From medical textbooks to Paul Epworth’s recording studio, Rebekah Rennick chats to Dave Bayley of Glass Animals about their Oxford musical upbringing and eating Annie Clark's dinner
Glass Animals fall into the mystical category of musicians that appear to have materialised overnight. This Oxford quartet have quickly evolved from the condensed, trembling cauldron that is their bubbling debut, and as the telephone clicks to connect with lead vocalist Dave Bayley it’s clear that they certainly have, and continue to connect with us from an elusive place; somewhere on the cusp of the Canadian border to be precise. “It’s quite beautiful except the fact I’m standing in a Walmart parking lot!”While it appears that these four childhood chums have descended upon the musical hemisphere in one massive gloop of whimsical indie-rock, Bayley didn’t fine-tune his musical inclinations in the classical sense at university. He, instead, spent many sleepless nights during his medical degree bringing alive the melodies that were circling around his head “It was kind of impossible for me to avoid it. Once I started making music and thinking about music I found myself having ideas. The ideas wouldn’t really stop, I couldn’t get a break from the them” he explains.Bayley’s husky vocals give Glass Animals’ tracks the grainy texture that rustles and whispers in your ear, while his lyricism slithers and oozes, dripping with obscurity at the best of time. Otwo wondered did his medicinal background seep into his lyrical structuring in any way? “Making music is such a different process. I kind of feel music is about breaking every single rule and doing Medicine is about following every single rule that you’ve learnt. The lyrics, yeah it definitely played a part in those.” He contemplates “I was really interested in psychiatry and how the brain works so I spent a lot of time speaking to patients who had quite severe mental disorders and they always had acute perspectives on the world. I was always trying to get into their heads to see how they viewed the world. I guess those stories definite play a part.“Growing up within the cultural and influential hub of Oxford instinctively played an important role in shaping the band’s early ideas of music “I think the music scene in Oxford is kind of dwindling a bit now. There was a great club called ‘The Zodiac’ that was owned in part by Radiohead & Supergrass. They’d put on some local band almost every single night. I don’t really know how they made money because sometimes there used to be just four people in the crowd. We’d go there every night no matter who was on and that’s how we came to love live music and that a live show could be something really different” he muses.One particular performance sticks out, not just for the electricity that projected from this now reputable quintet but the impression it left upon their minds “I remember the first time that we saw Foals and there pretty much was only twelve people in the room; like Foals, us and some drunk guy. They still had all of this energy and doing these extended groove tracks and it taught us a lot about live music and that particular scene.”Since then, Glass Animals have continuously returned to music throughout their the years; “We always kept calling each other about new music and we’d always go visit each other. I remember going to visit Joe in Brighton a lot; there’s a really great music scene down there, and he’d come up to London quite a lot and we’d go clubbing and see dance music. We never played until we got a bit bored at university”