Their debut album saw them embark on an incredible two-year world tour. “There were lots of mad things that happened,” reflects the softly-spoken guitarist. “In terms of the band, there are always the highlights – playing with U2 was really, really good; I guess because we all came from working class backgrounds. Coming from Glasgow, you don’t really contemplate doing it as a career; it’s a dream for most people. The fact that we’ve been able to travel around the world and we used to take our mums to gigs all over the world,” he chuckles; “we used to fly to Europe and America and they used to come and watch us.”
The acclaim and success bestowed upon that debut has, of course, led to Glasvegas’ sophomore album, Euphoric Heartbreak, being one of the most anticipated albums of 2011. About 80% of the record was written by James in Glasgow before the band relocated to California to set up a studio at a Santa Monica beach house for the recording of the record. Having fallen in love with Santa Monica after previous gigs in LA, Glasvegas based themselves at the beach house from January to May in 2010. At the end of last year, Swedish musician Jonna Löfgren replaced departing drummer Caroline McKay.
“James would come down one morning and say ‘I’ve written a song – it’s called Euphoria, Take My Hand, and then we’d record it in a day,” Rab enthuses. “It was one of the easier songs to record in Santa Monica, but when it actually came to going into the studio with Flood, that was definitely one of the harder ones. I guess the challenges were probably staying inspired – you’re there for such a long time and there’s no one there to say ‘you need to do this, you need to do that’. Because there’s a lot of distractions in LA if you’re not careful – it’d be easy to fall into that trap if you just believe your own hype and you believe your own success. We keep each other’s feet on the ground.”
The manner in which the landscapes of Santa Monica informed their musical ideas can be heard in the album’s lush atmospheric melodies and ethereal soundscapes. “I think more of the futuristic elements on the record probably came from that period of time,” Rab contemplates. “I was listening to Depeche Mode, Queen, kind of incandescent bands, so that definitely had an influence on the music. I think James was quite addicted to Blade Runner – he used to watch it all the time, so I guess it was really him looking to be inspired by something.”
Interestingly, the third track on the album, You, was initially a song that James wrote about Robert (“he’s as deep as the ocean”). “It was really sweet – it was nice that he was writing the song and thinking about me,” says Rab, a little abashedly. “It’s funny because me and James are family – our mums are twin sisters, so we grew up together. So it’s funny how you can recognise in someone when there’s something wrong – you know, they don’t need to tell you that there’s something wrong. You know that there’s something not right with them and he could see that there was something wrong with me at the time.
“And he wrote that song, and then it turned out that it was actually about James. That’s one of the great things about music – James wrote that song thinking it was about me, but it was about him.”
Euphoric Heartbreak closes with the extremely moving Change, which features a spoken-word passage from James’ mother. “That was really funny, actually,” giggles Rab when recalling his aunt’s time in the studio. “She was only in the studio for half an hour, but she just took over. We were in Sweden last week and the song came on; I got a shiver because I remember when I used to be young, she used to shout at me when I got in trouble. And now she follows me all over the world,” he chuckles. “That was the last song written for the album; it was written in London, actually, after the Santa Monica period. I think it’s one of the most moving ones that we’ve done.”
The most honest and heart-wrenching song on Glasvegas’ second album, however, would have to be I Feel Wrong (Homosexuality, Pt. 1). “We were at a park in Glasgow and all of our friends were there,” Rab relates in his disarmingly sensitive manner. “And we didn’t know that one of our best friends in Glasgow’s gay and he hadn’t told us. At the park we were drinking and got a little drunk, and you could hear him speaking to another guy and he was just saying that he loved him and he wanted to do something but he couldn’t because he was afraid, and he doesn’t want any of his family or friends to know. And it was quite heartbreaking, to be honest, to see that, because it’s just love – two people love each other and they can’t show it because they’re scared.
“That really affected James because I think he thought that he’d seen it all with relationships falling out and falling in love, but that was just totally different. I don’t think he ever thought that so much emotion could exist between two men.
“He left the party at six o’clock in the morning, went to a friend’s house and got out an acoustic guitar and wrote that song. That was probably about the middle of 2009 – that was one of the first songs we had for the record. The ones that he wrote in Germany, we stayed up all night drinking and he started writing songs at four o’clock in the morning. He’s most creative during that time for some reason.”
The cover artwork for Euphoric Heartbreak features an iconic Marilyn Monroe photograph and was also inspired by Vincent Van Gogh’s Wheatfield With Crows. “That photograph of Marilyn Monroe was taken on the Santa Monica beach outside the house where we recorded, and the day before we were due to do the cover, James had that idea,” Rab explains. “I think it was taken just a week before she died, and he said the look in her face was like she was there but she was already gone.”
