Stage Stories: Glass Animals look back on their most legendary live performances in an interview

Music

Ticketmaster Germany / 12.09.2024

Interview

From performing in front of 100,000 people at Lollapalooza in Chicago to being crammed with 11-year-olds, Glass Animals tell us about their most memorable concert stories.

Photo: Frank Hoensch / Redferns

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As we Dave Bayley and Drew MacFarlanethe singer and guitarist of Glass Animals, for an interview via Zoom, their energy is just as infectious in the video call as their music. The answers are so relaxed that you feel like you’re meeting old school friends.

With their globally successful band Glass Animals, both musicians have played in front of over 100,000 people, were nominated for the prestigious Mercury Prize for their second album and are currently on their biggest tour to date around the world to promote their neues Album „I LOVE YOU SO F***ING MUCH“ to present to their fans.

The ten new songs show the constant development of the unique sound of the Glass Animals. Quartet from Oxford has no plans to slow down in 2024 – especially not on the live stages of the world. In an interview with Ticketmaster, the band takes us on a journey through their best, worst and wildest concert stories.

The gig that made you want to make music

Drew: I don’t know if there’s a particular gig for me, but my mother always took us to church. When I was a kid, I sang in church and played the organ. So I just did that a lot. That was kind of the beginning of music for me, and it went on from there. Yes, that’s a bit of a strange answer.

Would you go back and play music in the church?

Drew: That’s a good question. Maybe when I’m much, much, much older – say in my 70s – I can imagine that being a really nice way to make music when you’re retired. But probably not now.

Dave: Nothing against the church musicians, they’re so good! I just don’t know if we’d have the time. My first concert was Bloc Party. I remember being in awe of live music because that was my first proper concert. I’d been to a pub concert with my mum as a kid. But Bloc Party was the first concert I went to in London with my friends – with no adults – I think I was 13. It was at Brixton Academy and I just thought, ‘Wow, music is powerful. The sense of togetherness in that room is amazing’. I loved it. I don’t know if it made me want to be on stage or anything. It just showed me that live music is a damn beautiful thing.

The first own concerts

Dave: We had a few – I don’t know how to describe it – false starts? A friend of ours had a 16th birthday party and he asked us if we would play something. It was very different. You [Drew] have sung.

Drew: We played covers of The Strokes. We were attacked.

Dave: I don’t know how good we were, but we got through. It was a bad start. But then we didn’t play for ages. The next gig was in the pub opposite my house. It was f*cking awful.

Why would you describe it as “f*cking awful”?

Dave: I think we didn’t have enough music. And there wasn’t really anyone there because we were the first of five bands. And we didn’t have any space because we were the first of five bands – I remember Joe sitting on the floor playing a drum machine. It was nerve-racking. And we hadn’t mixed anything, we hadn’t really told the sound guy what was going on. Then when the guitar came in, it was insanely loud and caused physical pain to everyone in the room. A steep learning curve.

The smallest concert

Dave: I remember we played in Leeds and nobody had bought tickets for the show. That was our first tour of England. And we had a little snack which was just hummus and flatbread – basically just enough food for us – but they couldn’t get it for us because we hadn’t sold any tickets. That was quite a sad moment, wasn’t it? We all thought we were going back to our normal jobs at that point.

Drew: We also had a show in Bristol where the only person in the audience was a guy called Jeff – he was known as Big Jeff. He went to all the festivals and smaller band gigs in the area and he was always right at the front moshing. So at our gig in Bristol there was no audience at all except for this guy, Big Jeff, who was literally one foot in front of us in a tiny room moshing as hard as he could.

The best concert

Drew: I think my favorite shows are probably the Red Rocks shows. It’s an outdoor amphitheater in the mountains of Colorado overlooking Denver. There’s always something special about those shows – there were some really spectacular moments, like when we got hit by a huge storm during our set and the whole venue shut down. There’s a video of that on YouTube.

Dave: Yes, I said the word “thunder” and then lightning struck the stage. I felt like Zeus.

Drew: People thought we staged it! It was unbelievable… Then we were taken off the stage.

Dave: I’ve had a lot of favorites over the years, for different reasons. My favorites are the ones that kind of surprise you. We played in Oklahoma one time or something, and we pulled up to the venue on the bus, which was like a dead-end street on the outskirts of town. And this little kid comes out and says, “Hey guys! Welcome to the show!” He had just booked us to play in this garage. I don’t know how he did it, but our booking agent booked us this show in this garage. And he didn’t have a stage—there was just one speaker and a little light. It was very family-friendly, but it rocked.

Drew: It was wild.

The biggest appearance

Dave: At Lollapalooza in Chicago, we opened for Paul McCartney and someone said there were over 100,000 people in front of us at that point. Which is pretty scary. It was also the last night of the tour and we were so tired. But the energy from everyone kept us going. Our biggest headline show was in Kansas City, in front of about 20,000 people. But this tour is going to top that.

The worst show

Dave: There was a show in Mexico where they didn’t tell us they had gotten us pyrotechnics. And then I was standing over this flamethrower – I thought I was going to die – and when it went off, it was so loud and the flames just missed the insides of my thighs. Some EDM act from the night before had left $10,000 worth of pyrotechnics. They asked our tour manager, Tom Allen, if we wanted to go, and he said, “Absolutely, but I have to push the button…”

The strangest performance

Dave: We played at a house party in Kansas City, and it was weird because it was a bunch of 11-year-olds at a birthday party. And we just got booed.

Drew: They tried to get us to wear hats and throw sunglasses at us, and there was a stage invasion at the end. All the kids stormed the stage and tried to take our instruments and play them, which is very cute, but also quite confusing. I don’t know how that happened, but basically we drove up to a house in a tour bus again, kind of like in Oklahoma. I think I spent the whole gig trying to get the keyboard to work. I finally got it to work, and then we stopped.

From the English original (discover.ticketmaster.co.uk) translated by Dorjana Richter.

If you haven’t had enough of the band yet: Glass Animals are touring Germany this year. The last tickets and resale tickets are available at Ticketmaster.

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