Glasvegas: The ties that bind

It is midday when Glasvegas emerge from their rooms in a London Travelodge.

Guitarist Rab Allan is the first down, dressed head to toe in black, only minus his shoes. "I had to wash my cowboy boots, they were fusty," he explains to his confused band mate bassist Paul Donohue, also wearing black. When the others appear, with Rab and singer James Allan's trademark spiked hair, they look as though they have stepped out of one of their promo pictures. Do they always dress in black? "It's functional more than anything else," says Donohue as he looks down at his sweater. "I've got nothing cleaner – everything's been worn at least two days," he shrugs.

The indie-rock four-piece have, after all, been on the road almost constantly for the past year. Ever since the band sold 1,000 copies of their self-released 7in single "Daddy's Gone" last November, making them the subject of a fierce battle between record labels wanting to sign them (Columbia won), the demand for Glasvegas sent them on a non-stop tour. The band tell me they have spent a not-so-grand total of 10 or 15 days back home in Glasgow this year.

The first person to champion them was Creation Records boss Alan McGee, who called them "the best Scottish band for 20 years". The sound that Glasvegas honed, tapping into the emotions, has resonated with the masses in a way that few new bands can. Not long after the cover of NME proclaimed them the "best new band in Britain", their by now hugely anticipated debut eponymous album went straight to second place in the charts in September. Their intense and deafening epic Phil Spector-esque wall of sound with the fuzzy droning guitars of The Jesus and Mary Chain is balanced by James Allan's sensitive vocals in his soft Glaswegian burr. And beneath the intimidating appearance (leather jackets, towering hairstyles and stoic stares) is a vulnerable side revealed by songwriter James's thoughtful and poetic lyrics – not to mention their ever approachable attitude towards their fans.

For four East End Glaswegians with working-class backgrounds (before they were signed, Donohue was a ceramic tiler, James was unemployed and Rab had a job packing raw meat at a factory), things couldn't be much more different. Fans now clamour to meet them and the press queue up to do interviews. For the band – comprising cousins James and Rab, who grew up together, school friend Donohue and drummer Caroline McKay, whom they met while she worked in a vintage clothing shop – it makes visits back home, though becoming scarcer, an increasingly surreal experience. "You can't go out there anymore because for every nine people that are really nice to you there will be one that will be a bit of an ass," Rab says. "And we're not really the kind of people that will walk away and go 'hmmm'. Do you know what I mean? So you don't really go out anymore – not to the places you would usually go. So you need to go to expensive places to keep out of people's way and then you get called posh."

But recognition doesn't just happen in their home town. It happens even here, in a Travelodge 400 miles away. "I met a guy in the elevator this morning and he started shaking because he knew who I was. That's really sweet as well. He was like: 'Why are you in a Travelodge? You're on a major record label.' I guess there's a double side to it," adds Rab.

It's a conundrum. One of the most important things to the band is their fans, who break into song whenever the band play "Daddy's Gone", a poignant song James wrote about his father leaving home when he was a child. It's a song that has the power to make grown men cry at gigs. "I remember we did a gig in Brighton a while ago and two separate guys came up and started crying and was like 'where's James, where's James?'," says Rab. "It's a mad, but brilliant thing," adds James, from behind his customary black Rayban Wayfarers. "People are really sweet and funny. 'James! James!' they shout down the street. I live in the city centre in Glasgow so if I go across to the shop there are lots of people shouting things and you get everyone looking at you. It can freak you out a wee bit and it's happening more and more, but if I didn't want any of that I would have stayed unemployed and made music for myself. I chose to sign a record deal."

The mastermind of the band, it would seem unusual that in his youth James reserved all his passion for football; music played little part. All he had to listen to were the limited record collections of his mother and older sister. "I never had my own music. My sister would listen to Madonna and my mum's music... on the nasty side it could be Bryan Adams and Roxette and then verging towards something better would be the Righteous Brothers and Roy Orbison. It was not through choice. If I hear Celine Dion even now I can almost hear my mum's Hoover in the background." Little did he know, but Orbison would one day become a focal point in his career.

As things escalated for the band, so the sing-alongs that take hold of the crowd at their gigs would increase in volume. "The crowd are always brilliant, except for when you can't hear the monitor for how loud they're singing," quips Donohue. "At T in the Park we walked out and what they were singing was louder than everything on stage. We noticed the difference when we did Reading and Leeds because it was really far away from where we're from and although we'd already sold gigs out in cities, that was full tents going crazy. I think sometimes there are those key gigs when you notice things are changing," Rab adds.

The band raised their profile further when they shared the stage with Oasis, supporting them at the Electric Proms last month. As well as sharing their predecessors' working-class backgrounds, they share a supporter in McGee who discovered them both at the influential Glasgow venue King Tut's (he famously signed Oasis there in 1993). At the Electric Proms gig James announced to the crowd: "The reason that I even picked up a guitar is Oasis." To have experienced being there, sharing a stage with their rock heroes, was enough to bring home their success for James. "It made the world feel really small. Like everything that's happening at the moment, sometimes I feel like I'm 100ft tall and everything else is tiny, and other times I've felt tiny and everything else seems so big. Even yesterday I was being interviewed for a Roy Orbison documentary for the BBC and the girl said: 'I interviewed Bono yesterday, it's you today and Paul McCartney tomorrow.' And I thought, I remember my mum playing that little red tape all the time and I would lie in my bed and hear In Dreams [an album by Orbison] coming through the wall. For that to go to yesterday freaks me out a little bit. I had to stop because I was getting flashes of lots of different things, from my childhood to now and then the Oasis thing, because those were the first songs I learnt on the guitar and the first time I was really turned on to having a band."

How does he feel they won the hearts of the public and got to this point, where they are not only supporting their musical heroes but being spokespeople in a programme that includes the world's biggest rock stars, Bono and McCartney? "I know that we're here doing all these things not through just technical ability. A lot of why we're here is through natural ability, instinct and a little bit of heart," says James. "If I thought I didn't have a little bit of soul and a little bit of heart I'd be really upset. People could call me anything, but, if they said that and really meant it, that would affect me more than anything."

Instinct is a word that crops up most often with the band's songwriter. It's what made the band sign with the major label Columbia, and James claims it is the driving force behind his song-writing. It also prompted James to pick a Transylvanian church as the venue to record their new six-song Christmas record, A Snowflake Fell (And It Felt Like a Kiss). It features "Cruel Moon", a beautiful piano-led song that cannot fail to pull the heart-strings, which was written in New York when they were making the album with producer Rich Costey (Interpol, Franz Ferdinand and Muse). On his way to buy a guitar, James drew inspiration from seeing a homeless man on the pavement with bags full of his belongings. "When you think I'm going to buy a guitar, I'm pretty comfortable, that was playing in my mind. It's a place called George Square, a lot of people who have nowhere to go go there, and when I was writing this place kept popping into my head.

"I don't really choose to write a lot of the songs. A lot of the time it will be instinct, which can be quite a bittersweet thing because even if you want to write a song it's not up to you. But the sweet part is when it happens. It's a beautiful thing." One of the first songs that James wrote was "Flowers and Football Tops" and he took a few of his creations to the other band members to gauge their reaction. Rab recalls the instant connection they felt for the songs. "He wrote 'Flowers and Football Tops' and 'Stabbed' and I remember thinking that's amazing. Then there was 'Daddy's Gone'. He would keep bringing them in and we said we need to do something. I don't want to sound arrogant that I knew something was going to happen – the songs were too good for nothing to happen. At what level and how big it gets I didn't know, but this stuff is too good. I always remember that night we sat and listened to stuff. There was some strange electricity in those little songs, before we could really play."

And they couldn't play at the beginning. When they first formed, with McKay joining in 2005, she had never played drums and they had to teach her from scratch. For the first gigs, McKay would play one drum while a drum machine would provide the rest of the beats. "It's the hardest thing I've ever done," she admits. She stands up to play the drums ("that's the only way I know and I'm too wee to sit down" – she's 5ft tall). McKay is one of the few female drummers in rock bands, but she unassumingly dismisses her inclusion as number 10 on NME's 2008 Cool List. "The funny thing is," Rab says, turning to me and shaking his head, "I know all these drummers who go out of their way to get sponsorship deals with Zildjian who are a famous cymbal maker and she got tons of free stuff, just like that. I know guys who would kill for that and she's like 'ooh, a new shiny cymbal'. She doesn't get it and that's the great thing."

Looking back on their eventful year, what all the members agree on is that the band's success is the way people can relate to the songs. "It's the honesty in James' song-writing," suggests Rab. "For me," McKay adds, "it's the lyrics and the fact that it doesn't matter where you are in the world, he talks about issues that everyone can relate to. It makes it personal and important to them. They take ownership of that song. It's incredible."

"It's just little poems that I write," James continues. "I never thought about 'Daddy's Gone' [resonating with fans]. All these people singing our songs was never an agenda. When that happens it's a real beautiful thing because other people are basically saying 'your words and melodies are part of my life'. I don't know if I can put into words how important that is to me. It is beyond special."

'A Snowflake Fell (And It Felt Like a Kiss)' is out on 1 December on Columbia; Glasvegas are touring to 16 December (www.glasvegas.net)