Word: allan
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...hard to pigeonhole Glasvegas. While Britain's music scene is currently awash with spattered Day-Glo clothing and hipster aloofness, the band of the moment dress in black and embrace their emotions with astonishing honesty. But what's this cream-colored cocktail in the hand of lead singer James Allan as he sits - black shoes, black Ray-Bans, black vertical hair - in the windowless bar of a posh London hotel? "Hey, don't box me!" says Allan, with a smile as unexpected as the banana breeze he's sipping...
...Allan and his band are making a habit of defying preconceptions. While the soundtrack to 2008 is all jangling indie guitars and retro '80s bleeping, the Scottish band's much heralded debut album, released on Sept. 8, boasts a mile-high Phil Spector-style "wall of sound" built - as it was by fellow Glaswegians the Jesus and Mary Chain - with brooding, layered guitars and pounding rhythms. Those expansive, girl-group arrangements are the epic backdrops to Glasvegas' brave and brutal lyrics. "Where Spector came from I guess is quite a good place to go if you want to land some...
...tackling gang fights, imprisonment and infidelity, Allan's lyrics are more akin to Johnny Cash than the Klaxons. Current single Daddy's Gone is a stark rebuke from son to absentee father: "I won't be the lonely one/ Sitting on my own and sad/ A 50-year-old reminiscing what I had." The schoolyard taunt is made all the more poignant by harmonies soaring free from a Ronettes-style melody...
...long way from the band's roots in the hard-scrabble streets of Glasgow's East End. Allan, his cousin Rab (guitar), Paul Donoghue (bass) and Caroline McKay (drums) hail from Dalmarnock, a gritty neighborhood where male life expectancy is just 58 years, almost two decades below the British average. The hardest gig, Allan says, was his first, in front of his mother. "Picking up a guitar in the first place was braver than any of the songs that I wrote," says Allan, a semiprofessional footballer until the band took off. "When you're a kid, drinking, playing football...
...much-hated editor who supervised the newspaper's standards of word choice, and who personifies the tyrannical, pretentious side of the Times. (The inside joke here is that the victim, Theodore Ratnoff, is portrayed as a tall and handsome strapping blond, while the real editor of standards, Allan Siegal, was short and heroically rotund.) His body is discovered with a telling item stuck into his chest: a newspaper spike, the symbol of days gone by, when an editor rejecting copy would spike it on a metal spire atop one's desk. The smart-alecky reporter assigned to cover the crime...