Discovering The World Is Weird - Through Fortune Tellers With Sausage Candles

"I just spotted that!" Glass Animals frontman Dave Bayley points at one of his band's framed gold records on a wall inside Caroline HQ, South Melbourne. "Madness!" The Oxford quartet's breakthrough single Gooey achieved gold status in Australia earlier this year and Bayley recalls the day Glass Animals were presented with this certification. "It was so nice! It was a mental day: we had finished our album [How To Be A Human Being], had our first-ever BBC [Radio] 1 interview... and then we walked out and someone was there with our gold discs! It was the most mind-blowing day! And I cried a little bit... And just finishing the record as well was just, like - it was quite an emotional record; it was weird kinda writing about personal things, which we'd never really done properly before."

During a previous interview with this scribe back in 2014, Bayley admitted, "I'm a bit scared about writing very honest things... Maybe for the next record I can be a bit more blunt." So how did he go? "[I] tried in this one, yeah," Bayley reveals. "Some of it's made up, some of it's autobiographical - I'm not gonna say what's what - I like that mystery."

Bayley is dressed casually in faded jeans and a bright, coral-coloured windcheater. He's quietly spoken and his accent is quite posh (so much so that it comes as a shock if he drops an F-bomb). Sitting next to him on the couch is bassist/keyboardist Ed Irwin-Singer, who's sporting a black shirt, tan jacket and jeans combo. Irwin-Singer has really bright blue eyes. So where did they hang their framed gold records? Bayley offers, "I gave mine to my mum." Irwin-Singer dobs in their drummer, "Joe [Seaward]'s is in his loo... That's really funny."

"It was tricky! But it all came flooding back; it was really weird. So I've decided to quit music and go back to medical school." 

"Yeah, my mum put hers in the entrance," Bayley continues. "As you walk into the house, it's there! [Laughs] It's really embarrassing." She must be really proud. "Yeah, she's sweet," he allows. That's gotta be one of hardest things about touring... "Not seeing mum?" Bayley interjects, chuckling.

Glass Animals played the first of two sold out shows (the second to go on sale) at 170 Russell last night. During the day, they stopped by Kane Hibberd's studio in Cremorne for our cover shoot. Given that Bayley studied medicine, it can't have been the first anatomical model he's come across. "Yeah," the frontman admits. "We had to pull it apart and put it back together." Irwin-Singer laughs, "It was quite hard!" Bayley agrees, "Yeah, it was tricky! But it all came flooding back; it was really weird. So I've decided to quit music and go back to medical school." 

"What!?" Irwin-Singer feigns shock and then Bayley consoles, "Never. No."

While Glass Animals were touring off the back of their debut album Zaba, Bayley became fascinated with the strange conversations they were having with randoms and began recording some of these into his phone. So did these 'subjects' know they were being recorded? "Not always," Irwin-Singer confesses before Bayley jumps in, "I think some of them did... There was a guy talking about giving himself a blow job and how he would, like, wake up every day and try and give himself a blow job and he was [laughs] really weird... On tour you meet a lot of people."

"Yeah," his bandmate concurs, "Either the world is much more weird than I thought it was, or... As a musician and maybe as a foreigner, people feel that they can tell you stuff that they wouldn't say to their friends and family." Bayley says the "good stories" they collated ranged from "heartbreaking" to "just plain weird", "hilarious" to "shocking". These sound bites inspired Bayley to "start making up [his] own characters... sort of incorporating autobiography into that".

"We ended up having to redo a bit of it. It was a bit incriminating," Irwin-Singer observes. Although Bayley confirms "some of it is real", he recognises that they "definitely couldn't have gotten away with" some of it: "we actually had to remove some for the final cut of the record because it was a bit much, yeah."   

"He had this little candle next to him and all these tarot cards and, I dunno, male prostitute just popped into my head."

"People said stuff that they probably wouldn't have said if they knew that it was gonna end up on an album," Irwin-Singer opines.

What about that a dude banging on about sausages at the beginning of Take A Slice? "The sausage guy, yeah," Bayley obliges. "That was a fortune teller... I shouldn't say, but that's a real recording. We went up to this guy to get our fortunes read and this guy was called Jupiter - that was his name, yeah. And we went up to him and someone was cooking some food next door, and I said, 'What is that smell?' And he said, 'Oh, it's a candle. It's, like, my sausage candle.' And it was a very weird thing to say - really weird thing to say - so we all started laughing awkwardly. And I had this idea for a character that was, like, a male prostitute... It was the way that this guy Jupiter was dressed: he was wearing, like, little shorts and a tank top." So you could see the outline of his 'candle'? "Oh, yeah," Bayley chuckles. "And he had this little candle next to him and all these tarot cards and, I dunno, male prostitute just popped into my head."

"You felt seduced by him," Irwin-Singer teases.   

"Yeah, I did," Bayley plays along. "He was very handsome, so I wrote a character based on that idea... That idea came later when I was re-listening to the recording and remembering what was happening, yeah; so all of the kind of character sketches and ideas came after the tour had finished in December," he clarifies. "It was just too busy on the road... Actually writing meaningful stuff can be really tricky on tour."

As soon as Glass Animals returned from their tour, Bayley "locked [himself] away in a studio". "I had so many ideas. I really wanted to get started," he enthuses. "I hadn't made music probably - well, since that Joey Bada$$ track [Lose Control], but that was [done in] one day." So at what stage did Bayley involve the other Glass Animals in the songwriting process? "A week and a half and after that...  I had most of the songs, like, everything was written pretty much," he shares.

"And we were like, 'Dave, what are you doing? Send it to us'," Irwin-Singer jokes. 

The band "went to a friend's wedding in January", Bayley continues, then, upon their return, "Went into the same place together and started kind of breaking [the songs] apart, just developing them further". Glass Animals "just went with the demo" for a couple of the How To Be A Human Being album tracks, which was a departure from the production on this album's predecessor. On creating their "really polished" Zaba set, Bayley reflects, "We were really self-conscious - and we'd never done it before - and we wanted everything to be dead perfect. But what we realised this time around is that you can do all of that, but you end up losing a bit of soul and spontaneity... We're sort of appreciating that rawness and that grittiness in those first takes a lot more."