Glasvegas

Thu 14th Jul, 2011 in Features

Glasvegas front man James Allan isn’t sure whether he’s a singer or just really good at shouting. He is sure however, that the face he sees in the mirror is a good-looking one. A face, that in the right light, betrays a haunting resemblance to Sid Vicious and holds the same potential of creating headlines.

Since Glasvegas’ first album, released in 2008, reached Number two on the UK Album Charts, Allan has had a turbulent track record. He infamously missed the Coachella Festival when he reportedly mistook animal tranquilizer for valium and overdosed right before their set; went missing when he was meant to play at the Mercury Music Prize in the UK – the night the band was nominated – and there was a rather unconventional relationship with two goldfish that has been blamed for causing havoc on Glasvegas’ tour with The Kings of Leon.

All that aside, Allan has powered forward and the band released their second album in April this year, Euphoric Heartbreak mainly thanks to Allan’s mum, who not only got him back on the straight and narrow, but also features on the track, Change. Here, Allan talks about where he’s at now, playing this year’s Splendour in the Grass and his impenetrable Glaswegian accent.

You guys decided to independently finance your first few releases and then you posted all of your bands demos up on MySpace for free download. Why did you decide to start out like this?
I never really gave the MySpace thing a great deal of thought. It was Rab. Some of the people coming to our earlier gigs new the songs and I said, “how do they know the songs?” and Rab said “Oh, I put them on MySpace, man.” So that’s how I found out about that! But I guess that kind of helped us, because it was a convenient medium to make our songs available to people. They were just little demos that I had made at home that I’d recorded on the computer because there was no way we could afford to go into a studio. I’m sort of glad that I had to do that, because now I can understand it all and why and how to communicate an idea. I know how to do it technically now. It’s almost like you have to have some sort of mathematical, mythological kind of knowledge in some ways. If you want to be able to express yourself and relate to your audience, you’ve got to learn the maths of it.

Do you think there has been a change of focus from making good music, to a focus on financial success?
Yeah, it’s an absolute disgrace the state of music. It’s become more of a financial voyage that someone is trying to sell. People are always trying to work it. The sad thing is, is that it’s nothing to do with skill; it’s not people with no ability. Often people making songs have more ability than what the record suggests. It probably sounds really cynical, but I just want to be able to believe in something – the same as everybody else does – I think you’ve just got to get a little bit of your personality across and I think that’s the thing that people fear. They think that if they do that, then the financial void that they’re trying to fill won’t be filled because they’re going to express themselves too much.

I think there’s less money in music and so the nature of the beast becomes a little more desperate. Not all human beings. Like, Bob Marley for example. He could have made a little pop thing and cashed that in for a few bob, but he was good enough to do what he did and what he made was a lot more than any little pop song could give him because he bought his self expression.

A lot of bands outside of America grow up listening and learning to sing with American accents, whereas you sound exactly the same when you sing as you do talking to me now. Was this a deliberately patriotic decision, or just a natural occurrence?
[Laughs] No! It was just a natural one. I’m quite relieved I don’t [sing with an American accent] because I think it’s so funny. I like to think of myself as being a person who could recognize some kind of beauty in something. I always thought that the New York accent was really sexy and the Glaswegian accent I always thought was a sexy one too, just as the Australian one is. I mean, most accents are sexy on their own anyway.

Most people say it’s more exotic if you don’t come from America but I think no, I can recognize the beauty in that. For me though, I really felt like there wasn’t even a choice. Cos you know what, I do a bit of singing in my bedroom… well I’ve not got a bedroom, but my hotel room, and if I’m singing Elvis Presley songs, I don’t sing them like me, I sing them like I’m Elvis because I am Elvis in that moment. But you know, I don’t even know if I would consider myself a singer. It’s more like, I’m good at shouting – I’m not Frank Sinatra [laughs]. So the thing is, it’s like because I don’t really know if I’m a singer or not – I don’t really know what I am – I just kind of let the tide take me where it’s going to take me.

I think, as well, with any band, you’re thrown right in the deep end. As soon as you walk out with your guitar then people don’t care whether it’s your first gig. I remember one of our first gigs and a guy said, “hey that was great, that was really funny” because of my accent, because I was trying out an American accent and I thought, “I don’t think you got the point” [laughs]. So I’m making up for it now.