Heart Of Glas

It’s been 18 long months since bombastic rockers Glasvegas performed on Irish soil, and as soil goes, it doesn’t get fancier than the stuff at Slane Castle. Boyne Valley turf, pretty damn-near blue skies and a line-up to make the rock deities quiver; for the punters who got the fuzzy end of the lollipop, it felt more like Morocco than Meath, but I’m guessing guitarist Rab Allan has some pretty swell memories of the show.

“That was awful!” he cries. “Did you enjoy it? I absolutely hated it! I think I was ready to punch my drummer in the face!”
Lovely. I’m guessing it was no skinny-dip in the moonlight for Oasis either, who split up eight weeks after the gig. Allan, at least is able to see the bright side.
“Funny story – when they broke up, we stole all their crew,” he giggles, sounding just the tiniest bit like a vintage Disney villain.
“I woke up about 10 minutes ago!” he apologises. “I woke up and I think I’ve got a cold as well. I’ve got a runny nose and I feel all blocked up. We’re in the studio today, we’re finishing the last track of the record. We were supposed to go do a video for the first proper single of the album, but all the treatments we’ve had through have been absolutely awful!”
If Allan sounds like he’s moaning for Glasgow, it’s hardly because he’s feeling sorry for himself. New single ‘The World Is Yours’ has already premiered to massive love from doting fans and by all accounts, the band couldn’t be more pleased with themselves.
“It’s always good when people like what you do, but I thought it was great anyway!” Allan laughs. “That sounds really arrogant but I thought it was great! We were out last week and the reaction from everyone was fantastic. To be honest, people were going mad! They were trying to sing the words to the songs they’d never heard before. It was really sweet. We’ve been working so hard on it, so it kind of feels like it’s paying off a little bit.”
Drummer Caroline McKay left Glasvegas in March (her bandmate wanting to pummel her probably had something to do with it), but the Allan cousins have already set about road-testing a shiny new skin-pounder, Swedish newcomer Jonna Löfgren.
“She is absolutely unbelievable!” Rab gushes. “She’s the best drummer I’ve ever seen. And she’s beautiful. And she’s Swedish. Put all those things together and I’m a very happy man. She only came in about three quarters of the way through the album, so James played drums and I played the cymbals.”
Sounds like the musical equivalent of “You take the wheel, I’ll work the pedals.”
“It was!” he chuckles. “But none of us were good enough to do the drums! But she’s fantastic. It’s always going to be hard moving to a new country and English is her second language so I think it’s only now she’s starting to understand what we say! But it’s really special, it seems as though it’s a brand new band. It’s really exciting.”
In what may go down as the cleverest move in Glasvegas history, the band up and left the blustery Black Moors and headed to the beach town of Santa Monica to record the follow-up to their self-titled, Mercury-nominated debut.
“I used to be one of these people who thought, ‘Sure, it doesn’t matter. You write a song, you write a song. It doesn’t matter where you do it.’ But it did matter because we were recording in a big four-floor house and the studio was in the second and the top floors. We used to look out and the sun would be shining on the water and it was just beautiful. We used to play the tracks back and think, “Does the music match what we’re seeing out the window?’ I guess it’s a funny way to do things. When we went to Santa Monica, we’d obviously travelled around the world and seen all these things, but to actually go and live there for four months was quite a culture shock, because of how healthy some people are… compared to how unhealthy I am. It was a bit of a culture shock to see people running. I didn’t know what they were doing! I thought they were being chased! I found out it’s a new craze called jogging.”
Okay, so they’re not exactly fitness buffs, but the determined foursome had certainly earned themselves a good holiday.
“We had five weeks off in three years,” Allan stresses. “The manager had to sit us down and say, ‘You could tour for the next three years if you want, but you need to stop at some point’.”
I’d have thought they’d be dying for a couple of evenings on the sofa watching Come Dine With Me, but as soon as they got back to their homeland, they set out on a mini-tour.
Allan briefly goes into big softie mode: “I played in a cow shed. I met a guy who could kick himself in the head. I met a lot of interesting characters, but you know what? It was just really good being out with my best friends again.”
The 11 tracks on the album, (I’ve been privy to all but the one Rab and co. plan to finish today!) suggest an altogether dreamier Glasvegas, and a band that perfectly suit the record’s trippy title – EUPHORIC /// HEARTBREAK \.
“It’s funny,” Allan hums. “It was the only title that we had and it was the only title that we wanted. It was the same with the first record, there was never any question of what it was going to be. I think we knew from Santa Monica that it would be EUPHORIC /// HEARTBREAK \ and James had these slashes as well, which were a bit strange. But I think, like the song, it keeps going on about the high point and reaching the bottom. That you can be so high and then you can be that low as well.”
It doesn’t take a whole lot of book smarts to figure out that the low point they’re referring to is frontman James Allan’s meltdown in 2009. Stories about the quiffed singer’s party binges are notoriously bizarre – my personal favorite goes that James serenaded his goldfish (with ‘Close To You’ by Burt Bacharach, obviously) at the zoo, before taking his pet to the hotel bar and later, watching telly with it on his lap. Luckily bandmates and fans alike are now able to see the funny side.
“We were supposed to play Coachella and we cancelled the day of the gig.” Rab begins. “James fell down. He fell down. That’s what I’m going to say. He fell and he didn’t get back up again so we had to cancel the gig, but he woke up two days later and he wrote [opening track ‘Pain, Pain, Never Again’]. I think that was him just thinking, ‘It’s time to start something’. We all thought it was incredible.
“The record company shat themselves,” he laughs. “’It’s not a single, James! That’s not what we sent you to write!’ but he said, ‘Don’t worry, it’ll be fine’!’”
Silly record company fatcats. Didn’t they realise All Powerful production sensei Flood (U2, Depeche Mode, Nick Cave) was on board to twiddle the knobs for them?
“The guy is a legend,” Allan beams. “He’s just one of the most relaxed and laidback guys I’ve ever met and he’s got this aura about him. And the other thing is he’s had a facelift. He denies it, but he’s 50 and he looks about 30. He looks better than me and I’m 37! He’s had a facelift, I don’t care what he says. I’m going to make that public. Have you seen Stand By Me? You know the part when the deer comes out of the woods and just stands and looks? Flood just listens. He won’t say anything until he’s got the right thing to say. He doesn’t get verbal diarrhea the way I do.
‘And he put me to shame on the party stakes as well!” he booms, expelling another Disney villain cackle. “He knows how to have a good time.”
A-ha! Those fanmade t-shirts, the ones that read ‘All work and no play makes James a dull boy’ suddenly make sense. Promise me something, though lads. Keep away from the zoo for a couple of months, yeah?

EUPHORIC /// HEARTBREAK \ is released on Sony Music on April 4. Glasvegas come to the Academy on April 28. You can listen to 'The World Is Yours' on hotpress.com now.