Music > Interviews

Glass Animals

The Nick Rayns LCR, UEA

by Lizz

17/02/17

It’s rare when a band’s first visit to Norwich takes place in the LCR, the biggest gig venue in the city. Glass Animals’ rise to top billing has been fast and furious –this young Oxford foursome make music that takes the best of funk and soul and mixes it with a touch of electronica with an indie slant. Following their entirely sold out headline tour late last year, they’re back with their second album How To Be A Human Being, and their latest single Pork Soda is big at R1. I spoke to bass player Ed about collecting stories, not knowing what they’re doing and how excited they are to play Reading Festival.

How did the band get together?

We were friends at school together in Oxford but then we all went off to different uni’s. So Dave started writing some tracks on his computer and we met up in the holidays and he told us “right, you’re in a band with me!”. We bought a few instruments and messed around as you do with friends. But that was only during the holidays, and we only started taking the band seriously when we all decided to take a gap year after uni. We all moved home to Oxford and that’s when we started making music properly and gradually started doing some gigs.

Your music is full of smooth funk and soul, with loads going on in each song in terms of layers. When the band first started, what sort of sound were you aiming for?

At that time we were into all sorts of different things. Growing up we were all into The Beatles, and Dave grew up in America and was heavily into hip hop which I think you have also hear in our music. When we were teenagers we all listened to a lot of guitar music – The Strokes and Bloc Party. It actually turned out that the guy who produced a lot of their music is the guy who owns the label we’re on! When we found out he was interested we were so excited because he worked with all these bands we loved when we were teenagers. Dave and Joe were more into dance and electronic music, like Mount Kimbie and Bonobo. Our sound comes from all the music that we’ve listened to in our lives, we never sat down and decided what we wanted to sound like, we just started making weird noises and worked out what sounded cool!

You had a sold out headline tour last autumn in the UK, Europe and American, and now you’re heading back out on the road.

When we released our first record we didn’t know what we were doing. We just put it out and waited to see what happened. The whole of 2015 we killed ourselves in terms of touring. In America in particular we got bigger and bigger which was so exciting. So we’re just going to carry on doing that and see where it takes us.

Do you think that’s a wise move for young upcoming bands to get noticed, to do a lot of touring early on?

It does sound like a pretty old school way of doing it, doesn’t it? We were pretty lucky with Spotify – a lot of bands don’t like it because you can’t make any money out of it , but for us it’s been great because it got our music out to a worldwide audience. That was how we got fans and enabled us to do gigs in American and then build it from there. It’s a crazy business, and all we’ve really done is chase this wherever it’s taken us!

Your second album came out at the end of August last year. The title is How To Be A Human Being – how do you feel the album would help us to learn that?

Ha ha! Well the idea was that the songs off the new record are all characters, a mixture of people. We collected people’s stories, which were often pretty crazy, especially the ones from America, we met lots of weird people and had hilarious, weird and sometimes really sad conversations with them. They opened up to us because we were foreign and musicians, and people seem to think that musicians are a different breed of person for some reason. We collected all these stories and Dave sat down and mashed them together into characters, some based on the stories, some based on people we know, and some based on us. It’s basically a collection of stories and that’s what the title reflects. A lot of the characters are quite extreme.

What’s your favourite song from the new album?

Hmmm, interesting. The last track on the record is very personal to all of us, and musically we had a lot of fun making the first track and also Mama’s Gun. I think we’ve all got different favourites.

These new songs are pretty lively and the build in your songs seems to have increased on this album. Were you thinking about your live audiences’ reactions more this time around?

Yeah, the first record was very much a studio record. We didn’t know what we were doing or how it would translate live. We spent two and half years touring it after that and the songs changed quite a lot over that period. We experimented a bit, tried things out and saw how people reacted to it, and learned quite a lot from it. So we were aware of that when it came to the second album, we knew how things work live a bit better and that did probably go into the way we made the tracks. Also we like to keep the acoustic instruments on the album raw and not overly produced. We don’t do a billion takes of everything, and that gives it a bit more of a live feel as well I think.

A couple of years ago you were playing in a basement to four people. Now you are doing extraordinarily well. What is it about your music that you hope speaks to people so successfully?

Blimey! I think we love playing live and that’s been an asset to us. We’ve grown into larger stages. I don’t really know why people like it – the four of us like it, and we’re all quite different to each other and critical, so if we can say we like it then that’s good enough for us.

I wanted to ask about the video that accompanies Season 2, Episode 3 that you created with the director Whoopi. Has the reaction been what you hoped for it?

Yeah it’s been incredible. He’s amazing, that man, we’ve got to know him quite well. We did this event in LA where we did a live version of the album – a lot of the actors from the videos came in and there were props from the video. The audience could come and interact with them, and Whoopi did some projections of the artwork he’d done for the video – the computer game stuff. The reaction has been brilliant. We also made a computer game to go along with it. Just one of those crazy ideas you have when you’re a teenager, and then you actually get to do them!

You have some very ardent fans – which of your songs goes down the best when you play live?

The one that people mostly want us to play, and also the one that’s most difficult to play is Agnes, it’s very personal and it’s very complicated! We recorded it in the studio and it uses so many synths that we can’t bring them all on tour with us unfortunately. We’ve had to use samples, and there’s quite a lot off stuff going on. It’s been quite difficult but that is the one that people really want us to play so we’ve had to find a way to make it work.

What are your plans for the rest of the year? Are you going to be playing some festivals? I know you’ve been announced for Reading already.

Yeah Reading’s going to be awesome! We went to Reading together three of four times when we were younger as it’s near Oxford, and we did all the things you do at festivals and saw loads of our favourite bands there. So to play on that stage is incredible, and hopefully we’ll be able to bring some of our mates from home along with us. We’re basically just playing as much as we can this year – we’re playing a bunch of American festivals too. It’s mental!

Glass Animals play UEA on 17th March. Tickets available from ueatickets.ticketabc.com