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It'd
been far too long since we last caught up with the lads from Glyder and
so when we found out they were heading across the waters to our sunny
shores again, we jumped at the opportunity to catch up with them again.
Shortly before their sound check we nabbed lead singer Tony Cullen to
chew over the cud of old
rock n' roll.
MM - How's the tour
with Y&T going?
Tony - Last nights gig was good. We
were on really early which was a bit unexpected and we actually started
at 7.25 pm, with the doors opening at 7.00 pm so it was just starting to
fill up as our set was getting into the swing of things. It was a
good set though and although it's just a short set as we've only got
half an hour we try to keep it pumping with the heavier stuff.
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MM
- What made you decide to release the new EP at this point in
your career?
Tony - We just did it for a number of reasons really, we
wanted to use up the songs that we had written from before.
There's nothing that we would have put on the third album on it,
it was material we had left over from our first and second
albums that didn't get used. We really wanted to have them
recorded in a decent quality. It was a case of using
those tracks and also something to tide us over between the
second album and the third album. Something to bridge the
gap. Now these songs are done we can move on to the third
album. |
MM
- So have you had a chance to think about how the third album might go?
Tony - Oh yeh, actually we're busy writing it at the moment.
We all have bits of songs that we've written individually and now we're
in the process of bringing them all together so we can all have input on
other people's songs and we'll see what happens.
MM
- Do you know what direction the new album might go in or is it too
early to say?
Tony - So far I think it's going to be heavier, loads of riffs,
there's some really great riffs and Pete's coming up with some really
great riffs at the minute, overall it sounds good. I think there's
going to be a few crackers on it, which is great.
MM
- Some of the songs on the EP were quite different to the songs you have
on the first two albums, perhaps moving away from the Thin Lizzy
influence?
Tony - Well we do get that comparison a lot
because we do have that kind of sound and line-up, plus we worked with
Chris (Tsangarides) for the first album and Chris has that sound, it's
just how he works. He does a lot with Y&T as well, all the
harmony guitar bits and everything. The new album is going to go
that way again. The songs on the EP are a bit all over the place
to be honest, I was surprised at the great reaction we've had to it.
It doesn't sound like an album would sound, there's no running
production or theme to the songs. Each song was individually done.
It's been received so well though that I think the third album might
strike a little bit more in that direction as well. Songs like
'Love Never Dies' and songs that are that little bit heavier and have a
different kind of sound to our usual sound. Obviously they're
still going to sound like Glyder as well though.
The EP was just something we decided to try and we weren't expecting too
much from it, whatever it did it did and we would be pleased with that,
we just wanted the songs recorded and out there. It seems to be
going as well as the albums to be honest which is great. Whatever
we did with it seems to have worked.
MM
- It's always a shame when you have great songs but for whatever reason
they don't quite fit in with what you're putting on an album. You
don't want to just shelve them away so it's great you've managed to find
this home for them.
Tony - Yes because we did have some songs that for whatever
reason didn't fit in or just weren't up to scratch at that time so we
never really recorded them properly. Some of them were just half
written ideas and stuff, who knows some of the others might come into
play again some time in the future. We'll just have to wait and
see I suppose.
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MM
- I believe you released the new EP yourselves?
Tony - Yes we just released it via
the website, it wasn't a proper release as such, it won't be in
the record stores and such, it's just available from our
website. We wanted to do it that way to keep it tight and if you
want to get it you can get in touch with ourselves as we take
care of all the website and stuff ourselves. So if you get
in touch directly with us we'll post it out.
MM
- Yes I have noticed you seem like a band that like to keep
everything in house as far as possible.
Tony - Yes we do pretty much
everything ourselves. I think it's the only way to do it
these days to be honest. You might get signed to a label
of whatever size and they might throw money at you for the short
term but after that you're just going to get lost in the shuffle
of 20 or 30 bands that they have. Doing it all yourself
means you're on top of it yourself. Someone else isn't
going to do it all for you if they have nothing to gain from it,
we're doing it because we love doing it and we're having fun,
although we still have to live as well. You still have to
have somewhere to sleep at the end of it all so we're
trying to make it work ourselves.
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MM
- Well it definitely seems to be working for you.
Tony - Yeh well again it's getting better
and better. When I think what we were doing a year or two years
ago to what we're doing now, this year has been so busy for us, we've
been away a lot on tour. We've done a lot of gigs and some
festivals and next year looks like it's going to be great as well.
Hopefully we'll get a go at some of the festivals that are coming in for
next year. it'd be great to get on the festival circuit again next
year because they're the best thing for raising your profile.
Regardless of what festival it is, when you're playing a festival your
name is on all the posters and featured in all the magazines so people
see your name everywhere all the time, that's the key to it all.
MM
- You played the mighty Sweden Rock Festival earlier this year.
Tony - Yes that was a great gig, it was
really really enjoyable. We were playing with Dio in Stockholm on
the Thursday or Friday and then we drove down to Sweden Rock and played
there which was great. The whole weekend was great. I
thought just playing with Dio was fantastic and then we went down to
play the festival in a tent and the place was jammed packed for us.
There were bands on every stage but all those people had come to see us
in the tent, it felt great. We'd love to get back to Sweden as
Sweden seems to be a pretty good spot for us. We've done a bit of
work over there this year and hopefully we'll get back there again next
year.
MM
- Have you guys still got the day jobs to go to as well?
Tony - Yes, when we go home we're straight
back into the day jobs. We're lucky because we do have the kind of
day jobs that allow us to do this. I was lucky in that I work with
my brother as a car mechanic. When I left school he was just
starting up his own business so I went straight in with him, obviously
it was only something that I meant to do for a few months but then here
we are a few years later and I'm still fucking doing it! (laughs).
That's just the way it goes though. Davy does a bit of work in a
hotel nearby where we live and Pete does a bit work as a mechanic.
We're all doing bits and pieces because it allows us to walk away from
it all when we need to and when the opportunity comes to go out on tour
or do an album we can. We're really lucky in that sense.
Hopefully next year we'll see the end of that and we'll be able to make
a living out of our music. Basically when you're on the road
you're literally living from day to day, if you're lucky they'll give
you a drink.
MM
- You've had quite a few high profile supporting slots over the past
couple of years, what's been some of the highlights?
Tony - They've been great. The good
thing about getting a high profile support slot is that you get to play
in proper venues, we've had enough of playing all the little shitty
dingy ones squashed into a little room then walking straight out on
stage. You get maximum exposure. If we weren't playing here
tonight and were playing a little backstreet pub somewhere you don't
know how many people would turn out to see you and it could end up
costing you to do that gig. At least with this gig it doesn't cost
us anything and it's a ready made crowd to a certain extent so we just
have to try and impress them. That's what we try to do, to impress
the crowds with our show every night.
Thunder was fantastic, but my favourite was Dio because he's just such a
fucking legend. Thunder was great, especially the English date
with Thunder that we did because we were playing to 2,000 - 3,000 people
there which was really good. We also did Thin Lizzy in Ireland
which again was good for us, especially meeting the band and obviously
because we're ourselves big Thin Lizzy fans it felt quite an honour.
It's been fantastic and sometimes you forget and have to really think
about what you've done and how far you've come. There's so many
great memories from all that. Fish was brilliant too, the whole
tour was probably the best tour we've ever done. The Fish
audiences are just so nice, there's no arse-holes at all.
Fish and the band were just so friendly and would have done anything for
us. There was no pressure on us from them at all, they even let us
use their back-line and the Fish drum-kit, it was amazing because that
never really happens where you're allowed to use the same drum-kit as
the main band. It's the best way of having it though, there was
none of this fucking rock star shit, that kind of bull-shit doesn't
really cut with any of us anyway. Fish were brilliant though,
absolutely fantastic, we had such a great time out with them.
MM
- Yes the band (Glyder) do have a bit of a reputation for being quite
straight talking.
Tony - Well you can dance yourself around someone all you want
but it's not going to get you anywhere so what's the point, you're just
wasting other people's time. We prefer to get to the point.
MM
- Has there been any low points so far?
Tony - Well sometimes it gets hard when you get home and you're
trying to write songs and work on new songs and you still have to get up
and go out to work. For example I get home from work at around
6.00 pm and I barely get a chance to eat a bit of dinner before I'm down
to Pete's garage to rehearse. We rehearse a lot and we work on the
music a lot, maybe for 2 hours a night or something. By the time
you get home you're just fit for bed, so doing that all the time really
does your head in. Plus the right gigs might not be coming in for
you. You could be at home for 3 or 4 months and you might not be
getting that many songs done.
Basically
you're not doing what you want to be doing and at times you just
want to say ... for fucks sake man ... you might not be making
enough money from your job to pay the bills and so you're
constantly trying to catch up on everything. There's not
really any kind of comfort zone when you're home from tour.
At least when you're out on tour you can sit back and say you're
going to be doing this for 4 or 5 weeks. But when you go home it
does tend to be a little bit of a struggle, but it's worth it.
If you can do this and make some kind of wage out of it, I'm not
talking about fucking millionaires, just a decent wage out of it
then that would be a dream
come true. Then you could pack in the day job and just go
home and concentrate on writing songs and work in the studio or
whatever all the time. To be able to do that, that
would be the perfect scenario, so who knows, maybe next year. |
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After
the tour with Y&T we go to Spain for 2 weeks then we go home for
about a week before we go out to India to headline a gig over there to
10,000 people. That will be our biggest gig to date and it will be
all to our own people. I think that's fucking amazing and I just
can't get my head around it. That's going to be really
interesting. Everyone keeps telling us not to drink the water but
I'm sure as long as we don't drink the water we'll be OK.
Then when we come back from India we've got a festival in Wales coming
up and we're going to do a little gig in Dublin to launch the EP that we
have out. Actually we were talking to a promoter last night about
maybe doing a gig in Belfast as well so we'll see what happens.
That will keep us busy and then we're trying to get the next studio
album, the third album ready for a release at the beginning of next
year. That's what we're pushing for, the beginning of next year so
that's what we're aiming for.
MM - That's the Hard Rock Hell Festival in Wales isn't it?
Tony - Yes, the line-up for that looks fantastic, it's going to
be great. We were just playing a festival in France last week
actually, it was great. Life's mad though, we were talking last
night about stuff and I'd completely forgotten we'd been in France the
week before, it's so hectic at time. Actually we had to drive out
the day the fire happened in the tunnel so we were delayed with that,
then we had a blow out on the van just outside of Coventry. It was
a nightmare we had to quickly go out and buy two new tires. We
eventually got into France about 4 o' clock in the morning and we had to
kip in the van until we could check into our rooms. It was such a
nightmare. Once we got caught up on ourselves it was good.
You know how you always say things come in three's? Well we were
thinking we'd got stuck at the tunnel and had the blow out and were
wondering what the third thing would be, then when we finally got on
stage and then on the first song, round about the second chorus we heard
this thing go bang and we had no bass guitar. The box had some
dodgy wiring and just blew, so that was our three things!
(laughs).
MM - The EP has John Mulrooney on keyboards?
Tony - Yeh Fist, we all just call him Fist. He's a great guy
and that's what he does, he plays the keyboards. He's going to be
doing Hard Rock Hell with us actually and he's also going to be doing
the gig in Dublin with us. It's going to be interesting as that
will be our first time playing with a live keyboard. It will be
interesting to see how that works out. I'm kind of afraid of
keyboards in a band to be honest with you. I don't mind if it's
the kind of thing Purple did, but if it's just that widdly widdly kind
of shit ... (laughs).
MM - Might we see the keyboards featuring a bit more in your songs in
future?
Tony - Well we've got some keyboards on both our first and second
albums already. Chris played keyboards on the first album and Andy
played the keyboards on the second album when he was doing the mixing of
it. Fist did it on this release and I think we'll probably get
Fist in again for the third album because that's what he does. He
does some really good keyboards bits.
MM - Do you ever foresee a time when you might have a keyboard player
full time some in the future?
Tony - Oh I don't know about that, maybe just for big gigs, for
the smaller gigs I think we'll keep it just the four of us.
There's not enough room in the van! (laughs). Keyboards take up a
lot of space you know.
*MM - With that we say our farewells and make our way up to the main
hall so the guys can carry out their sound check. A review of that
nights performance will follow shortly so keep checking back. |