The Stool Pigeon

If the rock’n’roll dream still exists, it’s best left in the hands of dreamers. Dreamers like James Allan, the leader of the extraordinary Glasvegas. For the first time in his life, James’s tendency to dream his days away is being celebrated rather than ridiculed.

“It’s common knowledge among anyone who knows me,” he laughs, his rich Glaswegian burr so familiar because it’s exactly the same as his singing voice. “And in the past I got a hard time for it, while I was at school, when I was playing football. But that’s how my songs have come about. So it’s quite weird that this thing about my personality that was always fuckin’ frowned upon... but now, because we’ve got records out and I’m in a band, people are encouraging me to be a daydreamer. It’s funny how things work out, know what I mean?”

I do know what he means. It’s funny that a band with a dodgy pun for a name should come from nowhere and become the most exciting new British rock band in a generation by blending fifties pop melodies, stadium shoegazer guitar noise, thunderous female Phil Spector-meets-Mo Tucker drums, and lyrics about the grainy realities of British working class life sung in an angst-ridden Scots accent thick enough to need subtitles. I put it to him that, on paper, his band doesn’t make sense. He laughs heartily again:

“My whole life hasn’t made sense, man! Believe me. There’s a lot of truth in what you fuckin’ just said there.”

And it’s funnier that the man behind this visionary proposition is a former journeyman footballer from a rough Glasgow suburb called Dalmarnock. Allan played as a winger for Falkirk, Queens Park and Gretna before being kicked into touch. “I wasn’t that disappointed,” he says. “My favourite times playing football were before anyone handed me any money for it. No matter what your job is... it takes a back seat once rock’n’roll comes into people’s lives. I find it quite embarrassing at times, because it makes me sound like I’m trying to say that I played football and I never really done that great that I could go around telling everybody about it.”

And it’s bordering on the bloomin’ hilarious that the group who are capable of single-handedly raising the Titanic of politicised, inspiring, communal rock’n’roll are led by a man who is the spitting image of Britrock’s greatest man-of-the-people, Joe Strummer of The Clash. Even if Allan didn’t favour a quiff and black rebel-rocker threads, the facial resemblance would still be bordering on the bizarre.

“The first time it was said to me I didn’t even know who Joe Strummer was! Then I saw photos of him and thought, ‘Yeah, I guess I do look like him.’ It’s funny... I met him just before he died. My cousin - the guitarist in our band - was playing the Barrowlands and put me on the guest list. We had passes to go backstage. It was strange... everybody’s convinced that he looked at me and done a double-take. We chatted for a couple of minutes. He was cool.”

I get my chance to chat to the very cool James a couple of weeks before the release of Glasvegas’s breathlessly awaited eponymous debut album. And the 28-year-old singer, songwriter, and rhythm guitarist’s reputation as The Nicest Man In Rock is well-founded... once you get past a marked reluctance to discuss the mundane facts of his recent past. When I ask him when he started Glasvegas, he insists he doesn’t know: “My memory’s really bad. You should ask the guitarist.”

What we can piece together ourselves is that Glasvegas were formed in early 2006 and comprise James, his cousin Rab Allan (aforementioned guitarist), Paul Donoghue, and iconic stickswoman Caroline McKay. Their first single ‘Go Square Go’ sounded like My Bloody Valentine, The Ronettes and The Proclaimers having a bundle in an echo chamber, and had a moving and true lyric about the rules of being bullied as a child. “The pressure to fight,” James recalls. “I was always quite confused about that. If I ever have a kid I’m gonna be saying, ‘Don’t fight! I don’t care if you look like a pussy to other people. Look after yourself!’”

Alan McGee declared Glasvegas the greatest thing since sliced Gallagher and NME writer Tim Jonze formed the Sane Man label to put out the massively acclaimed ‘Daddy’s Gone’, the best single about absent fathers since The Temptations’ ‘Papa Was A Rolling Stone’ (or maybe Happy Mondays’ ‘Kinky Afro’ - you decide), in late 2007. James insists that he’d always been too busy daydreaming to have a pop masterplan, and that he began to feel a little freaked out about his lyrics being suddenly thrust into the wider world. “I’ll be honest, man,” he says, “if somebody had told me that the songs were going to be released as singles and all this stuff was going to happen, it would probably have affected the way I wrote it. I’d have probably been quite afraid of hurting people’s feelings that were close to me. The first thing to say is that the songs aren’t autobiographical. They touch on real experiences, but a lot of it is just about writing a poem about a certain thing. But I thought it would be easy for my family to get dead confused, and think it was about them... the obvious one was ‘Daddy’s Gone’. When we were making the album in New York, my sister moved house for me. And she found the original lyrics of ‘Daddy’s Gone’, and they’re written on a Job Centre application form! I had no job at the time; I was just trying to express myself. It’s not been very planned.”

No one is ever going to believe that that song isn’t about your own father...

“I know. And there are touches of that song that totally relate to my life. But I’m not thinking about my own dad when I’m singing it, y’know? And the song is basically saying that I don’t want to get to a point in my life when I’m regretting a lot of things ’cos that can really destroy people. You know how powerful guilt and regret can be. So... people can get hurt and that was never my intention. I love my family.”

Has your Dad heard ‘Daddy’s Gone’?

“Yeah.”

And?

“I’ve never spoke to him about it. And I don’t know if I ever will. This might sound quite harsh, but... I don’t need to explain any of my songs to my family or anybody. ’Cos that’s my art. And whatever I do, that’s my business. I want the freedom to express myself without feeling pressured.”

So you didn’t work between the end of your football career and Glasvegas being signed?

“No, I was on the dole. I was quite happy. I wasn’t being bogged down with all the shit that comes with jobs. It meant that I could just be a daydreamer and watch movies and listen to music. I wanted to give myself to writing music. The worst thing is that you have no money and can’t buy people Christmas presents or take your girlfriend out and you feel like shit about that stuff. But it was important to me, man.”

Is it true that you were sitting and listening to Christmas records all year round?

“Not every day, but... yeah, I do. I go through phases and last summer it was Christmas albums - the Phil Spector Christmas album - I listened to that every day and my neighbours must have thought I was a lunatic. I can’t decide between that and Elvis Presley’s debut as the best album ever made.”

And are you really going to put out a Glasvegas Christmas album this year?

“Yeah. Studios have been booked and flights have been booked so it’s too far down the line to back out now. Ha!”

You’ve relocated a lost art - a band making big, grandiose rock music with lyrics specifically about the realities of working class life, which has become the preserve of rappers and post-Mike Skinner pop acts...

“Yeah... when you say specific, I suppose we’re not very vague. In the current climate you hear a lot of things that are just words strung together. But the only way I can think about lyrics is to write about things that’s been on my mind a lot. The things I write about are things I’ve not been able to forget.”

Since the turn of the year, Glasvegas have signed to Columbia, supported the likes of Muse and Kings Of Leon, recorded their debut album in New York with Rich Costey, and been in prison. Their prison tour - where the band played at Glasgow’s Barlinnie, Polmont Young Offenders Institution, Edinburgh’s Saughton and Cornton Vale women’s prison in Stirling - proved that Allan’s songs about the rough end of working class life were more than a pose.

“I think a lot of people look at people who are begging in the street or who are in prison and get this arrogance that that would never be them,” says James. “And you don’t know the circumstances people grew up with. Falling on the wrong side of the tracks. There’s no black and white way and people can be in prisons for a lot of different reasons. They’re not necessarily evil, although some are. I’m sure a lot of them didn’t plan on being there. And I don’t see my art as being exclusive to anybody. I don’t like to get in other people’s space and impose my art onto them. But I like to put it out there, man.”

And what were the prison shows like?

“Just really different. I mean, we played with Kings Of Leon last night, and they’re for real. But these prison guys are for real in a totally different way. The electricity in the room can be quite far out, as you can imagine. A hundred prisoners in front of you, all wearing the same t-shirt, all sitting with a packet of crisps; grown adults. There’s a real sadness in their eyes. They’re all lost and alone. When you leave all these emotions that you never expected hit you.”

James’s ability to mainline those unexpected emotions into Big Rock while remaining specific in his subject matter illuminates Glasvegas. ‘Stabbed’ is a poem about being attacked by a gang, backed not by raucous guitars, but by Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. James is being attacked by a local gang called the Baltic Fleetos, and, just as he’s thinking of fighting his way out of it, they produce swords. True story? Or one of James’s poetic licences?

“No, that’s quite a common thing. But it’s never happened to me personally. The Baltic Fleetos are a gang in Dalmarnock. They never chased me ’cos I was from Dalmarnock, so the song is not about me. They used to fight against the Parkhead Rebels when I was younger. They’d stand in this big bit of waste ground and fight. When I was 10, I used to go down and watch. I wasn’t much of an aggressive person, though. If there’s a fly in a room I can’t hit it with a newspaper. So the chances of me hitting people in the street... Don’t get me wrong, man, if anybody is in any way invading my space, I don’t take that too well. But the idea of harming someone else is quite strange to me.”

Album opener ‘Flowers And Football Tops’ is inspired by Kriss Donald, the Glasgow teen who was the victim of a brutal murder in 2004. Sadly, because Donald was the white victim of a racially motivated attack by Asians, the song has been misinterpreted by some on the extreme right.

“What can you do?” James sighs. “There are a lot of nutcases out there. You put stuff out there and there’s always gonna be some who read into things the wrong way. The thing is, I don’t think there are massive subtleties in my music, so it’s hard to imagine how anybody could fuckin’ misinterpret it. The exact idea of the song is... I thought about that boy Kriss and his family quite a lot. There still isn’t a day goes by when I don’t think about him. And, at the time I wrote the song, I was seeing a lot of distressed parents in the press and on TV. And like most people, I was thinking, ‘Fuck... what if that was my kid?’ But because I don’t have kids, I was thinking about how my mum would handle that. It’s so unbelievably gothic and gruesome. Kids shouldn’t be leaving their home at night and not returning... it just should’nae happen. The flowers and football tops... I know people leave them as a tribute, but they shouldn’t even be there. It’s just a fucked-up world. I bet you any money that you were hurt when you read those things, man. The only difference is I wrote the song. So I’m the guy who cares, as if nobody else does. Everybody fucking cares. I don’t know the boy, but that boy is me. He’s my neighbour, brotherhood of man, compassion for other fucking people. It’s a big part of my life. All these things that I’m saying are pretty simple.”

But in case there are any lingering doubts about Allan’s attitude to multiculturalism, perhaps these lines from album closer ‘Ice Cream Van’ will put them to rest:

Destroying the ground where gruesome lays
Sectarianism and the hurtful racist ways
Bring back the glory days
Active citizenship
And pure community

Don’t mean to be the jaded old fly in your ointment, James, but which “glory days” were these exactly? Did I miss them?

“Maybe they just in existed in my imagination! But it’s basically saying that I’m sure there is still room for those glory days. It’s no’ fucked, man. Maybe it’s just wishful thinking. But I don’t believe it is.”

James Allan pauses. Maybe he’s just taking a second to think about how he must sound, being so socialist and impassioned and openly idealistic in a pop world so dripping in cynicism. But then, that’s why his band might just have made the best and most important debut album since The Smiths; that sense of being naked and unashamed about believing in a better world. So he doesn’t pause for long. He just spits it right out:

“Those lines... they’re the sun and the moon, man. They’re my personality and what I dream about. They’re everything.”

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