For most bands and most record labels, trekking to the wilds of Eastern Europe to record a Christmas album would be a project that would remain filed under 'Nice idea, but...' Glasvegas, however, are not your ordinary guitar band.
Glasvegas (from left): Rab Allan, Paul Donoghue, James Allan and Caroline McKay.
Little more than a year ago, Glasvegas were just another underground band with a bit of a buzz among those in the know. The release of the band's third single, 'Daddy's Gone', in November 2007 changed everything for cousins James and Rab Allan, bassist Paul Donoghue and drummer Caroline McKay. By the dawn of 2008, Glasvegas became the subject of a good old‑fashioned major‑label scrap, and since signing to Columbia in February, they've enjoyed sold‑out tours across Europe and the US, the BBC Electric Proms with Oasis, two top 20 singles, a slew of prestigious summer festival slots and a gold‑certified album that debuted at number two in September.
Yet in press interviews, frontman and songsmith James Allan didn't seem interested in talking about that record. His excitement was focused on the band's next project: a mini‑album of Christmas‑themed songs called A Snowflake Fell (And It Felt Like A Kiss), to be recorded in Transylvania.
"James used to talk about the Christmas record on and off since maybe about a year ago,” says Rab Allan, Glasvegas' lead guitarist. "And then once the record companies got involved we told them all. We told them all we wanted to do a Christmas album, and they all agreed and said 'Yeah, that's fine', but I think Columbia thought we were kidding them, to be honest, because when we turned round and said, 'Have you booked the tickets for Transylvania yet?', they seemed quite surprised!”
Against The Clock
The bulk of A Snowflake Fell was tracked in this room at the citadel in Brasov, Transylvania.
Because of a tight gigging schedule, time was against the record even getting off the starting block. In the end, two of the six tracks — 'Cruel Moon' and 'Please Come Back Home' — were laid down in early October at Electric Lady Studio A in New York with Rich Costey, who had produced the debut record and would have joined them in Transylvania if he hadn't had other projects already swamping his in‑tray.
"The LP was a thought‑out, timely affair, mostly using material that they had been touring with,” explains Costey. "As a result, they were already comfortable with the songs, as was I, so it was more a matter of crafting the sounds, opening some doors for them, and keeping an eye on the performances to be sure we were getting the best possible work out of everyone. The EP was loose! They came into the studio straight from the tour bus, with the material in various states of undone, and with that wild look in the eye one has whilst in the middle of a tour. We had about four days — three of them were spent hanging out, going through the material and occasionally getting some work done on 'Cruel Moon', and the final day was spent recording 'Please Come Back Home'. The recording of the EP tracks and the recording of the debut had Neve preamps in common and that's probably about it. For the EP, it was basically 'Do we have signal coming in from that mic? We do? OK, roll!' James sang through a vintage U47 from the studio's closet, which is a very good‑sounding piece, and other than that it was SM57s and KM86s on the guitar cabs. Drum mics were chosen for reliability first, sound second, and acoustics were recorded with U67s.”
No Compromise
Kevin Burleigh outside Saint Nicholas Church in Brasov, where he recorded a local choir singing 'Silent Night'.
While Glasvegas were still laying down tracks with Costey in New York, Kevin Burleigh, the band's front‑of‑house engineer, was organising the Transylvanian sessions. Burleigh has been working with Glasvegas since 2005, and he engineered and co‑produced the band's early demos and pre‑Columbia singles at Central Sound in Glasgow, but the Transylvania experience was a challenge like no other. From an early point, James Allan had been absolutely clear that there could be no compromise over the recording location he envisaged.
"We found this great studio called ISV in Bucharest and they had an SSL, API, Avalon pres, quality outboard — the usual suspects — and they had a great backline, so we were happy to go there,” explains Burleigh, "But James was like 'No! It has to be Transylvania and it has to be a space. Get us a room!' And they were saying, 'Lots of other bands we can quote have done this and they've photographed a place but then actually gone and recorded it somewhere else — it's a concept thing!' but James and I both thought 'Let's try and actually go to a space and make it happen!'”
Recording in Saint Nicholas Church was a hurried affair.Why Transylvania rather than any other place on the planet? James just puts that down to a mixture of having a strong hunch and a weighty dose of long‑standing curiosity. "Sometimes you just get ideas and you can't quite put your finger on why,” he explains James. "I always used to wonder what that place looked like, whether it looked like it did in the cartoons — a faraway, other world, really spooky, gothic, untouched — and it was all the things I thought it would be.”
When Kevin Burleigh and his assistant Jimmy Neilson touched down in Romania, just days before the band were due, they still had no idea where they were going to be recording. Help came in the form of Horia Daneti, a Romanian travel rep who earmarked four possible recording locations. After checking them all out, Kevin plumped for two rooms that he felt would tick all of his and James' boxes. The spaces in question were at the Cetate, a 16th‑Century citadel sitting on a hill above the Transylvanian city of Brasov.
"We chose an old wine cellar that we wanted to use for some acoustic stuff,” says Kevin, "It was just a circular stone room, and some of the reflections were fantastic. And the other place we used was like an outhouse that was part of this citadel. And we had two power points to run the whole thing.”
Choosing Gear
Glasvegas frontman James Allen at the upright piano that made its way onto several tracks.
Burleigh had spent a couple of days in pre‑production in Glasgow, building and testing a rig that he thought would fit the bill for whatever space they ended up finding once they hit Transylvania. Glasvegas would be flying to Romania direct from New York and they were bringing their guitars, Rab Allan's pedal board and Caroline McKay's drum kit. Rather than clocking up big bills hiring and transporting gear from a UK rental company, Burleigh rented amplifiers, monitors and mic stands from a local private studio owner, Gabrielle Isacc. "I'm from Glasgow and I know where the guys are from, and I spend their money like it was mine. There was no way I would justify spending £5000 for someone coming over with amps, because everything comes out of the band's budget and I know from running a studio how tight things are! You cut your cloth and if you've got a bit of confidence in your ability, you can use most bits of equipment.”
So as far as the core recording gear and mics went, Kevin's real key consideration was how much they could cram into their luggage.
"I thought we could take a small hand luggage bag each with a laptop, a couple of cables and some plug‑ins, and the rest of the stuff we could pack in a hard suitcase,” explains Burleigh. "Jimmy had been using this M‑Audio ProFire 2626 interface, and using that meant that at the top end we could have 12 A‑D channels using ADAT with a Focusrite 4Pre, which gave us a good in. Glasvegas have never really multitracked together as a band, so I knew I wouldn't need any more than four, but there were another eight on the interface. That gave us the best way of getting Pro Tools because it's a single‑unit interface, the converters work, the Pro Tools works and if it came to it, we knew we could take the Session back and get to work on it quickly.”
Microphone‑wise, Kevin packed a few pet faves, including a Neumann U87, an Audio‑Technica 4033, a Beyer TG201 and an AKG 414EB, as well as a few Shure SM57s and an SE Reflexion Filter, so that "whatever the space we ended up in, we knew we could get some vocals done”.
All In The Head
Kevin Burleigh opted to bring the bare minimum of equipment from Britain.
By the time the band arrived in Brasov, Kevin and Jimmy had everything set up and ready for recording at the citadel. For James Allan and the rest of Glasvegas, finally setting foot on Transylvanian soil was a surreal experience, to say the least. "I'd just spent a week or a week and a half in New York City, and going from that to Transylvania in one move was like a pretty f**ked-up time, man, do you know what I mean?” says James. "Time was getting on and it'd been quite hard work with a lot of things, touring and generally just living — hard living — and I think by that time everybody's state of mind seemed pretty low, like you were floating in this f**king abyss or something. It was quite a peculiar time there, but having your mind a little bit like that going from New York to Transylvania — that all added to the picture of it being a little psychedelic!”
Time was certainly tight, as they only had a grand total of four days in Romania and, to top it all off, the other members of the band still knew very little about these James Allan Christmas compositions. James recalls an amusing encounter with one of Columbia's A&R men in New York.
"I said, 'Well, that's the Christmas thing finished, you're gonna love it!' and he was like 'Oh brilliant, I can't wait to hear it, can I hear it?' and I was like 'No' and he was like 'What? Why not?' and I said 'Because all the sounds are in my head!' He wanted to punch me!”
"James had got it all planned in his head before he went in so he knew what was going down but none of us did,” explains Rab Allan. "So what would usually happen is that James would sit and play and say, 'I want you to play this on the bass, Paul,' and he'd say to me, 'I want you to do this on the guitar,' and we would just build it up that way with the ideas that he had. Me, Paul and Caroline were just walking in the dark to be honest, just doing what we were needed to do.”
Serendipity also played a part: the discovery of an out‑of‑tune upright piano in a citadel room was destined to change the sound of the songs 'Careful What You Wish For', 'Silent Night' and the title track. "One of the beautiful things was finding that old piano,” enthuses Kevin. "It wasn't too badly out of tune but it had seen better days. We got a couple of people to physically move it to the outhouse and that's the piano used on most of the recordings. Some of James' ideas came through him playing that piano, and it was also fun trying to match up all the guitars to the tuning. It was really ad hoc how it happened!”
Play To The Effects
The main aim of the little time Kevin had with the band at Cetate was to lay down a core structure, which could then be built on at a later point with overdubs as and when necessary during the mixing process. On the tracks they recorded with piano, 'Careful What You Wish For', 'Silent Night' and the title track, the citadel's upright was the first thing to be laid down with an SM57 "popped under the lid”, whilst Kevin also gave James a "rough click” so that all the other parts could be overdubbed and individually tracked later on. The guitars and drums were recorded with a combination of SM57s and an AT4033, while James' vocals were recorded in the centre of the room with the Neumann U87 and the Reflexion Filter to reduce the room ambience. Burleigh had borrowed some Rode NT5 mics from his local studio contact and these were left open facing the top corners at the rear of the room during all the sessions, capturing room ambience.
A Glasvegas trademark is the 'wall of sound' wash of guitars that permeates both their recordings and their live performances. Kevin Burleigh outlines some of the secrets behind that sound and how they were recorded for the Snowflake Fell Transylvanian sessions, which in the end all took place within the confines of the citadel's outhouse.
"I just set up 57s and an AT4033 because a lot of it is effects,” explains Kevin. "They were playing through a Fender DeVille, which we hired from the local guy, and then it would just be tuning EQ and levels. I'd feed things in like Waves Enigma and Echo Farm before Sonnox reverbs just to let it move about, and we'd have a really long reverb that I'd darken up a bit. That gives me the sort of thickened‑up pad sound which is on the guitars. When they both change chords, they don't move bang on the bar but, if they do, there's still the overhang of the delay. Rab's pedal setup and James' have a Big Muff into a RAT and other distortions fed into a Space Echo or Line 6 DL4, so they distort everything before they put it in delay, and it just creates this noise. If you just listen to the guitar sound through the amp you'd say 'That's quite strange, that's really muddy!' but they play to the effects. A lot of guys will just play the guitar, pick out the lines and then add effects as long as the riffs are still defined and the melody still cuts, but Glasvegas don't; they play differently because of the effects!”
Mixing
Caroline McKay's minimalist drum kit sets the Christmas mood.
The mixing sessions that followed the Transylvanian escapade were just as frantic as the recordings had been. Kevin Burleigh and James Allan camped out at Terminal Music in Glasgow to mix on their Euphonix, adding a few overdubs, while they were also keeping in virtual contact with Rich Costey, who was simultaneously mixing 'Cruel Moon' and 'Please Come Back Home' in New York.
"I was already in the middle of another album at that point,” explains Costey, "so the mixing process for me consisted of recording basics of someone else during the daytime in Studio A, then going upstairs to my room, Studio C, at night and mixing Glasvegas. For 'Cruel Moon', I was able to send finished versions to James, get his arrangement notes back, and then pull up the song again to tweak it. For 'Please Come Back Home', we didn't have that sort of time, so I basically pulled it up and it stayed on the board until it was done. I had the mix streaming live off the desk to their studio in Scotland so they were able to check in constantly and make comments, mostly whittling down the arrangement. An interesting thing to note is that I mixed 'Cruel Moon' entirely on my Neve BCM 10 [sidecar mixer], doing all the fader moves manually, even though I had my 88R sitting next to me. I just like the way it sounded.”
During the final mixing session, Kevin Burleigh and Glasvegas actually broke the Terminal Studio record, working non‑stop for 29 hours to get everything finished, resulting in poor assistant engineer Jimmy Neilson hallucinating. The pressures were certainly starting to take their toll.
"This boy Jimmy just started hallucinating thinking people were waving at him through the studio windows,” says Rab Allan, "He was seeing people waving at him just purely because everyone had been working — by that stage — for five or six days with just a couple of hours sleep each night. It was just chaos!”
Something Special
As far as Kevin Burleigh is concerned, the decision to head to Transylvania for the recordings was fully justified, despite the hard work and crazy schedules: he believes the songs would not have come out as they did had they been recorded in a conventional studio.
"The ambience of Transylvania totally benefited the recordings,” says Kevin. "Even what we did at night in Brasov, going for a drink, going to different places, seeing different people, getting a bit crazy, a bit wild. James always said it was about getting away together to do this, the whole point was that the space had to be in Transylvania because it just fed everybody's imagination and I think it affected the finishing touches — James' melodies, how multi‑layered he would arrange the songs, he must've known his top lines but maybe the pace would have changed in a proper studio. The place just gave everyone that wee bit more imagination.”
James Allen, likewise, feels that the whole project exemplifies what is special about his band. "[Glasvegas] is about using your imagination and being a part of loving art, of loving music, of loving being creative. It's not doing things just because it's the standard way to do things, man, and the Christmas record is obviously far away from being the standard thing, you know, and I hope, moving into the future, we never accept the standard thing. Hopefully this record is gonna represent the future both for myself and for the band.”
Glasvegas & The Transylvanian Choir
One of Kevin Burleigh's many Transylvanian tasks was to track down a Romanian choir and record them singing 'Silent Night' in a local church or cathedral. "Luckily enough, the first night I managed to get on‑line at the hotel and started searching for a choir,” says Burleigh. "I found this choir in Brasov, so I asked our interpreter if he could call them. Then, the first night the band arrived, James and I met the conductor, Marius Modiga, and another guy who was part of a small orchestra, in case we required strings. These guys and everyone we met in Transylvania were so helpful and they asked us if we would come to see the choir at rehearsal, in a classroom at a local college. It was strange because the guy had given me a recording of them doing 'Stille Nacht' or 'Silent Night', and as we walked through the college corridors to the class, I thought they must be playing the recording for reference — but when the door opened this choir was in full voice, everybody just sitting at these desks, looking at the conductor, really relaxed, just singing 'Silent Night'. It was stunning!”
"That was an amazing thing and it was something I'll never forget,” says James Allen. "I love that it was totally human and there was no other kind of music or instrumentation or acoustic guitars or amplifiers or pianos or whatever. Humans have evolved making that noise, I never even knew that kind of noise was possible. I'd only heard people do things like that on TV, and as I was walking through the front door and I was getting closer to them, I thought it was a CD they were playing, but they were practising 'Silent Night' and when somebody opened that door, it was like f**king angels coming out! I was really pinned back against the wall!”
Luckily, the conductor was well acquainted with the priest at Brasov's magnificent gothic Saint Nicholas Church, where they recorded two takes of 'Silent Night', sung in Romanian, which would later be mixed into James Allan's haunting piano‑led take on the carol. The choir's ad hoc vocal exercises would also form the end sequence to 'Careful What You Wish For'. Kevin Burleigh recorded them with four mics plugged into the Focusrite 4PRE: a set of Rode NT5s in X/Y configuration about two metres behind and above the conductor, an AKG 414 behind the choir, where there was a "magnificent low end” due to the height of the cupola above the altar, and the Neumann U87 30 metres away at the back of the cathedral.
"We had 20 minutes setup time, no soundcheck and an hour to record everything we needed,” says Kevin Burleigh. "There was absolutely no room for error. 'Take everything!' was our mantra during the whole of the Brasov sessions. I'm very, very lucky to be involved with such an imaginative band as Glasvegas, even with all its technical challenges — the results are sublime!”