Interviews

The Glitterati

• 15th Dec 2009

Leeds outfit The Glitterati have recently recorded their second album, Are you one of us?, due out February 2010. Glasswerk caught up with the band during their recent UK tour supporting W.A.S.P.

How has the tour been so far?

It’s been really good. The gigs have been great and they get better, the first few songs people look at like you like a dog that’s being shown a card trick, but by the end of the set people have been receiving us really warmly.

What are W.A.S.P. like to tour with?

We’ve been told, in the nicest possible way, to keep our distance, we’ve spent a bit of time with their crew though, and they seem like really nice guys, they’ve been very accommodating to us.

Do you prefer live shows over recording?

They’re quite different challenges, the live thing is what it’s all about […] there’s nothing more validating or equally damning than getting up on stage and having people loving it or hating it. If we were going on an eighteen-month tour and you asked us on week one we’d say yeah, we prefer playing live, if you asked us at the end we’d be like, yeah, we really prefer being in the studio […] They’ve both got their positives and they’ve both got their negatives […] we make a conscious effort to try and get as much out of all of it as we possibly can really […] and the heavy eyes and sighs I’ve been hearing all day show that we’ve been getting as much out of it as we possibly can.

What can we expect from the new album?

It’s the album we wanted to do the first time around. I think we’ve finally found our sound, our groove […] [for the first album] we went in to work with a massive producer; no matter how much you tell yourself you’re not going to be intimidated, inevitably there’s a certain amount of deference when you’re working with someone as big as Mike [Clink], we learned a ton from him, it was an invaluable experience, but working with Matt on this second record was a much more collaborative experience; it was a bunch of guys together just trying to make a rocking record. It’s my favourite recording experience so far. We’ve made the record we wanted to make.

You’re quite a retro band, in that you’ve got a simple guitar, bass drums set-up; what do you think of all the synth bands out today?

I don’t personally have an issue with synth bands, i think there’s room for everybody. I got into playing guitar at a time of my life, as a kid, when musicality became an option for me, there was just no way I could afford a keyboard, there was no way that was an option for me, I went to a little music shop on the edge of town and bought a sixty quid guitar, which wasn’t a lot, but it was enough to make me feel like I could do something creatively. Maybe it’s a working class thing but I think it’s just a lot of rich kids buying keyboards.

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