‘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 Greg McMurray, 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.’

 

With their shared love of songwriting, lockdown also provided the right climate for another obsession to blossom. Cross remembers, ‘We bought a Tascam 388 tape machine. We’d always wanted to record to tape as it sounds amazing, but we’d never done it before, so it was a bit of learning curve. You can’t edit takes like you would if you were recording straight to Pro Tools. Also, we were conscious of how temperamental the machine was because of its age, so it forced us to be more precious with each take. Midway through making the album we got to the studio and found there’d been a massive leak from the ceiling and the Tascam was completely drenched. Annoyingly, everywhere else in the room was dry and the leak was solely on the most valuable thing we owned. Two weeks later, after renting a dehumidifier, burning out three hairdryers and a massive electricity bill we plucked up the courage to try turning it on again, and luckily it still worked. Looking back, we were totally in our own bubble, trying to craft this world. It was hard work, but we stuck at it.’

 

McMurray says, ‘I went and bought the tape machine off this old guy in a Tesco car park somewhere in Devon. He’d had it since the 80s and he gave us all his old tapes. (We ended up using bits of talking and scattered audio from those tapes on the album). Then we set about building a studio in Paul’s cellar. Paul got deep into woodwork on YouTube and built bass traps and soundproof boards and stuff. We just set everything up in there and that became our sort of treehouse club. We’d go there every day and record as much as possible’. 

 

On From A Distant Place, there’s a feeling of being allowed into an an expansive, internal universe. The sense of rebirth, of new desire from the band is palpable. First single Gift Horse breaks new territory: the kind of woozy psychedelia that wouldn’t sound out of place at British summer solstice or an LA beach. Follow-up Thick as Thieves is the summertime glam-stomp our airwaves have been deprived of for too long. Throw into the mix a handful of face-melting guitar solos (Fever Dreamin’, Streetlight), road-hardened riffs (At TheBorderline) and sun-kissed melodies (Flying Saucer, Telephone Song), and it makes for a batch of songs as completely accessible as they are eclectic. But it’s an overriding sense of restrained cool that weaves the album together, the confidence not to overcook it. The songs do the talking. 

 

Cross says, ‘Other than the obvious stuff, our influences range from singer songwriter stuff like Tom rush and Clifford T Ward, to heavier garage stuff like Ty Segall. I think the album sounds like that too, it covers a lot of bases musically. My favourite Beatles album is the White Album and I love how all over the place it is. I get quite bored when an album has ten songs that all sound the same, so I think unconsciously it’s turned out quite a mixed bag’. 

 

In their heavier moments – a hat that Cut Glass Kings wear so well – there’re glimpses of a thread leading back to Birmingham’s legacy of rock bands like Traffic and Black Sabbath. Do they feel part of that lineage? ‘No, not really’, Cross says thoughtfully, ‘a lot of bands around here start off gigging locally and ingratiate themselves in the local music scene, but we never did that. I’m pretty sure we’ve played more gigs up North or in London than we have Birmingham. I think because we’re happy locking ourselves away making music in our own little world, we could be living anywhere, it just so happens Birmingham is our nearest city. In saying that, I do love bands that come from around here like ELO and Sabbath’. McMurray chips in, ‘This is one of the things we had in mind when naming the new album ‘From A Distant Place’. It seemed to sum everything up’. 

 

Cut Class Kings knowingly or unknowingly continue that Midlands bloodline, updating it. Take ‘Fever Dreamin’’ for example – think Tame Impala if they’d grown up in Birmingham biker bars, or a Black Country Allah-Las. Whoever they’re compared to, be it the obvious power duos like Black Keys, White Stripes, or the American fuzz-punks – Cut Glass Kings are powered by a definitively British engine, more T-Rex than T-Bone Walker. 

 

‘I’ve got big dreams in my head’, sings Paul Cross on album opener Big Dreams, the intentions of a band in chrysalis. His and lifelong cohort Greg McMurray’s story is one you hadn’t bet on in 2024. After From A Distant Place, put your money on them making their big dreams a reality.