Glitterbox

Glitterbox

Johnny Green – singing and guitars
Miles Heseltine – guitars and singing
Tony Holland – bass guitar
Mark Servaes – drumming

Like a “square peg in a star-shaped hole,” Glitterbox don’t quite fit into any easy catagorization. The London-based quartet’s debut album, “TIED AND TANGLED,” stands out from much of today’s increasingly generic Britpop by virtue of turbine guitars, potent hooks and singer/songsmith Johnny Green’s first person spectacular lyricism. Eleven buoyant, chiming-yet touched with a diamond-hard edge-treasures can be found here, including the intoxicating exultation of the first single,”Houdini,” and “You Can’t Live On Mars,” a plaintive powerhouse driven by the band’s aggressive heart. Inside Glitterbox one finds something special, something truly alive with the passion and honesty of the best rock ‘n’ roll.

The men of Glitterbox met in 1990 at a London art school. They attended gigs by all the American indie-rock heroes of the time-Nirvana, Pixies-and in 1993, the four friends were inspired to form a band. The kick-off point for their ambitions stemmed from the UK Riot Grrl anarcho-revolutionary tactics of Huggy Bear.

“We were meeting up and getting drunk and going to concerts and we would talk about music all the time,” Green says. “We’d become four obsessives. So there was this punk resurgence, this real DIY thing going on. Huggy Bear’s music was awful, but the concerts were really invigorating. It was dangerous and I found that really exciting.”

Despite a problematic inability to truly play their instruments, the band-dubbed She-played their first gig. The audience response to their chaotic set was so strong that the quartet were forced to play the set a second time.

“The first shows were really rapturous,” Green says of the early She performances. “They were exciting, rushes of adrenaline. We’d tear the stage to pieces and it would go mad. We blagged our way onto good bills and played to packed houses and people were madly into it. But we realized that we had to get good, so we locked ourselves away for a year-and-a-half.”

So, with borrowed (or stolen, depending on who you ask) equipment, the band woodshedded in their North London flat, devoting themselves to a constant rehearsal schedule in order to grow into the classic band they imagined themselves to be.

“It was really intensive,” Green recalls. “The music was getting better and better. We played a few more gigs, which went really great, but we still didn’t feel we were there. Then we saw the Verve in London, and it was like, this band really believed that they could fly. They were trying to take off on stage and we came out of there thinking, ‘Wow. We’ve got to be that good. We’ve got to make some kid come along and just be totally bowled over. We’ve got to have the power to take over somebody’s life.’ So we went away again and tried to make the music match up to our expectations.”

During their time off, though, the band found themselves battling each other instead of mastering their craft. Things got to the point where She almost split up. Drummer Servaes ran off to Barcelona for six months but was eventually talked back into returning.

“We locked ourselves away for so long, we were just fighting all the time,” Green says. “It was just personality things. You lock four men in a room together for long enough, they’re going to start knocking lumps out of each other.”

If anything though, the internacine struggles only served to make She stronger. In 1995, the time came to expose themselves. They opened for Yanks like Everclear, That Dog, and the Lemonheads and released two indie singles, “Rollerskates” and “Superman,” both of which sold out their limited pressings almost instantly.

The band became the object of attention from a number of labels and soon inked a deal with Atlantic. Alas, they discovered that another band in the US had dibs on the She moniker. Rather than calling themselves, say, “She UK” or “The London She,” the band decided to rename themselves Glitterbox, a handle derived from a scatalogical bit of Cockney rhyming slang. Glitterbox headed off to Wales where they recorded “TIED AND TANGLED” at the legendary Rockfield Studios with producer Dave Eringa, best known for turning the dials on the Manic Street Preachers’ “GOLD AGAINST THE SOUL.”

Throughout the many diverse and potent songs on “TIED AND TANGLED,” Green makes significant lyrical use of iconic figures like Houdini, Woody Allen, Superman (Nietzche’s, not Krypton’s) and Jesus. “I wanted to make this record with easy metaphors,” he explains. “It was a way into the slightly more ambiguous territory that might be in the rest of the lyrics. It’s a way to maneuver people around.”

Which isn’t to say that Green’s lyrics aren’t grounded in reality. “The Jesus Song” comes from the songwriter’s park bench meeting with a proselytizing Christian cult member, while the epic-yet-undeniably-sad anthem “Woody Allen” was actually inspired by the autobiography of another troubled comic genius, Lenny Bruce.

“Him and his wife Honey were in that honeymoon period were they were having sex all the time,” Green elaborates. “She had a really voracious appetite for sex but he suffered from clinical lethargy so he’d lock himself in the bathroom and she’d be banging on the door and he’s shouting, ‘Leave me alone! I’m sore!’ And that’s what that song is about. It’s a beleaguered man in a relationship with a strong woman.”

In addition to the emotive music found on “TIED AND TANGLED,” Glitterbox’s goals of creating transcendent art are also manifested in Green’s startling paintings which grace the album sleeve. Though he takes his painting quite seriously, Green worries about being seen as a fine artist slumming in a pop group. “To kids, painting is such a non-rock ‘n’ roll thing,” he says. “And at the end of the day, the essence of our band is pure rock ‘n’ roll.”

In the end, essence is everything for Glitterbox. After years of retreating then reemerging more powerful than before, “TIED AND TANGLED” finds Glitterbox at last making the music they’ve always heard in their heads and their hearts, but were not yet able to create. “This band is like a butterfly that keeps going back into its chrysalis, and then comes out slightly better, stronger,” Johnny Green believes. “I reckon we’re on our fourth genesis now. Ready to fly.”


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