love for American pop songs from the past, Allan made the mental leap from what he imagined to be his father's thoughts on the loss of his brother, to the romantic, almost tragic yearning that he hears in the likes of 'Mr Sandman' and 'All I Have To Do Is Dream'.
"I was fascinated by a human longing for something lost and something gained, something wanted and something unwanted. I was also fascinated by thinking about what a dream was. Sometimes in life, the only way to gain any kind of relief over something is through a dream. If that's all you've got, then you'll take it; you'll take anything because the longing can be that painful. Every time I go to see my father, he'll talk about his brother, every single time. He just misses him ... I've always got a picture of my uncle when we're playing that song. My dad's not actually heard it yet, but he'll hear it soon."
Allan's mother also has her place on the album, a very real physical presence on the closing track as she voices the fictional mother telling her son, about to be released from prison, to "be not led into temptation / And dare to resist not re-offending again".
"It was funny," Allan remembers. "When my mum came into the studio, she was telling Flood how to produce and telling me to swap the words around. She was like Diana Ross - bang, out the door, one take. It was the last song, and we were trying to get the rest of the songs to match each other. It was really sweet because I knew she was feeling under pressure about it. She never mentioned it, though, because she didn't want any extra pressure to go on me. Maybe I'm the guy with experience of a recording studio compared to the experience she's had, but, even in that moment, she's thinking to herself, 'I'm the mother, and I need to alleviate any pressure I can. I'll take the strain.'"
So, was there a blurring between the fiction of the lyric and the fact of the situation? "Even in the recording studio, man, she was playing the role of my mother and I was still the child," Allan agrees. "It's a memory that I'll always cherish. And she did say, 'Just think, boys: if this is the last song that you ever do, then mine is the last voice on the record ...'"
EUPHORIC///HEARTBREAK\\\ is released on April 4. Glasvegas play Aberdeen Music Hall on April 23; HMV Picture House, Edinburgh on April 24; and O2 Academy, Glasgow on April 25.
By Neil McCormick
The Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/
5:04PM BST 01 Apr 2011
Rating: * * * *
Columbia, £12.99
Rock may be in creative and commercial decline but there are still some things it does better than any other kind of music: big, anthemic, emotional commitment and release. Scottish four piece Glasvegas do these simple things better than most.
Built around the vulnerable, angst-filled crooning of frontman and songwriter James Allan, Glasvegas play straightforward, melodic songs constructed around familiar chord changes amped up so that effects-laden guitar distortion crashes out of the speakers with all the sonic grandeur of Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound, a sparkling bed of harmonic spikes and melodic accidents.
On their second album, Glasvegas evoke the ambient intensity of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music while anchoring it in songs that demand actual commitment from the listener. I worry about where they can go next with such a restrictive musical template, but here they have managed subtle refinement without sacrificing the essence of their primitive appeal.
There is a sense of flow to this set, building from intimate beginning to a genuinely euphoric climax before tailing off with wistful beauty. You have really to listen to penetrate Allan’s thick Scots accent, but as the sound opens up you discover nuances amid the noise.
Allan’s swooping melodies hint at a Roy Orbison style flair for reshaping classic rock into heartbreaking epics, and lyrics enacting the political as highly personal dramas.
It’s like a marriage of the Clash, the Smiths, the Pixies and the Jesus And Mary Chain, delivered with a passion and purpose that makes much-hyped rock saviours the Vaccines sound as vacuous as they really are.
At a time when questions are being asked about how posh rock music has become, Glasvegas are staunchly working-class heroes. Allan grew up in a single-parent family on an estate in Glasgow, experiencing years of unemployment and poverty before forming this band with his cousins. He is a tortured, sensitive soul, who clearly struggles with a lot of the prejudices of his environment.
The heart of their superb 2008 debut was 'Daddy’s Gone', a song of abandonment. Here too he sings with aching bewilderment about such themes as desire and loss, but he also embraces the kind of difficult topics that might force some sections of his audience to confront their assumptions.
'I Feel Wrong and Stronger Than Dirt' are subtitled 'Homosexuality part 1 and 2'. As the titles suggest, there is nothing arch or clever about Allan’s writing, but in its bold stating of sincere feeling lies its true power. Glasvegas are a band their audience can believe in, and that is exactly what rock needs right now.
Related:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturecritics/neilmccormick/3814349/Glasvegas-how-they-thundered-to-greatness.html
Fear and loathing in Glasvegas
By BRIAN BOYD
The Irish Times
http://www.irishtimes.com/
Monday, March 28, 2011
After the immediate success of his debut album, footballer-turned-rock-star James Allan found himself in a Chicago hotel singing ‘Close To You’ to his pet goldfish. This time around there’s less pressure . . .
AS HE WAS carried out of the backstage area of a rock festival on a stretcher due to a drug overdose, Glasvegas singer James Allan told people staring at him, “It’s not how it looks.” Unfortunately it was exactly how it looked.
Glasvegas were one of the big draws at the 2009 Coachella festival (the US equivalent of Glastonbury) and at the time, the official reason given for Allan not being able to perform was the old reliable “exhaustion and dehydration”.
In rock terms you can break the code of the euphemisms easily enough. “Fruit and flowers” (as on a backstage rider) is cocaine and groupies while “exhaustion and dehydration” can be anything from a psychotic breakdown to a Class A overload.
Allan’s crash and burn came six months after the release of the band’s self-titled album – a magnificent work that artfully combined the guitar noise of Jesus and Mary Chain with the orchestral production of Phil Spector. Easily the best album of 2009, Allan, now 31, says it was too much success too quickly.
“My head just wasn’t in the right place. I was exaggerating all the bad things about success,” he says. “I had been a professional footballer all my life [he played for Cowdenbeath and other Scottish league teams] and while most people who want to be in a rock band practise for a few years and learn how to write songs, all the songs on the first album were my very first attempts.
“One moment I was on the dole, the next I was on the front cover of music magazines. In fact, I remember signing on one day and producing a newspaper with mention of my name in it to the woman behind the counter. She hadn’t believed me when I told her I was in a rock band.”
What distinguished the first Glasvegas album was how, despite lyrically coming across as particularly bleak, it was so sonically extravagant. Allan wrote about racial murder ( 'Flowers and Football Tops '), absentee fathers ( 'Daddy’s Gone' ) and heroic social workers ( 'Geraldine' ).
“All music is influenced by your environment,” he says. “I wrote those songs while on the dole in Glasgow and I honestly never knew they would end up on the record – or even that there would be a record. The press said they were ‘theme’ songs but it was what I saw happening around me. I was never into the usual sort of ‘escapist’ lyrics – I prefer real events. 'Flowers and Football Tops' is about a true story – a teenager in Glasgow was stabbed to death then drenched in petrol and set alight near where I lived. I just couldn’t shake that story off.”
He found himself feted by the indie gods and traipsing from one award ceremony to the next – and it didn’t sit well with him. A desperately shy and ferociously intelligent character, Allan found “the road” hard going and on a Kings Of Leon tour in the US he became strangely attached to two goldfish.
“My sister gave them to me as a birthday present and I think I was going a bit mad at the time with the constant touring. I remember taking the goldfish to the zoo in Chicago with me and there’s some video footage of me somewhere on the 33rd floor of a hotel singing The Carpenters’ 'Close To You' to them. Yeah, that was strange alright.”
He went missing for a week in September 2009. He was supposed to show up at the Mercury Music Prize Awards (Glasvegas had been nominated) but neither bandmates, management nor label could get in touch with him.
“I wasn’t being disrespectful to the Mercury, I would have loved to have been there – I used to love sports day at school,” he says. “It’s just I was supposed to fly down to London to meet up with the rest of the band but at the airport I just decided to go and visit a friend in New York instead. The problem was I had no mobile phone – so no one could get in touch with me.
“The worst part of that, though, was my father going down to his local shop in Glasgow. The headline on one of the newspapers was ‘Glasvegas singer is missing for past five days’ and they had this on the billboard thing outside the shop. He was really upset. But I got in touch with everyone and now I do have my own mobile phone.”
TO RECORD THE follow-up album, Allan decided to write it well away from Glasgow.
“I wanted somewhere completely different and when we were touring around the US I remembered getting off the bus in Santa Monica one time and having the feeling it would be a great place to write an album. I wanted to see what would happen if you took a person out of his natural environment – and how that would effect the music. So I hassled my manager for ages and eventually we got this big beach house and moved in for a few months. I remember it being horrendously expensive so feeling under pressure to come up with the songs quickly.”
Endless strolls at night on Santa Monica beach helped him get over the overdose, and over the goldfish. “I had gone from being a nobody on the dole to a somebody and this was the first time I had to slowly and surely put myself back together,” he says.
“As a rock star you can think of yourself as important but when we went into Los Angeles you’d find yourself sitting beside Dustin Hoffman in a restaurant. And then you think of all the darkness of the rock ’n’ roll persona and how certain people are attracted to and fascinated by that. I remember walking along that beach – and it was a place of such natural beauty – and asking myself why I wanted to be in a band in the first place and trying to get back to the start again somehow. And it’s a funny thing but places of great natural beauty can make you very sad – there had been heartbreak in my life and that’s what came out on the album.”
Entitled Euphoric /// Heartbreak \\\ , Allen explains the slashes are all important as they represent “the ascent, the crest of a wave and then the crash”. Eschewing the bruised social commentary of its predecessor it’s just as musically lush but a lot more introspective lyrically.
“There was a lot of uncertainty because the canvas was so blank,” he says. “But then I starting digging very deep – maybe in an unhealthy way – and then I got myself into this position . . . it’s hard to explain but it’s like as if everything around you goes silent, the sort of feeling I used to get when I was dribbling around players as a footballer, and the songs just came.
“ I really felt a lot less pressure with this one because now we’re sort of an established band – with the first one we just had no idea what was going to happen.”
Regret and contrition bleed out of almost every track. “They’re very personal, they’re very honest, but I felt that was the only way,” says Allan. “You’ve probably gathered by now that I’m a bit impressionable and the songs here are from the last two to three years when I was at my most impressionable. I did a lot and I learnt a lot. And I think the title of the album says it all.”
Euphoric /// Heartbreak \\\ is out now
Glasvegas get euphoric over second album
James Allan and his bandmates return after a long lay-off.
By Alan Morrison
The Herald (Scotland)
http://www.heraldscotland.com/
29 Mar 2011
With Glasvegas it's always about the clash of extremes. It starts with the band's name, as the grit of Scotland's west coast slaps up against the glitz of the American Dream. Then it becomes a statement of intent within the music itself, as distorted guitars and a thumping beat envelop doo-wop melodies and Phil Spector soundscapes.
This was the lifeblood of Glasvegas's self-titled debut album, and it's even more prominent on the follow-up. EUPHORIC///HEARTBREAK\\\ goes one step further than its predecessor, forcing those extremes, those contradictions, into its very title. Again, it's there in the music, as heavy textures of guitar, keyboards and adrenaline-rush drumming contrast sharply with the raw emotions of fragile lyrics.
"For good or bad, I try to avoid mediocrity and things being in the middle," admits singer and songwriter James Allan. "But that can sometimes get us into trouble ..."
This approach has split audiences into those who are set alight by the fire in the belly of songs like 'Daddy's Gone', 'Geraldine' and 'Go Square Go', and those who think Allan, hidden behind his rock-star Ray-Bans, is a bit arrogant and pretentious. It has also seen Glasvegas's debut album go platinum and pick up a much-deserved Mercury Prize nomination while the band dipped a steel-capped toe in the stadium lifestyle via support slots with U2 and Kings Of Leon.
It's a truth, not a cliche, to say that such success carries an emotional toll. Rather than join his band mates at the Mercury Prize ceremony in September 2009, Allan went awol in New York. A few days later, however, they all met up in Boston for the beginning of the Kings Of Leon tour, and although the band claim that reports of a later incident in Chicago were much exaggerated and merely the end product of Allan larking about on his birthday (the music gossip pages made much of him wearing only a bathrobe and singing Carpenters songs to his goldfish), exhaustion was clearly setting in. So much so that drummer Caroline McKay called it a day in March 2010.
Now, after a year away from the media glare, most of it spent writing and recording in a three-storey beach house in Santa Monica, Glasvegas are back with a new album, a new drummer and an escalating series of live dates. They've been easing latest recruit Jonna Lofgren in with low-key gigs (including a Scottish tour in early January that stretched from Orkney to Hawick), testing out new material along the way. But it's the album (released on April 4 with U2 and PJ Harvey producer Flood behind the desk) that's going to be the real focus of attention.
Musically, it's more ambitious, more layered, than the debut disc. Words-wise, it's a world apart from what typically passes for rock lyrics today. 'The World Is Yours', 'Shine Like Stars' and 'Euphoria Take My Hand' thrive on punch-the-air choruses set to ecstatic surges of energy; 'Lots Sometimes', with its vocal repetitions and acceleration of pace, is a set-list classic-in-waiting.
But it's on other tracks, where Allan strips his emotions bare then goes deep inside himself to make dark and personal discoveries, that EUPHORIC///HEARTBREAK\\\ distinguishes itself. More often than not, the singer then filters those feelings through different voices, reaching for understanding or forgiveness and finding empathy by crafting characters and poetic short stories in song. These might be the perspectives of gay characters (on 'Stronger Than Dirt' and 'I Feel Wrong') or a prison inmate (closing track 'Change'); but they're the means for Allan to comfortably express and examine his own feelings.
"If you're too detached from the song, the bottom line is going to be hard to find," he explains. "But if you're not arm's length away from it, I think it becomes over-emotional. The direction, the focus, the execution of words on any poetic level - you're never going to deliver them the best way. I was right in the moment writing some of the songs on this album but, in a lot of ways, I sort of wasn't there. I was arm's length away from it, so that I could actually see it and execute it in the right way.
"It was the same with the first album. I wasn't sitting writing 'Daddy's Gone' crying into a sheet of paper. I actually had quite little emotion in me when I was writing that song. But I had a daydream, though; it was a total daydream. There's a difference between losing yourself in that little wormhole-imagination thing and being totally emotional when you're writing. There's a total hardcore focus, but it's not a total over-emotional focus."
The crossover point - and arguably the emotional high point of the album - is 'Dream Dream Dreaming', in which Allan puts words into his own father's mouth concerning the suicide of the singer's uncle. Initially the song came about as a response to 'Daddy's Gone', probably Glasvegas's best known track, which articulated, in uncompromising terms, a boy's bitter frustration with the father who had abandoned the family home.
" 'Daddy's Gone' was only one side of the coin with my father," Allan says now. "I felt a bit guilty about that song because who's to say what's round the corner for all of us, you know? I'd go on TV shows, and people would ask about it and say things about my father, and although it was only a snapshot in three minutes or whatever, it sort of ran away with itself. And I felt bad about that.
"But there were times when I'd be walking down the street, and a guy would come up to me and say how the song is about his life, how it relates to him so well, how it recognised the pain in him. Who am I to argue with those things? Who am I to say if it's right or wrong to write that song? A lot of other people have connected with it, so I'm still a fortunate person for that."
Through his love for American pop songs from the past, Allan made the mental leap from what he imagined to be his father's thoughts on the loss of his brother, to the romantic, almost tragic yearning that he hears in the likes of 'Mr Sandman' and 'All I Have To Do Is Dream'.
"I was fascinated by a human longing for something lost and something gained, something wanted and something unwanted. I was also fascinated by thinking about what a dream was. Sometimes in life, the only way to gain any kind of relief over something is through a dream. If that's all you've got, then you'll take it; you'll take anything because the longing can be that painful. Every time I go to see my father, he'll talk about his brother, every single time. He just misses him ... I've always got a picture of my uncle when we're playing that song. My dad's not actually heard it yet, but he'll hear it soon."
Allan's mother also has her place on the album, a very real physical presence on the closing track as she voices the fictional mother telling her son, about to be released from prison, to "be not led into temptation / And dare to resist not re-offending again".
"It was funny," Allan remembers. "When my mum came into the studio, she was telling Flood how to produce and telling me to swap the words around. She was like Diana Ross - bang, out the door, one take. It was the last song, and we were trying to get the rest of the songs to match each other. It was really sweet because I knew she was feeling under pressure about it. She never mentioned it, though, because she didn't want any extra pressure to go on me. Maybe I'm the guy with experience of a recording studio compared to the experience she's had, but, even in that moment, she's thinking to herself, 'I'm the mother, and I need to alleviate any pressure I can. I'll take the strain.'"
So, was there a blurring between the fiction of the lyric and the fact of the situation? "Even in the recording studio, man, she was playing the role of my mother and I was still the child," Allan agrees. "It's a memory that I'll always cherish. And she did say, 'Just think, boys: if this is the last song that you ever do, then mine is the last voice on the record ...'"
EUPHORIC///HEARTBREAK\\\ is released on April 4. Glasvegas play Aberdeen Music Hall on April 23; HMV Picture House, Edinburgh on April 24; and O2 Academy, Glasgow on April 25.
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
I'm hoping our new album sounds like a dream but it has been hard, admits Glasvegas frontman James Allan
By John Dingwall
The Daily Record
http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk
Dec 17 2010
GLASVEGAS are planning to come back bigger, better and stronger than ever, according to frontman James Allan.
But the Scots singer, who caused a scare when he failed to show up at the Mercury Music Awards earlier this year, admits he struggled to deal with the way his band were catapulted to stardom.
After hits such as Daddy's Gone and Geraldine from their self-titled 2008 debut album, the 31-year-old endured a period of soul searching.
He admitted: "I don't know where hell ends and heaven begins. We've been pulled inside out.
"I am quite a resilient person then I fall down.
"I had some kind of ... it was like I was chasing parked cars. Sometimes it is so easy for me to say I am partying. So it's a little more complex.
"It's not just putting my feet up and having a good time.
"Sometime I am trying to make sense of my life and sometimes I feel I'm a stranger to myself.
"Along the way, there are certain things that aren't good for you, that catch up with you.
"I'm not just talking drugs and alcohol or any other cartoon cliches of a rock 'n' roll person. There are other less subtle things that aren't advertised in the rock 'n' roll comic book."
According to James, the madness of being in Glasvegas took its toll on the other members. None more so than drummer Caroline McKay, who quit in March.
James, 31, said: "There are probably lots of reasons why Caroline left. It is quite a tall order being in a band.
"When we started, we practiced and practiced. We didn't just spark up a cigar.
"But Caroline had never played drums before and it grew from my sister saying, 'I'll get you a gig', to something much bigger in such a short period of time.
"Caroline never asked to play gigs at Wembley with U2. In some ways, I feel responsible for that."
James insists his own emotional breakdown took place during the last days of a tour with Kings Of Leon, six months before Caroline quit.
Having been gifted two goldfish on his 30th birthday by his sister and band manager, Denise Allan, he became strangley attached to the newly acquired pets.
"The last two years have been crazy," James recalled. "The tour with Kings Of Leon came to a shuddering halt. We had to cancel the last few days.
"The last thing I remember was being given two black goldfish by Denise. It was my birthday.
"I took the fish to the zoo and I was singing The Carpenters' (They Long To Be) Close To You to the fish 33 floors up in a Chicago hotel.
"I even took the fish into the bar. I remember sitting on the edge of the bed in my bathrobe with the fish in the tank on my lap, flicking through all the TV channels. God knows what happened after that."
Explaining his decision to turn down the Mercury Music Prize last February, he added: "I got invited to the Mercury awards and one of my friends asked me to go and meet them in Central Park, New York. I chose Central Park."
The last time we spoke, James had been set on emigrating to Los Angeles. But he changed his mind when he got there.
"My initial instinct had been that I felt at home in Los Angeles. But I wasn't sure if my instincts had been right," James recalled.
"So we went to different places, including Venice beach, Silverlake and Hollywood. At the end of 12 days, I thought my instincts had been wrong.
"Then Denise suggested Santa Monica. We got there and I had never felt any more at home. I said, 'This is it.' "We took a walk along the beach, saw a house with a To Let sign, called the estate agent and did the deal.
"We took some microphones over, set up some nice amps and came back with about 20 songs."
The next step was to find a producer. The Glasgow rockers chose Flood, best known for his work with U2 and Depeche Mode, and the recordings were completed at his Assault & Battery studios in London.
In the process of recording the as-yet-untitled album, the band also found a replacement drummer for Caroline.
Swede Jonna Löfgren will join the band on their January tour of Scotland which takes in Orkney, Wick, Oban, Dunoon, Troon, Hawick and Dunfermline.
Lead guitarist Rab Allan said: "Jonna is beautiful. She has been working with us for the past couple of weeks. She is a good drummer and stands up when she drums.
James added: "I was speaking to Jonna and saying how funny it was that she was from Sweden.
"I found out that Rab had told the record label that he didn't want a drummer unless it was a girl and she was from Sweden.
"Rab is quite cocky and so clumsy. When she turned up, I just thought what a genius Rab was.
"I am so proud of my cousin for that. It is early days and it's like a new girlfriend. I just want to take things slowly and make sure that she is having fun and she's OK.
"She is pretty and there is electricity dripping off her when she is playing."
Unlike Caroline, Jonna has been drumming from an early age.
"I started playing drums when I was three," she said. "I took the pots and pans from the kitchen and started banging on them.
"I've been taking lessons since I was seven. I am trained and my style is different."
The album, due for release in March, is currently being mixed by Claudius Mittendorfer, who has worked with Muse, Franz Ferdinand and Arctic Monkeys.
"This has been one of the hardest points of my life - sometimes I am trying to work out if I am losing my mind," James confessed.
"I am trying to prove to people I don't have OCD. I really need to believe in myself and believe that I'm not a maniac and the sound will work out in the end.
"Somebody asked what I wanted the album to sound like. I said, a dream. So I'm sure over the next week, it'll be wrapped up. I have to cross my fingers and hope it works out. I'm hoping for the best and that the stars align."
The Daily Record
http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk
Dec 17 2010
GLASVEGAS are planning to come back bigger, better and stronger than ever, according to frontman James Allan.
But the Scots singer, who caused a scare when he failed to show up at the Mercury Music Awards earlier this year, admits he struggled to deal with the way his band were catapulted to stardom.
After hits such as Daddy's Gone and Geraldine from their self-titled 2008 debut album, the 31-year-old endured a period of soul searching.
He admitted: "I don't know where hell ends and heaven begins. We've been pulled inside out.
"I am quite a resilient person then I fall down.
"I had some kind of ... it was like I was chasing parked cars. Sometimes it is so easy for me to say I am partying. So it's a little more complex.
"It's not just putting my feet up and having a good time.
"Sometime I am trying to make sense of my life and sometimes I feel I'm a stranger to myself.
"Along the way, there are certain things that aren't good for you, that catch up with you.
"I'm not just talking drugs and alcohol or any other cartoon cliches of a rock 'n' roll person. There are other less subtle things that aren't advertised in the rock 'n' roll comic book."
According to James, the madness of being in Glasvegas took its toll on the other members. None more so than drummer Caroline McKay, who quit in March.
James, 31, said: "There are probably lots of reasons why Caroline left. It is quite a tall order being in a band.
"When we started, we practiced and practiced. We didn't just spark up a cigar.
"But Caroline had never played drums before and it grew from my sister saying, 'I'll get you a gig', to something much bigger in such a short period of time.
"Caroline never asked to play gigs at Wembley with U2. In some ways, I feel responsible for that."
James insists his own emotional breakdown took place during the last days of a tour with Kings Of Leon, six months before Caroline quit.
Having been gifted two goldfish on his 30th birthday by his sister and band manager, Denise Allan, he became strangley attached to the newly acquired pets.
"The last two years have been crazy," James recalled. "The tour with Kings Of Leon came to a shuddering halt. We had to cancel the last few days.
"The last thing I remember was being given two black goldfish by Denise. It was my birthday.
"I took the fish to the zoo and I was singing The Carpenters' (They Long To Be) Close To You to the fish 33 floors up in a Chicago hotel.
"I even took the fish into the bar. I remember sitting on the edge of the bed in my bathrobe with the fish in the tank on my lap, flicking through all the TV channels. God knows what happened after that."
Explaining his decision to turn down the Mercury Music Prize last February, he added: "I got invited to the Mercury awards and one of my friends asked me to go and meet them in Central Park, New York. I chose Central Park."
The last time we spoke, James had been set on emigrating to Los Angeles. But he changed his mind when he got there.
"My initial instinct had been that I felt at home in Los Angeles. But I wasn't sure if my instincts had been right," James recalled.
"So we went to different places, including Venice beach, Silverlake and Hollywood. At the end of 12 days, I thought my instincts had been wrong.
"Then Denise suggested Santa Monica. We got there and I had never felt any more at home. I said, 'This is it.' "We took a walk along the beach, saw a house with a To Let sign, called the estate agent and did the deal.
"We took some microphones over, set up some nice amps and came back with about 20 songs."
The next step was to find a producer. The Glasgow rockers chose Flood, best known for his work with U2 and Depeche Mode, and the recordings were completed at his Assault & Battery studios in London.
In the process of recording the as-yet-untitled album, the band also found a replacement drummer for Caroline.
Swede Jonna Löfgren will join the band on their January tour of Scotland which takes in Orkney, Wick, Oban, Dunoon, Troon, Hawick and Dunfermline.
Lead guitarist Rab Allan said: "Jonna is beautiful. She has been working with us for the past couple of weeks. She is a good drummer and stands up when she drums.
James added: "I was speaking to Jonna and saying how funny it was that she was from Sweden.
"I found out that Rab had told the record label that he didn't want a drummer unless it was a girl and she was from Sweden.
"Rab is quite cocky and so clumsy. When she turned up, I just thought what a genius Rab was.
"I am so proud of my cousin for that. It is early days and it's like a new girlfriend. I just want to take things slowly and make sure that she is having fun and she's OK.
"She is pretty and there is electricity dripping off her when she is playing."
Unlike Caroline, Jonna has been drumming from an early age.
"I started playing drums when I was three," she said. "I took the pots and pans from the kitchen and started banging on them.
"I've been taking lessons since I was seven. I am trained and my style is different."
The album, due for release in March, is currently being mixed by Claudius Mittendorfer, who has worked with Muse, Franz Ferdinand and Arctic Monkeys.
"This has been one of the hardest points of my life - sometimes I am trying to work out if I am losing my mind," James confessed.
"I am trying to prove to people I don't have OCD. I really need to believe in myself and believe that I'm not a maniac and the sound will work out in the end.
"Somebody asked what I wanted the album to sound like. I said, a dream. So I'm sure over the next week, it'll be wrapped up. I have to cross my fingers and hope it works out. I'm hoping for the best and that the stars align."
Friday, April 16, 2010
Shock as Glasvegas star Caroline McKay quits band
By Bev Lyons
The Daily Record (Scotland)
http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/
Mar 31 2010
GLASVEGAS drummer Caroline McKay has sensationally walked out on the Scottish band in the middle of writing for their second album.
The group, who are working on the songs in Los Angeles, are said to be in shock after she quit on Monday.
Details are unclear but an insider confirmed Caroline was not fired and it was her decision to go.
Glasvegas (from left): Rab Allan, Paul Donoghue, James Allan and Caroline McKay.
Frontman James Allan said: "We are really sad Caroline has decided to leave as she is one of the coolest drummers around.
"But we respect her decision and say goodbye with all our love and luck."
It seems incredible that someone previously unknown would walk away from the band which made her an international star, but our source insisted she had her reasons.
But it is unclear whether she even intends to remain in music.
The insider told The Razz: "Caroline just wants to pursue other interests.
"She left. She was not pushed. I don't know if she's been unhappy for a while or whether it was a recent decision.
"I do know the band are all gutted to lose her as they are all very close."
At least Glasvegas have not started recording, so Caroline's departure should not affect the production schedule or force any re-recording.
Our insider told us: "They are still at the writing stage so this should not have any real effect on the album.
"They are planning to go into the studio in the summer. But they are all very upset though, especially James."
He recruited Caroline while she was working in Glasgow vintage shop Mr Benn, even though she had never played drums before.
He shaped her into the driving force behind the band's signature sound and has staunchly defended her against criticism of her musical ability.
James said: "Caroline had never played before but I thought, 'She should be in the band. She's a brave girl.' " And outspoken star Jon McClure of Reverend And The Makers also leaped to her defence.
He said: "I was furious when I heard someone suggest the band would be better offwithout her. Caroline is the coolest woman in rock."
Jon's opinion was backed up when Caroline made No.10 in the NME Cool List. She had seemed content with her new life as a rock star and has spoken about the bond between the band.
She said: "The boys are like brothers and the journey we're all on together is a once-in-a-lifetime experience."
But Caroline suffered terribly from stage fright, so perhaps she simply could not face the prospect of doing a tour with the new songs.
She had confessed: "I get sick every night. All over the country, there are little bags of puke where Glasvegas have played."
The Daily Record (Scotland)
http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/
Mar 31 2010
GLASVEGAS drummer Caroline McKay has sensationally walked out on the Scottish band in the middle of writing for their second album.
The group, who are working on the songs in Los Angeles, are said to be in shock after she quit on Monday.
Details are unclear but an insider confirmed Caroline was not fired and it was her decision to go.
Glasvegas (from left): Rab Allan, Paul Donoghue, James Allan and Caroline McKay.Frontman James Allan said: "We are really sad Caroline has decided to leave as she is one of the coolest drummers around.
"But we respect her decision and say goodbye with all our love and luck."
It seems incredible that someone previously unknown would walk away from the band which made her an international star, but our source insisted she had her reasons.
But it is unclear whether she even intends to remain in music.
The insider told The Razz: "Caroline just wants to pursue other interests.
"She left. She was not pushed. I don't know if she's been unhappy for a while or whether it was a recent decision.
"I do know the band are all gutted to lose her as they are all very close."
At least Glasvegas have not started recording, so Caroline's departure should not affect the production schedule or force any re-recording.
Our insider told us: "They are still at the writing stage so this should not have any real effect on the album.
"They are planning to go into the studio in the summer. But they are all very upset though, especially James."
He recruited Caroline while she was working in Glasgow vintage shop Mr Benn, even though she had never played drums before.
He shaped her into the driving force behind the band's signature sound and has staunchly defended her against criticism of her musical ability.
James said: "Caroline had never played before but I thought, 'She should be in the band. She's a brave girl.' " And outspoken star Jon McClure of Reverend And The Makers also leaped to her defence.
He said: "I was furious when I heard someone suggest the band would be better offwithout her. Caroline is the coolest woman in rock."
Jon's opinion was backed up when Caroline made No.10 in the NME Cool List. She had seemed content with her new life as a rock star and has spoken about the bond between the band.
She said: "The boys are like brothers and the journey we're all on together is a once-in-a-lifetime experience."
But Caroline suffered terribly from stage fright, so perhaps she simply could not face the prospect of doing a tour with the new songs.
She had confessed: "I get sick every night. All over the country, there are little bags of puke where Glasvegas have played."
Thursday, January 07, 2010
Glasvegas to record second album in Rick Rubin's house
Band set to record drum parts with producer
New Music Express
http://www.nme.com/
November 2, 2009
Glasvegas have revealed that producer Rick Rubin has invited the band to record the drum parts for their second album in his Los Angeles house.
The four-piece are set to record the follow-up to last year's self-titled debut with Rich Costey, who helmed their first effort. However, frontman James Allan told NME.COM that Rubin, who has produced Beastie Boys, Johnny Cash, Metallica and Red Hot Chili Peppers, wants some input.
"I'm going to leave all the stuff about which studio to use to Rich Costey but Rick Rubin wants us to record the drums at his house," he explained.
"We were supposed to go over there a few days ago but we've put it off for a couple of weeks because it felt like it was going too well [demoing the album] in Glasgow."
Allan was speaking backstage at an intimate London club gig at the Parker McMillan venue where he and guitarist Rab Allan played an acoustic show on Friday (October 30).
Speaking about the demo sessions he said: "We're working on the new album right now. We've got this small rehearsal room in Glasgow and we've been recording the new album in demo form. I'd like to get the entire album done like that in demo form before going to LA to record it in big studio."
He added that the theme of love was set to dominate the album. "Love gained and love lost," he explained. "The idea of finding love and losing love. I still think I'm clueless when it comes to songwriting and describing how I'm feeling, what I've seen and what comes to me in the middle of the night. But it is an album of love songs. It is a definite follow on from the debut, which also had love songs on it, but was mainly about having aspirations to love."
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Glasvegas makes its move on America
By Shay Quillen
San Jose Mercury News
http://www.mercurynews.com/
Posted: 01/08/2009 12:00:00 AM PST
Last year, Glasvegas went from being a Scottish act with two obscure singles under its belt to being one of the most celebrated young bands in Great Britain. And as 2009 begins, the group is setting its sights on America — a country whose musical past plays a crucial role in its look and sound.
Glasvegas. L-R: Rab Allan, James Allan, Paul Donoghue, Caroline McKay (Photo Credit: Steve Gullick)
In Britain, "the name's out there, and people are getting it," says bassist Paul Donoghue, speaking from a tour stop in Manchester last month. "Now we need to go to America and really put a lot of work and a lot of effort into that."
The quartet — which also includes singer-songwriter James Allan, guitarist Rab Allan (James' cousin) and stand-up drummer Caroline McKay — played some East Coast dates last year but just embarked on its first jaunt across America. It's marking the U.S. release of its self-titled debut album, which hit No. 2 in England last year, with two national TV spots and a handful of club dates, including a Popscene show tonight at 330 Ritch St. in San Francisco.
Monday, Glasvegas played "Geraldine" on "Late Night With David Letterman." Next Thursday, the band will wrap up the tour with an appearance on "The Late Late Show," hosted by fellow Glaswegian Craig Ferguson.
It's a remarkable turn of events for a band that still lives in the gritty East End of the Scottish city that inspired its tongue-in-cheek name.
"It's like any other working-class city in Britain: It's got its bad points, but it's also got a lot of electricity and a lot of romance to it," Donoghue says in a Glaswegian accent so thick that, at times, it's unintelligible to American ears. "I love the East End of Glasgow, and I don't think I'd ever move."
The bassist says that when the band started about five years ago, James Allan's songs showed promise, but he hadn't quite arrived at what would become the band's signature sound — soaring, heart-on-sleeve vocals in a thick Scottish accent over music that manages to suggest both the Jesus and Mary Chain and the Shirelles.
"They were a lot more poppy," Donoghue says of Allan's early efforts. "I still think Glasvegas make pop music, but back then it was a lot more of the indie, color-by-numbers thing, jangly guitars and stuff like that. As James' confidence grew, that wasn't what he wanted to do. . . . He realized if he wanted to be true to himself, he had to completely change the style of songwriting."
Fueled by long record-listening sessions at McKay's house, the musicians began gravitating toward vintage American sounds by artists like Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Dion.
The band broke out of Scotland with the self-released "Daddy's Gone," voted the No. 2 single of 2007 in the influential English music magazine NME. The song was re-recorded for the band's debut album and became Glasvegas' biggest hit to date in the U.K.
"Where we were in Glasgow, there's so many broken families," Dougherty says. "Be it a child whose father left or a father who's left children — people will come up and say the song really affects them."
JANUARY 05: Musician James Allan of the band Glasvegas performs onstage at Virgin Megastore Union Square on January 5, 2009 in New York City.(Getty Images)
Last winter, NME's staff awarded the band, which had yet to release an album, the Philip Hall Radar Award, an honor that previously had gone to Franz Ferdinand and the Kaiser Chiefs. The award was presented by the Libertines' Carl Barat, who will perform a solo opening set at tonight's show.
Glasvegas is the kind of up-and-coming British act music fans have come to expect on Thursdays at the little room at 330 Ritch St. Over the past 13 years, Popscene — a series co-founded and booked by "Live 105" Music Director Aaron Axelsen — has given the Bay Area an early, up-close look at such soon-to-be-massive acts as Bloc Party, Muse and Amy Winehouse.
Axelsen voted the British import of "Glasvegas" as his No. 1 record of 2008, and his Popscene partners share his love for the band.
"The first thing I noticed while listening to Glasvegas was this incredible sound that reminded me of all the records I love — the shoegaze ones, the doo-wop ones, the space rock ones," writes DJ and marketing maven Nako Hashizume via e-mail. "I just wanted to drown in those waves of sound."
Contact Shay Quillen at squillen@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-2741.
Glasvegas has plenty of potential import
By STEVE WILSON
Special to The Kansas City Star
January 16, 2009
The resounding debut album from Glasvegas opens with “Flowers and Football Tops.”
Sung by James Allan, a 29-year-old from Glasgow’s tough east side, its perspective is that of a mother who’s just learned of the death of her young son. The lyrics don’t specify what events brought the police to her door, but the song evokes the story of young James Bulger, the Liverpool boy killed by two boys scarcely his senior.
Guitarist Rab Allan, the singer’s younger cousin, opens the song with a full minute of glacial, harmonic distortion that sets the stage for Caroline McKay’s whopping Phil Spector backbeat and James’ raw, impassioned vocal.
Allan sings like a cross between Joe Strummer and a Glaswegian Joey Ramone. Assuming the persona of a grieving mother is a potential landmine for any male singer, but Allan makes the grief dramatic and dignified.
Remarkably Glasvegas maintains the pace established by “Flowers and Football Tops” throughout most of its 11-song program.
The songs of James Allan are not basic pop fodder, tending instead toward evocative portrayals of working class life in Glasgow — its perils and iniquities. “Stabbed” evokes the everyday horrors of gang life. “Go Square Go” is sung by a young man steeling himself for a showdown with a playground bully (the refrain is terrifically catchy, but its repetitive use of the f-word won’t garner much media play). “Geraldine,” like “Football Tops,” finds Allan in female persona, this time as an empathetic social worker.
Especially powerful is “Daddy’s Gone,” a song for both an absent father and the young protagonist himself, which combines regret, resignation and defiance.
Beginning in 2003 as an Oasis cover band, only gradually did James Allan start writing songs for the band. Like so many of rock’s powerful ensemble sounds, Glasvegas’ was built piece by piece by trial and error.
Performing initially at blistering punk tempos, they found that slower tempos breathed life into Allan’s gritty songs.
Bassist Paul Donoghue and McKay lay down a propulsive foundation. Rab Allan’s mammoth guitar sound is derived from Will Sergeant (Echo and the Bunnymen), the Edge, and the Jesus and Mary Chain.
In a curious way it also updates the slap-back echo of early Sun Records recordings. He frames his cousin’s vocals with a strum and drone, pedal tone-heavy palette that’s huge and dense.
And while that density can be overwhelming, it’s consistently affecting.
As it’s already one of Britain’s most popular bands, it will be interesting to see how this latest, potent British import translates to an American audience.
San Jose Mercury News
http://www.mercurynews.com/
Posted: 01/08/2009 12:00:00 AM PST
Last year, Glasvegas went from being a Scottish act with two obscure singles under its belt to being one of the most celebrated young bands in Great Britain. And as 2009 begins, the group is setting its sights on America — a country whose musical past plays a crucial role in its look and sound.
Glasvegas. L-R: Rab Allan, James Allan, Paul Donoghue, Caroline McKay (Photo Credit: Steve Gullick)
In Britain, "the name's out there, and people are getting it," says bassist Paul Donoghue, speaking from a tour stop in Manchester last month. "Now we need to go to America and really put a lot of work and a lot of effort into that."
The quartet — which also includes singer-songwriter James Allan, guitarist Rab Allan (James' cousin) and stand-up drummer Caroline McKay — played some East Coast dates last year but just embarked on its first jaunt across America. It's marking the U.S. release of its self-titled debut album, which hit No. 2 in England last year, with two national TV spots and a handful of club dates, including a Popscene show tonight at 330 Ritch St. in San Francisco.
Monday, Glasvegas played "Geraldine" on "Late Night With David Letterman." Next Thursday, the band will wrap up the tour with an appearance on "The Late Late Show," hosted by fellow Glaswegian Craig Ferguson.
It's a remarkable turn of events for a band that still lives in the gritty East End of the Scottish city that inspired its tongue-in-cheek name.
"It's like any other working-class city in Britain: It's got its bad points, but it's also got a lot of electricity and a lot of romance to it," Donoghue says in a Glaswegian accent so thick that, at times, it's unintelligible to American ears. "I love the East End of Glasgow, and I don't think I'd ever move."
The bassist says that when the band started about five years ago, James Allan's songs showed promise, but he hadn't quite arrived at what would become the band's signature sound — soaring, heart-on-sleeve vocals in a thick Scottish accent over music that manages to suggest both the Jesus and Mary Chain and the Shirelles.
"They were a lot more poppy," Donoghue says of Allan's early efforts. "I still think Glasvegas make pop music, but back then it was a lot more of the indie, color-by-numbers thing, jangly guitars and stuff like that. As James' confidence grew, that wasn't what he wanted to do. . . . He realized if he wanted to be true to himself, he had to completely change the style of songwriting."
Fueled by long record-listening sessions at McKay's house, the musicians began gravitating toward vintage American sounds by artists like Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Dion.
The band broke out of Scotland with the self-released "Daddy's Gone," voted the No. 2 single of 2007 in the influential English music magazine NME. The song was re-recorded for the band's debut album and became Glasvegas' biggest hit to date in the U.K.
"Where we were in Glasgow, there's so many broken families," Dougherty says. "Be it a child whose father left or a father who's left children — people will come up and say the song really affects them."
JANUARY 05: Musician James Allan of the band Glasvegas performs onstage at Virgin Megastore Union Square on January 5, 2009 in New York City.(Getty Images)
Last winter, NME's staff awarded the band, which had yet to release an album, the Philip Hall Radar Award, an honor that previously had gone to Franz Ferdinand and the Kaiser Chiefs. The award was presented by the Libertines' Carl Barat, who will perform a solo opening set at tonight's show.
Glasvegas is the kind of up-and-coming British act music fans have come to expect on Thursdays at the little room at 330 Ritch St. Over the past 13 years, Popscene — a series co-founded and booked by "Live 105" Music Director Aaron Axelsen — has given the Bay Area an early, up-close look at such soon-to-be-massive acts as Bloc Party, Muse and Amy Winehouse.
Axelsen voted the British import of "Glasvegas" as his No. 1 record of 2008, and his Popscene partners share his love for the band.
"The first thing I noticed while listening to Glasvegas was this incredible sound that reminded me of all the records I love — the shoegaze ones, the doo-wop ones, the space rock ones," writes DJ and marketing maven Nako Hashizume via e-mail. "I just wanted to drown in those waves of sound."
Contact Shay Quillen at squillen@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-2741.
Glasvegas has plenty of potential import
By STEVE WILSON
Special to The Kansas City Star
January 16, 2009
The resounding debut album from Glasvegas opens with “Flowers and Football Tops.”
Sung by James Allan, a 29-year-old from Glasgow’s tough east side, its perspective is that of a mother who’s just learned of the death of her young son. The lyrics don’t specify what events brought the police to her door, but the song evokes the story of young James Bulger, the Liverpool boy killed by two boys scarcely his senior.
Guitarist Rab Allan, the singer’s younger cousin, opens the song with a full minute of glacial, harmonic distortion that sets the stage for Caroline McKay’s whopping Phil Spector backbeat and James’ raw, impassioned vocal.Allan sings like a cross between Joe Strummer and a Glaswegian Joey Ramone. Assuming the persona of a grieving mother is a potential landmine for any male singer, but Allan makes the grief dramatic and dignified.
Remarkably Glasvegas maintains the pace established by “Flowers and Football Tops” throughout most of its 11-song program.
The songs of James Allan are not basic pop fodder, tending instead toward evocative portrayals of working class life in Glasgow — its perils and iniquities. “Stabbed” evokes the everyday horrors of gang life. “Go Square Go” is sung by a young man steeling himself for a showdown with a playground bully (the refrain is terrifically catchy, but its repetitive use of the f-word won’t garner much media play). “Geraldine,” like “Football Tops,” finds Allan in female persona, this time as an empathetic social worker.
Especially powerful is “Daddy’s Gone,” a song for both an absent father and the young protagonist himself, which combines regret, resignation and defiance.
Beginning in 2003 as an Oasis cover band, only gradually did James Allan start writing songs for the band. Like so many of rock’s powerful ensemble sounds, Glasvegas’ was built piece by piece by trial and error.
Performing initially at blistering punk tempos, they found that slower tempos breathed life into Allan’s gritty songs.
Bassist Paul Donoghue and McKay lay down a propulsive foundation. Rab Allan’s mammoth guitar sound is derived from Will Sergeant (Echo and the Bunnymen), the Edge, and the Jesus and Mary Chain.
In a curious way it also updates the slap-back echo of early Sun Records recordings. He frames his cousin’s vocals with a strum and drone, pedal tone-heavy palette that’s huge and dense.
And while that density can be overwhelming, it’s consistently affecting.
As it’s already one of Britain’s most popular bands, it will be interesting to see how this latest, potent British import translates to an American audience.
Concert Review: Glasvegas
Glasvegas
Bowery Ballroom, New York, NY - 01.06.09
Filter Grade: 86%
by Samantha Barnes 01.09.2009
http://www.filter-mag.com/
JANUARY 05: Musician James Allan of the band Glasvegas performs onstage at Virgin Megastore Union Square on January 5, 2009 in New York City.(Getty Images)
The scene was a cold and rainy night, perfect to make Scotland’s hottest import, Glasvegas, feel right at home in New York City. Playing an overly sold-out show at SoHo’s Bowery Ballroom on the day of their debut album’s U.S. release, the band was set to encounter a New York audience full of hipsters, industry wigs, fellow musicians and music fans eager to see if the act lived up to they hype. Surely a tall order to fill, but despite minor distractions, the band showcased just why Bowery was the place to be that night.
With no introduction needed, the band, all clad in black, took the stage to the backdrop of moody blue strobe lights and kicked right into the 7-minute pulsing album opener, “Flowers And Football Tops.” Frontman James Allan’s vocals soared over the dark room with his repeated pleas to his “baby,” evoking another generation’s Danny Zuko with his leather jacket, mini-pompadour and soulful croon. As the song built intensity, so did the light show, until bona fide stadium lights flared at the 550-capacity venue, causing most to turn away from the stage and some less forgiving concert-goers to yell out for relief. Concluding the song with a heartbreaking rendition of “You Are My Sunshine,” they prepared the crowd for exactly what was in store for the following 40 minutes – brooding sounds with spot-on vocals and a dreadfully inappropriate light show.
The quartet played through several songs without acknowledging the crowd, slowly building the excitement while loosening up to the typically stagnant New York audience. By mid-way through the relatively short 10-song set, they found just the chord to please the crowd. The lush sounds and sharp guitars of UK chart-topper, “Geraldine” had the room swaying and bopping along, led the whole time by Allan’s pitch-perfect voice. Following the crowd’s warm embrace of “Geraldine,” they switched to their darker side with the dramatic, building “Ice Cream Van,” showing only haunting shadows to the enraptured crowd while organs filled the air. Other set stand-outs include the stomping “Go Square Go” which broke into an all-out dance party and of course the highlight of the night - the powerful sing-along set closer “Daddy’s Gone.”
While the night may have ended too soon for some, Glasvegas proved that less is more with their concise set, only leaving the crowd wanting more, despite the potential retinal damage. Rest easy New York, they will return again with a little more confidence, a few more songs and perhaps a little less gusto for lights.
Set List
1. Flowers And Football Tops
2. Lonesome Swan
3. It’s My Own Cheating Heart That Makes Me Cry
4. Please Come Back Home
5. Polmont On My Mind
6. Geraldine
7. Ice Cream Van
8. Go Square Go
9. Stabbed
10. Daddy’s Gone
Bowery Ballroom, New York, NY - 01.06.09
Filter Grade: 86%
by Samantha Barnes 01.09.2009
http://www.filter-mag.com/
JANUARY 05: Musician James Allan of the band Glasvegas performs onstage at Virgin Megastore Union Square on January 5, 2009 in New York City.(Getty Images)The scene was a cold and rainy night, perfect to make Scotland’s hottest import, Glasvegas, feel right at home in New York City. Playing an overly sold-out show at SoHo’s Bowery Ballroom on the day of their debut album’s U.S. release, the band was set to encounter a New York audience full of hipsters, industry wigs, fellow musicians and music fans eager to see if the act lived up to they hype. Surely a tall order to fill, but despite minor distractions, the band showcased just why Bowery was the place to be that night.
With no introduction needed, the band, all clad in black, took the stage to the backdrop of moody blue strobe lights and kicked right into the 7-minute pulsing album opener, “Flowers And Football Tops.” Frontman James Allan’s vocals soared over the dark room with his repeated pleas to his “baby,” evoking another generation’s Danny Zuko with his leather jacket, mini-pompadour and soulful croon. As the song built intensity, so did the light show, until bona fide stadium lights flared at the 550-capacity venue, causing most to turn away from the stage and some less forgiving concert-goers to yell out for relief. Concluding the song with a heartbreaking rendition of “You Are My Sunshine,” they prepared the crowd for exactly what was in store for the following 40 minutes – brooding sounds with spot-on vocals and a dreadfully inappropriate light show.
The quartet played through several songs without acknowledging the crowd, slowly building the excitement while loosening up to the typically stagnant New York audience. By mid-way through the relatively short 10-song set, they found just the chord to please the crowd. The lush sounds and sharp guitars of UK chart-topper, “Geraldine” had the room swaying and bopping along, led the whole time by Allan’s pitch-perfect voice. Following the crowd’s warm embrace of “Geraldine,” they switched to their darker side with the dramatic, building “Ice Cream Van,” showing only haunting shadows to the enraptured crowd while organs filled the air. Other set stand-outs include the stomping “Go Square Go” which broke into an all-out dance party and of course the highlight of the night - the powerful sing-along set closer “Daddy’s Gone.”
While the night may have ended too soon for some, Glasvegas proved that less is more with their concise set, only leaving the crowd wanting more, despite the potential retinal damage. Rest easy New York, they will return again with a little more confidence, a few more songs and perhaps a little less gusto for lights.
Set List
1. Flowers And Football Tops
2. Lonesome Swan
3. It’s My Own Cheating Heart That Makes Me Cry
4. Please Come Back Home
5. Polmont On My Mind
6. Geraldine
7. Ice Cream Van
8. Go Square Go
9. Stabbed
10. Daddy’s Gone
Today's Tune: Glasvegas - Flowers and Football Tops
(Click on title to play video)
Baby
why you not home yet
baby its getting late
i wish you would be home by now.
door bell rings
who could it be at this time
police on my left and right
my sons not coming home tonight
baby, they dont need to show
its over, i know
baby, they dont need to show
flowers and football tops, i know
baby, baby, baby, why you?
no sweeping exits
no hollywood endings
flowers and football tops
dont mean a thing.
my baby is six feet under
just another number
my daughter without her brother
baby, they dont need to show
its over, i know
baby, they dont need to show
flowers and football tops, i know
my baby is gone?
(you are my sunshine
my only sunshine
you make me happy
when skies are grey
i hope you noticed
how much i loved you
how could they take my sunshine away)
Babywhy you not home yet
baby its getting late
i wish you would be home by now.
door bell rings
who could it be at this time
police on my left and right
my sons not coming home tonight
baby, they dont need to show
its over, i know
baby, they dont need to show
flowers and football tops, i know
baby, baby, baby, why you?
no sweeping exits
no hollywood endings
flowers and football tops
dont mean a thing.
my baby is six feet under
just another number
my daughter without her brother
baby, they dont need to showits over, i know
baby, they dont need to show
flowers and football tops, i know
my baby is gone?
(you are my sunshine
my only sunshine
you make me happy
when skies are grey
i hope you noticed
how much i loved you
how could they take my sunshine away)
Wednesday, January 07, 2009
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."
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: GlasvegasIn 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."
Tuesday, January 06, 2009
Review: Glasvegas
Reviewed By Emily Mackay
NME
http://www.nme.com/
Sep 5, 2008
First, a question: what is the point of rock’n’roll? There are as many answers as there are people to ask, but surely one essential tenet is that great rock affirms life. Which brings us to ‘Stabbed’, one of the most unsettling moments on Glasvegas’ astounding debut. In it, James Allan recounts a flight from a tooled-up gang in a half-dead monotone, muttering, “No cavalry could ever save me/I’m gonna get stabbed”, over reverb-ghostly piano. How many people are hunched knit-browed over notebooks right now, trying to write songs about ‘broken Britain and knife culture and that’? Well, they’ve all been rendered pointless by this, which knowingly echoes The Shangri-Las’ ‘Past, Present And Future’ in its borrowing of Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’. A piece written by the world’s most famous composer while he was slowly going deaf, appropriated by a bunch of rough-edged dreamgirls to make a teenage melodrama of crushed hearts, reappropriated by a 20-something Glaswegian for a topical-yet-timeless evocation of terror that, in its humanisation of a social problem, somehow offers hope. That, my friends, is pop music at work.
And that’s nowhere near the best song on the album. From the off, ‘Flowers & Football Tops’ grabs you by the throat: huge space and reverb lend power to spare instrumentation, stock “wooah wooah”s and “baby”s twisted to fit the raw and real pain of a mother deprived of her son by violence. Then there’s ‘Go Square Go’, the artery-pumping surge of guitar perfectly conjuring the adrenaline rush of an imminent childhood kicking. ‘Perfect’ is a word that keeps springing to mind, yet one of Glasvegas’ great strengths is that they’re forged from imperfection. Rather than seek out the tightest drummer on the Glasgow scene and the most seasoned guitarist, James Allan chose a girl he met in a shop and his cousin.
As a result, they have the do-or-die gang mentality of all great bands. That knack of using the near-to-hand and commonplace to fashion a watertight aesthetic also feeds into Allan’s lyrics. At first, his repeated use of nursery-rhyme motifs jars, but on further listening you realise each is tightly woven into its context. Most heartbreakingly so in ‘Flowers & Football Tops’, where the refrain from ‘You Are My Sunshine’ lingers, subtly wrenching, on the “sun” syllable. ‘It’s My Own Cheating Heart That Makes Me Cry’, meanwhile, deftly threads in a lyric from fellow working-class romantics Oasis as the narrator goes about his conquests. “It’s all about going out and getting pissed with eagle eyes/And sincerity bottom on my list/What’s the story morning glory?/I feel so low and worthless”, howls Allan, before the torrential finale cleanses his self-disgust. But unlike Oasis, Glasvegas are a social band: they sing about their city’s troubles, tour prisons and dedicate their first award to the murdered local teen who inspired ‘Flowers…’.
Their most socially aware songs, ‘Geraldine’ and ‘Daddy’s Gone’, remain as astounding as at first listen. The former rips through a classic indie-rock template to the raw guts underneath by the sheer force of Allan’s retching-up-his-soul delivery and its genius subject matter: who else could write a song about a social worker and make it sound like your soul ascending to heaven? ‘Daddy’s Gone’ similarly still stuns with its frank but never mawkish sense of abandonment. That Allan keeps it out of the melodramatic mire it could be (at risk of a hack-lynching, compare it with Lennon’s ‘Mother’) is to his credit.
What makes the album so sonically perfect is the contrast between the grandeur of Rich Costey’s big New York production, the simplicity of the songs and the immediacy of their Dion & The Belmonts-via-Dalmarnock inflections. Of course, they’re hardly the first to take doo-wop and girl-group sounds and add a bit of noise and echo. What sets them apart from bands ploughing similar furrows (like The Raveonettes) is their resistance to stylised retro references in favour of something much more human.
So believe it: this is the real thing, no-one’s crying wolf, not even Alan McGee. There’s not enough hype in the world for Glasvegas. They are an important, amazing, real band that won’t let you down. Not because they play real instruments and sing real songs about real people (they’d be just as genuine if they wrote noise collages about interstellar seahorses on MacBooks); they’re real because they put their entire hearts and souls and brains into it. And that is rock’n’roll.
9 out of 10
NME
http://www.nme.com/
Sep 5, 2008
First, a question: what is the point of rock’n’roll? There are as many answers as there are people to ask, but surely one essential tenet is that great rock affirms life. Which brings us to ‘Stabbed’, one of the most unsettling moments on Glasvegas’ astounding debut. In it, James Allan recounts a flight from a tooled-up gang in a half-dead monotone, muttering, “No cavalry could ever save me/I’m gonna get stabbed”, over reverb-ghostly piano. How many people are hunched knit-browed over notebooks right now, trying to write songs about ‘broken Britain and knife culture and that’? Well, they’ve all been rendered pointless by this, which knowingly echoes The Shangri-Las’ ‘Past, Present And Future’ in its borrowing of Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’. A piece written by the world’s most famous composer while he was slowly going deaf, appropriated by a bunch of rough-edged dreamgirls to make a teenage melodrama of crushed hearts, reappropriated by a 20-something Glaswegian for a topical-yet-timeless evocation of terror that, in its humanisation of a social problem, somehow offers hope. That, my friends, is pop music at work.And that’s nowhere near the best song on the album. From the off, ‘Flowers & Football Tops’ grabs you by the throat: huge space and reverb lend power to spare instrumentation, stock “wooah wooah”s and “baby”s twisted to fit the raw and real pain of a mother deprived of her son by violence. Then there’s ‘Go Square Go’, the artery-pumping surge of guitar perfectly conjuring the adrenaline rush of an imminent childhood kicking. ‘Perfect’ is a word that keeps springing to mind, yet one of Glasvegas’ great strengths is that they’re forged from imperfection. Rather than seek out the tightest drummer on the Glasgow scene and the most seasoned guitarist, James Allan chose a girl he met in a shop and his cousin.
As a result, they have the do-or-die gang mentality of all great bands. That knack of using the near-to-hand and commonplace to fashion a watertight aesthetic also feeds into Allan’s lyrics. At first, his repeated use of nursery-rhyme motifs jars, but on further listening you realise each is tightly woven into its context. Most heartbreakingly so in ‘Flowers & Football Tops’, where the refrain from ‘You Are My Sunshine’ lingers, subtly wrenching, on the “sun” syllable. ‘It’s My Own Cheating Heart That Makes Me Cry’, meanwhile, deftly threads in a lyric from fellow working-class romantics Oasis as the narrator goes about his conquests. “It’s all about going out and getting pissed with eagle eyes/And sincerity bottom on my list/What’s the story morning glory?/I feel so low and worthless”, howls Allan, before the torrential finale cleanses his self-disgust. But unlike Oasis, Glasvegas are a social band: they sing about their city’s troubles, tour prisons and dedicate their first award to the murdered local teen who inspired ‘Flowers…’.
Their most socially aware songs, ‘Geraldine’ and ‘Daddy’s Gone’, remain as astounding as at first listen. The former rips through a classic indie-rock template to the raw guts underneath by the sheer force of Allan’s retching-up-his-soul delivery and its genius subject matter: who else could write a song about a social worker and make it sound like your soul ascending to heaven? ‘Daddy’s Gone’ similarly still stuns with its frank but never mawkish sense of abandonment. That Allan keeps it out of the melodramatic mire it could be (at risk of a hack-lynching, compare it with Lennon’s ‘Mother’) is to his credit.What makes the album so sonically perfect is the contrast between the grandeur of Rich Costey’s big New York production, the simplicity of the songs and the immediacy of their Dion & The Belmonts-via-Dalmarnock inflections. Of course, they’re hardly the first to take doo-wop and girl-group sounds and add a bit of noise and echo. What sets them apart from bands ploughing similar furrows (like The Raveonettes) is their resistance to stylised retro references in favour of something much more human.
So believe it: this is the real thing, no-one’s crying wolf, not even Alan McGee. There’s not enough hype in the world for Glasvegas. They are an important, amazing, real band that won’t let you down. Not because they play real instruments and sing real songs about real people (they’d be just as genuine if they wrote noise collages about interstellar seahorses on MacBooks); they’re real because they put their entire hearts and souls and brains into it. And that is rock’n’roll.
9 out of 10
Viva Glasvegas
With their debut disc, the Scottish rockers are fast becoming the next big thing
BY GLENN GAMBOA
Newsday
http://www.newsday.com/
glenn.gamboa@newsday.com
January 4, 2009
Glasvegas is moving fast.
Three years ago, the Scottish rockers weren't even a band. A year ago, they hadn't even been in a proper recording studio and hadn't completed an album. But the swiftness of their arrival - they've already been crowned "Britain's Best Loved Band" by influential British magazine NME - isn't the result of any sort of plan.
Yes, Glasvegas (taken from a nickname for Glasgow) is moving fast. But they're the first to say that they have no idea where they're going.
Take the distinctive sound on their debut album "Glasvegas" (Columbia), which hits stores Tuesday. It's a little bit Phil Spector "Wall of Sound," a little bit girl-group simplicity and a whole lot of echoing guitars.
"It's funny," says guitarist Rab Allan. "That thing with the sound was quite a natural progression. Because Caroline [McKay] only plays two drums - she plays a floor tom and a snare drum - we had to fill in the gaps with the guitars and the distorted bass guitar. A lot of people think that we were influenced by Jesus and Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine, but we didn't really get into some of that until later on when we already had the sound.
"Some people think we're lying about that, but we're not," Allan continues. "To be honest, it was never contrived or planned out to be that way. We all just wanted something quite natural, that we could feel comfortable with. I guess sometimes if you put four people in a room, sometimes you can get something amazing from it."
Dramatic debut
The band's amazing run started last year with the single "Daddy's Gone," a wrenching tale of absent fathers set to stirring '60s pop, complete with earnest "woh-ohs" from singer James Allan. Its unique allure was so stunning that it landed Glasvegas - cousins James and Rab Allan, drummer McKay and bassist Paul Donoghue - all sorts of attention even before they had a record label.
British music exec Alan McGee, best known for discovering Oasis, said Glasvegas was "the most exciting thing I've heard since Jesus and Mary Chain."
Soon, Glasvegas was the object of a bidding war, ultimately signing on with Columbia Records.
"Two weeks later, we were in New York doing the album," Rab Allan says, laughing. "When you're in a band, you get opportunities to do things that you wouldn't normally be able to do. When the record company asked us where we wanted to do the album, we said, 'New York.' It's quite an exotic place, and it's got a lot of history, a lot of rock and roll history. We thought it was a good idea, and it was more of a holiday for us as well - a way to get out of Glasgow."
In March, the band found itself recording at Brooklyn Studios with producer Rich Costey, who has worked with Interpol and Franz Ferdinand, and living in Park Slope, soaking in the atmosphere. "The one thing people told me before I came to New York was that the people were a little bit funny, but I didn't find that at all," Allan says. "The people were lovely. People were really cheery, and they would hear the accent, and we would get into all sorts of conversations. You would be sitting in a bar, having a drink, and you would just meet people."
From Rourke to Bj"rk
And, as newly minted rock stars, Glasvegas found itself in some unusual situations, ending up at the Beatrice Inn one night with Mickey Rourke and sitting next to Bj"rk. The band's next recording experience, for an EP released in England for Christmas, was just as unusual - a castle in Transylvania.
Allan says Glasvegas will continue looking for new experiences because it's worked out for them so far. They plan to keep going wherever the music takes them.
"Things just click," he says. "You can't explain it but some things just feel right. You can't say why. None of us are great musicians. It's all pretty basic. And we taught Caroline to play the drums because she was great fun - that's why we wanted her in the band, which I guess is a backward way of doing things. But it's worked so far."
WHEN&WHERE
Glasvegas plays Bowery Ballroom, 6Delancey St., Manhattan, 212-533-2111, at 8 p.m. Tuesday.
The show is sold out. "Glasvegas," on Columbia Records, is in stores Tuesday.
BY GLENN GAMBOA
Newsday
http://www.newsday.com/
glenn.gamboa@newsday.com
January 4, 2009
Glasvegas is moving fast.Three years ago, the Scottish rockers weren't even a band. A year ago, they hadn't even been in a proper recording studio and hadn't completed an album. But the swiftness of their arrival - they've already been crowned "Britain's Best Loved Band" by influential British magazine NME - isn't the result of any sort of plan.
Yes, Glasvegas (taken from a nickname for Glasgow) is moving fast. But they're the first to say that they have no idea where they're going.
Take the distinctive sound on their debut album "Glasvegas" (Columbia), which hits stores Tuesday. It's a little bit Phil Spector "Wall of Sound," a little bit girl-group simplicity and a whole lot of echoing guitars.
"It's funny," says guitarist Rab Allan. "That thing with the sound was quite a natural progression. Because Caroline [McKay] only plays two drums - she plays a floor tom and a snare drum - we had to fill in the gaps with the guitars and the distorted bass guitar. A lot of people think that we were influenced by Jesus and Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine, but we didn't really get into some of that until later on when we already had the sound.
"Some people think we're lying about that, but we're not," Allan continues. "To be honest, it was never contrived or planned out to be that way. We all just wanted something quite natural, that we could feel comfortable with. I guess sometimes if you put four people in a room, sometimes you can get something amazing from it."
Dramatic debut
The band's amazing run started last year with the single "Daddy's Gone," a wrenching tale of absent fathers set to stirring '60s pop, complete with earnest "woh-ohs" from singer James Allan. Its unique allure was so stunning that it landed Glasvegas - cousins James and Rab Allan, drummer McKay and bassist Paul Donoghue - all sorts of attention even before they had a record label.
British music exec Alan McGee, best known for discovering Oasis, said Glasvegas was "the most exciting thing I've heard since Jesus and Mary Chain."
Soon, Glasvegas was the object of a bidding war, ultimately signing on with Columbia Records.
"Two weeks later, we were in New York doing the album," Rab Allan says, laughing. "When you're in a band, you get opportunities to do things that you wouldn't normally be able to do. When the record company asked us where we wanted to do the album, we said, 'New York.' It's quite an exotic place, and it's got a lot of history, a lot of rock and roll history. We thought it was a good idea, and it was more of a holiday for us as well - a way to get out of Glasgow."
In March, the band found itself recording at Brooklyn Studios with producer Rich Costey, who has worked with Interpol and Franz Ferdinand, and living in Park Slope, soaking in the atmosphere. "The one thing people told me before I came to New York was that the people were a little bit funny, but I didn't find that at all," Allan says. "The people were lovely. People were really cheery, and they would hear the accent, and we would get into all sorts of conversations. You would be sitting in a bar, having a drink, and you would just meet people."
From Rourke to Bj"rk
And, as newly minted rock stars, Glasvegas found itself in some unusual situations, ending up at the Beatrice Inn one night with Mickey Rourke and sitting next to Bj"rk. The band's next recording experience, for an EP released in England for Christmas, was just as unusual - a castle in Transylvania.
Allan says Glasvegas will continue looking for new experiences because it's worked out for them so far. They plan to keep going wherever the music takes them.
"Things just click," he says. "You can't explain it but some things just feel right. You can't say why. None of us are great musicians. It's all pretty basic. And we taught Caroline to play the drums because she was great fun - that's why we wanted her in the band, which I guess is a backward way of doing things. But it's worked so far."
WHEN&WHERE
Glasvegas plays Bowery Ballroom, 6Delancey St., Manhattan, 212-533-2111, at 8 p.m. Tuesday.
The show is sold out. "Glasvegas," on Columbia Records, is in stores Tuesday.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)