Interview La La Land: Glass Animals

Glass Animals’ Dave Bayley is playing a voice memo off his phone, plainly titled ‘David 2 New York City’. “Walks to the sidewalk, takes a left, goes to the corner,” begins the recording, and Dave cuts it off. “Can you hear that?” he asks, before recounting the tale. “So this guy was telling me about how he went on a date with this girl that he really liked. First date. They went clubbing on this double date with their two best friends. They left the club and sat in their car, smooching in the backseat, with their friends sitting up front - also smooching. This guy tapped on the window of the driver’s seat and shot the two people in the front. He then pointed the gun at the guy telling the story, pulled the trigger again, and he was out of bullets.”

Everyday conversations with taxi drivers don’t tend to go into such gory detail. Usually it’s the weather, football results, or how Uber’s ruined everything for ‘us cabbies’. Death rarely crops up. But maybe Dave’s just the kind of person it’s easy to emote to. He certainly has his fair share of voice memos. Hundreds of conversations, recorded on the road, became the foundation for ‘How To Be A Human Being’, Glass Animals’ second record. Their first, 2014’s ‘ZABA’, was a Jungle Book-inspired canopy-swinger. This one is far more rooted in reality, though Dave’s imagination managed to have its way.

Back in his school days, one teacher declared on every report card that “Dave is always in La La Land.” Given the fantastical debut album he made decades later, she might have been right. “That really upset me, for some reason,” he remembers. “So I went to see her every Halloween, from the age of eight. I’d knock on the door and go ‘Mrs Brooks, you are evil.’ I was probably dressed as a Power Ranger, maybe a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle.” Terrifying.

Now that it’s his actual job to daydream, Dave has let his imagination run riot. These voice memos didn’t initially have a purpose. He just kept having so many interesting conversations, and his “bad memory” meant that he’d forget them otherwise. “I found it really weird that people were so open,” he admits. “This taxi driver - he tells you a story in this almost light-hearted way, with a smile on his face. These really gut-wrenching, scary stories, told with a kind of cheekiness. That’s one of the things that some of the lyrics have - a cheekiness on the surface.”