INTERVIEW: Glass Animals Talk Children's Books & Charles Darwin

Those English lads of GLASS ANIMALS fame are just about ready to uncage their musical firstborn: 'ZABA', the band's debut LP, due for release on Friday June 6. And it's brilliant.

But before they loose it into the great jungle of the world, frontman Dave Bayley was kind enough to spill his guts to us about children's books, Charles Darwin, and his childhood fascination with collecting critters on the sly.

Dave, whereabouts are you in the world right now?

I am in Oxford in England—pretty much as far away as it gets.

Your debut album drops in about a week’s time—it’s sounding excellent. How would you personally summarise this album, in so many words?

Wow. I’d say it’s a journey, and you’re meant to listen to it from start to finish. So you enter at the beginning and you crawl through this tropical wilderness and come out the other side about forty minutes later. A nice little holiday away from reality.

So do you view it as one singular piece?

It’s not really a singular piece, but each song is meant to fill a gap that the other ones don’t. They’re all meant to convey one piece of work, but they’re all meant to be quite different to each other, whilst still in the same soundscape.

Almost like a musical jigsaw puzzle?

Exactly, yeah. Exactly like a puzzle.

Is there one track in particular that stands out as a highlight for you?

I can’t choose that, that’s like choosing a favourite child.

Everybody’s got one though.

Yeah, do they? They’re all precious to me… I can’t choose one.

No worries. So the title of the album, ‘ZABA’, is a reference to the children’s book ‘The Zabajaba Jungle’ by William Steig. What kind of inspiration did that book have for the album?

It was very much the way that a lot of children’s books are set up, and the way they’re presented. It’s the fact that you open it up and on the first page it’s… so, in the ‘Zabajaba Jungle’ you open up the first page and it’s a boy sitting in a hammock and he’s getting eaten by snakes, and you flip the page over and he’s getting eaten by monsters, and you flip the page over and he runs away and flies away on a butterfly, and you flip the page over and he’s captured by baboons—and a different thing happens on each page but it’s all in the same weird forest. And I thought it would be cool to structure a record like that, where it’s all a different page or a different chapter but they all kind of exist in this one weird land.

The album’s referenced as having been inspired by Kanye West and Charles Darwin—two geniuses in their own right, but a counterintuitive pair. I’m not sure they’ve ever been used in the same sentence before. In what ways did each influence the album?

Well Kanye I think is extremely experimental in the way he approaches music. He has no fear, no boundaries really, he just goes in and does whatever he wants to do and comes out with something pretty crazy. Especially on his latest record ‘Yeezus’: it’s pretty experimental, the arrangements and the production and the songwriting, but at the same time manages to be really mainstream and really catchy and accessible. And that’s always the goal.

Would you say that’s the album that you relate to the most with ‘ZABA’? Out of Kanye’s albums I mean?

No, I don’t think so. I think there are definitely other records I relate to a lot more than ‘Yeezus’ (laughs) which is a pretty intense record. It’s good, I like it a lot, but it’s definitely not one that ‘ZABA’ relates to much. It probably relates more strongly to older hip-hop records that I like, like ‘The Chronic’ by Dr Dre and some old kraut-rock records that I listened to a lot before making the album.

And Charles Darwin (laughs)—I just think he’s an amazing guy. He has this amazing ability to see simple patterns in things, and I think that’s what was very inspiring. I read an excerpt of his diaries and just the way he writes and the way he draws out these ideas I thought was really interesting.

I’m sure the Darwin influence ties into this next one a bit: the themes of nature and humanity’s place in nature that kind of backlight the album. What’s the significance of these ideas for you?

For me I spent a lot of my childhood out in nature. I lived in a very rural area—in a forest really—and I used to catch animals and keep them in little terrariums, and I always wanted lots of pets but I never had any real pets just little animals that I’d caught and kept in my house under my kitchen table where my parents wouldn’t find them. So I guess it just brings me back to my youth. And then more recently while we were working on the record I was spending a lot of time outside again because that’s where our rehearsal space is, out in the middle of the forest. So I was kind of going back to that headspace quite a lot.

Well that theme of youthfulness and childhood, that’s another kind of constant throughout the album isn’t it?

Yeah I think it is. I’m not totally sure why to be honest (laughs). Again I think it might come back to being in that forest-y headspace again that brings me back to my youth.

So the stop-motion, claymation video for ‘Pools’: kind of like a heavy trip meets the golden era of kid’s shows. It’s equal parts creepy and brilliant, and also one of those rare videos that adds a whole new level to the track. What was the inspiration or concept behind that video? Was that your idea?

Well we always work on the concept for our videos—most of our videos, not for the ‘Gooey’ video actually—but for most of our videos we work on the concept with the same guy, called Rafael Bonilla. And he’s just got a really interesting mind; his mind works in a really bizarre way. Actually the way I found about him is Joe, our drummer, showed me one of his videos and it had all of these weird animals in it that I’d seen in this really obscure book that I’d found—it was like a 17^th century book, and it was predicting all the animals that would exist in the year 2000—and he had all these weird animals in his short film. And I thought “this guy is on a similar wavelength to us”. So we start working on the film, and we just discuss what the song is about and some themes we want to see within the film and he comes back with a plot, and we work on the plot with him until we have something that we like. And then he’ll do it for us.

It seems like the kind of project that would’ve taken a lot of work and time. Did you have much involvement in the actual process of realising it?

No, not in actually making the little dudes out of clay, he did that himself. But he does it so quickly—it took him only a couple of weeks I think, like three weeks. He’s pretty efficient.

So finally, this album’s going to be released to the world pretty soon. You guys were out here in Australia quite recently, but in the light of this album release is there any plans to come back out this way anytime soon?

There are plans, yeah. I can’t tell you the exact plans, but we are gonna be coming back—I think it’ll be your summer. That’s all I can say.

Doesn’t really narrow it down for us. That’s good, nice and mysterious.

Yeah sorry I can’t tell you. But I really can’t wait to come back, I had a lot of fun last time.

Was that your first time out here?

Yeah, I hadn’t been to Australia before. I hadn’t travelled too much until being in a band, and now I travel all the time, which is great fun. Jetlag is a serious bitch though (laughs)

Words by Gavin Butler

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