Cut Glass KIngs

‘Having some time away from playing our old songs, and the world going mad for a while in lockdown made it feel like we were starting again. It helped change our own perception of what the band is, and what this album could be. Like we’d killed off an alter ego or something’ says GregMcMurray, drummer and one half of psychedelic pop/ rock outfit Cut Glass Kings, about forthcoming second album From A Distant Place. 

 

Cut Glass Kings’ story is one of childhood friendship and a shared desire to escape their birthplace of Stourbridge, a Black Country town on the peripheries of Birmingham. McMurray and singer/ guitarist Paul Cross have been close friends since the age of five; creative kindred spirits, whose primary bond quickly became music. By their teenage years they were dreaming up ways of finding an outlet for their boredom and creative energy (pro skateboarding being one discarded pipe dream) that led them eventually to form the beginnings of a band. Cross explains: ‘Luckily the dream of becoming skateboarders faded and we started making music. We were in punk bands when we were really young and then as we got older our tastes in music evolved. We started writing our own songs and we got the bug. It’s still as fun now as it was when we started.’

 

Early influences were found in PlayStation FIFA soundtracks, ‘unhealthy obsessions’ with Beatles and Bob Dylan records, then later, the garage-fuzz explosion of the 2010s. In 2014 they landed a support slot in Liverpool’s Zanzibar club, where they were spotted by The Coral’s James Skelly. ‘We had no idea how to play our songs live at that point, but James must’ve seen something. I just remember coming off stage and seeing him in the crowd. He came over and asked if we’d want to work with him at some point. We didn’t even know what that meant but we said yeah on the spot. We’ve been working together in one form or another ever since. He’s quite good at giving us a kick up the arse when we need it. We sometimes have a tendency to tie ourselves up in knots and overthink things. He's good at cutting through all that stuff.’

 

The result was the release of their self-titled debut in 2019 on Skelly’s then-active Skeleton Key label. It featured frequently playlisted Shadow Of Your Love, which to date, has accrued over five million streams on Spotify. But with the imposition of lockdown, fate offered time to reflect on what direction they really wanted their music to go in. McMurray muses, “For this album we started broadening what we were listening to. I remember early on we were listening to a lot of T-Rex’s ‘Electric Warrior’, earlier Ty Segall stuff, Timber Timbre. James put us onto the Eels album ‘Hombre Lobo’ which definitely had an influence on us. We were also listening John Grant’s ‘Outer Space’ a lot.’