The Humble Power of Glasvegas

Originally published in Soundcheck Magazine (12/1/08)

James Allan is not a rock star. Lead singer and songwriter for Scotland’s newest rising musical beacon, Glasvegas, Allan has not let the ascension of his band’s debut album to number two on the UK charts (scratching at Metallica’s trembling ankles) erode his seemingly impenetrable guilelessness. He speaks about the band’s sudden fame with the casual fluidity of a veteran, throwing around lots of “yea, mans” and “ya knows” like it’s all just some water cooler banter on another day at the office.
Allan’s voice, which on the record is an acute mix of Bono, Joe Strummer, Billie Joe Armstrong and Mel Gibson playing William Wallace, sounds a bit debilitated over the techni-crackle of my cell phone. “My throat’s a bit fucked,” he explains. It’s been a long week for Glasvegas, which also consists of Allan’s cousin Rab (same last name) on lead guitar, Paul Donoghue on bass, and Caroline McKay on drums. The band just had to cancel their first show of the US tour in Boston because Allan’s visa was late showing up and he couldn’t get across the border. The band doesn’t seem to be suffering the usual rookie rock-lag of world touring, though. They don’t seem to be overtly graceful about it, either. They are simply rhythmic, taking it all in stride.
It’s the simple formula that has made Glasvegas’ self-titled debut album, released in early September, an intimidating hit in Europe. In a world of decentralized networks, Glasvegas has a beating heart that drives their distorted tales of fractured families and bar brawls. The simplicity, Allan has realized, can be misleading. “They’re just poems,” he urges. “I take it as a compliment when everybody thinks that [the songs] are about me…but they’re not autobiographical.” His refusal to take credit adds to the band’s charm, which accrues in a sort of working class hero way every time Allan describes his songwriting in variations of trying to “make something not shit”. It’s almost as if Glasvegas don’t know they are a rock band. They make rock music, but that’s where the comparisons end. It may later turn out to end even before that, as Glasvegas has recently revealed their plans for a follow up - a Christmas album that will be recorded in Transylvania.
Even regarding this odd detour, Allan is comically matter-of-fact. “I just wanted to make some songs, you know?,” he shrugs. Don’t write off his wide-eyed streamlining as naivety, either. The band knows full well what they are potentially getting themselves into by using the holiday format for a sophomore effort. The long and short of it seems to be that they really don’t care. The beauty of, as Allan puts it, going from living at home and being unemployed to challenging for the top spot on the UK’s charts, is that the band doesn’t know how to answer to anyone else but themselves. And if you think there might be a deeper symbolism behind the choice of Transylvania as a recording locale, well, the band won’t admit to it. It was a place Allan has always wanted to see since growing up in Glasgow, and being in a rock and roll band is his opportunity.
It also seems to be an opportunity to illustrate life on Glasgow’s streets. “Geraldine,” the second track on Glasvegas, is the one song Allan admits is actually based on a life experience. The song begins as a blackened Cinderella fairy tale, complete with a fairy godmother who will “be at your side to console/When you’re standing on the window ledge/I’ll take you back from the edge/I will turn your tide”. It is later revealed that the “angel on your shoulder” is actually a social worker. Glasvegas’ sort of romanticized reality pumps life through the whole album, like on “Go Square Go”, which is sort of a “Saturday Night’s Alright (For Fighting)” as done by The Cure. The song is an orchestral pep rally before a street fight, both a jock jam and a goth ballad.
In fact, orchestral is a befitting if not unusual term for a rock band like Glasvegas. Trying to find Allan’s musical muse takes you on some crazy detours. When asked about his favorite new artists this year, he fawns about Elvis Presley. When talking about the Jesus and Mary Chain, he meanders into his love for Tchaikovsky and Mozart. Suddenly, it doesn’t seem his throat is bothering him anymore. And through it all, he keeps coming back to classical music, describing his backdrop to life as orchestral and trying to achieve a particular “fluidity” with the swaths of thick distortion that smear Glasvegas’ grounded pop songs into tapestries of rain, grit and sadness.
Not exactly the sound one would come to expect becoming the current obsession of magazines like NME. But that’s what happens with a little serendipity on your side, like how Scottish music mogul Alan McGee happened to catch the band play in a similar fashion to how he first discovered Oasis nearly two decades earlier. McGee’s backing of the band has propelled them ever since, entering them into a major label bidding war won by Columbia and thus placing them on that ever-precarious pedestal of potential. Glamor is a scary thing to happen to a band that is so practical, but these are things Allan insists Glasvegas doesn’t think about. “There’s a lot of things that you can’t help,” he admits. “But really, life’s so fucking mad, you know, that you can’t say what it’s gonna be. That’s the same for you as it is me, ya know?” And of course, after a bit of contemplation, he centers back on his ongoing mantra of how he just likes to write songs and be inspired, obliged to chip away at the totem of mystique built around a band all too humble to accept anything larger than life. It’s an attitude that has attracted fans everywhere the band goes. Sure, it’s gracious and polite, but it’s also very human. Glasvegas are the working man’s band - they clock in, make something gorgeous, and clock out. “After that, I just don’t know. Ya know?” Yeah. We know.