After the immediate success of his debut album, footballer-turned-rock-star James Allan found himself in a Chicago hotel singing ‘Close To You’ to his pet goldfish. This time around there’s less pressure . . .
AS HE WAS carried out of the backstage area of a rock festival on a stretcher due to a drug overdose, Glasvegas singer James Allan told people staring at him, “It’s not how it looks.” Unfortunately it was exactly how it looked.
Glasvegas were one of the big draws at the 2009 Coachella festival (the US equivalent of Glastonbury) and at the time, the official reason given for Allan not being able to perform was the old reliable “exhaustion and dehydration”.
In rock terms you can break the code of the euphemisms easily enough. “Fruit and flowers” (as on a backstage rider) is cocaine and groupies while “exhaustion and dehydration” can be anything from a psychotic breakdown to a Class A overload.
Allan’s crash and burn came six months after the release of the band’s self-titled album – a magnificent work that artfully combined the guitar noise of Jesus and Mary Chain with the orchestral production of Phil Spector. Easily the best album of 2009, Allan, now 31, says it was too much success too quickly.
“My head just wasn’t in the right place. I was exaggerating all the bad things about success,” he says. “I had been a professional footballer all my life [he played for Cowdenbeath and other Scottish league teams] and while most people who want to be in a rock band practise for a few years and learn how to write songs, all the songs on the first album were my very first attempts.
“One moment I was on the dole, the next I was on the front cover of music magazines. In fact, I remember signing on one day and producing a newspaper with mention of my name in it to the woman behind the counter. She hadn’t believed me when I told her I was in a rock band.”
What distinguished the first Glasvegas album was how, despite lyrically coming across as particularly bleak, it was so sonically extravagant. Allan wrote about racial murder ( Flowers and Football Tops), absentee fathers ( Daddy's Gone) and heroic social workers ( Geraldine).
"All music is influenced by your environment," he says. "I wrote those songs while on the dole in Glasgow and I honestly never knew they would end up on the record – or even that there would be a record. The press said they were 'theme' songs but it was what I saw happening around me. I was never into the usual sort of 'escapist' lyrics – I prefer real events. Flowers and Football Topsis about a true story – a teenager in Glasgow was stabbed to death then drenched in petrol and set alight near where I lived. I just couldn't shake that story off."
He found himself feted by the indie gods and traipsing from one award ceremony to the next – and it didn’t sit well with him. A desperately shy and ferociously intelligent character, Allan found “the road” hard going and on a Kings Of Leon tour in the US he became strangely attached to two goldfish.
"My sister gave them to me as a birthday present and I think I was going a bit mad at the time with the constant touring. I remember taking the goldfish to the zoo in Chicago with me and there's some video footage of me somewhere on the 33rd floor of a hotel singing The Carpenters' Close To Youto them. Yeah, that was strange alright."
He went missing for a week in September 2009. He was supposed to show up at the Mercury Music Prize Awards (Glasvegas had been nominated) but neither bandmates, management nor label could get in touch with him.
“I wasn’t being disrespectful to the Mercury, I would have loved to have been there – I used to love sports day at school,” he says. “It’s just I was supposed to fly down to London to meet up with the rest of the band but at the airport I just decided to go and visit a friend in New York instead. The problem was I had no mobile phone – so no one could get in touch with me.
“The worst part of that, though, was my father going down to his local shop in Glasgow. The headline on one of the newspapers was ‘Glasvegas singer is missing for past five days’ and they had this on the billboard thing outside the shop. He was really upset. But I got in touch with everyone and now I do have my own mobile phone.”
TO RECORD THE follow-up album, Allan decided to write it well away from Glasgow.
“I wanted somewhere completely different and when we were touring around the US I remembered getting off the bus in Santa Monica one time and having the feeling it would be a great place to write an album. I wanted to see what would happen if you took a person out of his natural environment – and how that would effect the music. So I hassled my manager for ages and eventually we got this big beach house and moved in for a few months. I remember it being horrendously expensive so feeling under pressure to come up with the songs quickly.”
Endless strolls at night on Santa Monica beach helped him get over the overdose, and over the goldfish. “I had gone from being a nobody on the dole to a somebody and this was the first time I had to slowly and surely put myself back together,” he says.
“As a rock star you can think of yourself as important but when we went into Los Angeles you’d find yourself sitting beside Dustin Hoffman in a restaurant. And then you think of all the darkness of the rock ’n’ roll persona and how certain people are attracted to and fascinated by that. I remember walking along that beach – and it was a place of such natural beauty – and asking myself why I wanted to be in a band in the first place and trying to get back to the start again somehow. And it’s a funny thing but places of great natural beauty can make you very sad – there had been heartbreak in my life and that’s what came out on the album.”
Entitled Euphoric /// Heartbreak \\\, Allen explains the slashes are all important as they represent "the ascent, the crest of a wave and then the crash". Eschewing the bruised social commentary of its predecessor it's just as musically lush but a lot more introspective lyrically.
“There was a lot of uncertainty because the canvas was so blank,” he says. “But then I starting digging very deep – maybe in an unhealthy way – and then I got myself into this position . . . it’s hard to explain but it’s like as if everything around you goes silent, the sort of feeling I used to get when I was dribbling around players as a footballer, and the songs just came.
“ I really felt a lot less pressure with this one because now we’re sort of an established band – with the first one we just had no idea what was going to happen.”
Regret and contrition bleed out of almost every track. “They’re very personal, they’re very honest, but I felt that was the only way,” says Allan. “You’ve probably gathered by now that I’m a bit impressionable and the songs here are from the last two to three years when I was at my most impressionable. I did a lot and I learnt a lot. And I think the title of the album says it all.”
Euphoric /// Heartbreak \\\is out now
