Next Friday, Kids In Glass Houses will drop their first new record in 11 years, Pink Flamingo. Ahead of its release, we take a trip to Cardiff to join the Welsh lads in an appreciative state – looking back over why it felt right to reunite when they did, as well as forwards with the confidence that they’re the best they’ve ever been…
The morning of May 26 last year wasn’t the least stressful Aled Phillips had ever known. Nor was most of the afternoon. Were you in the vape business, you’d have been printing money, as the Kids In Glass Houses singer gave legendary comedian Bill Hicks’ “I go through two lighters a day” boast about his smoking habit a modern update.
Pacing around at Leeds’ Temple Newsam, the weight on his mind was that he’d written a cheque that he wouldn’t actually be able to cash. Every year since Kids had split in 2014, Slam Dunk head honcho Ben Ray had been badgering him – “In my DMs, he never actually had my number” – to get the band back together. He had a big wad of banknotes to offer them for their trouble as well. And they’d resisted, until such a time that they felt comfortable in it, that it was a proper, comfortable thing, not a weekend one-off. By serendipity, this aligning of the five of them – Aled, guitarists Iain Mahanty and Joel Fisher, bassist Andrew Shay and drummer Philip Jenkins – on the same page had come at the same time as the 15th anniversary of their brilliant debut album, Smart Casual.
And so here Kids In Glass Houses were, with a plum spot at the perfect place to make their comeback. They’d even gilded the occasion by travelling between the fests in a luxurious nightliner (“Big-boy bus, do it properly”). And as he waited in his suit and shades to step out onstage with his band for the first time in almost a decade, the main thought elbowing its way into Aled’s brain was: “Oh man, I have fucked this.”
“We did the first practice, I got in the room, and the boys sounded like they'd been practicing for 10 weeks,” he remembers today. “But I was like, ‘Fuck, man, I cannot sing these songs at all. My stamina was gone. I hadn’t done any due diligence with my singing. I’d written those high notes when I was 19, not thinking about singing them when I was fucking 36! I was really down. I was like, ‘I can't do this.’”
The weeks leading up to Slam Dunk had been spent “belting out Kids songs” in his flat (“My neighbours must fucking hate me”), getting back in the game. Not wanting to dilute the occasion, they hadn’t done any sort of warm-up gig, with the singer saying he doesn’t like to do things by half. During the hours leading up to it, Aled “felt sick. I don’t know how many times I took a piss. I felt every second of it until we got onstage.”
And then, he says, “It was just gone.”
The shows were phenomenal. In both Leeds and Hatfield, Kids In Glass Houses performed to two of the biggest crowds of the weekend. The near-decade absence had only made hearts fonder. For all his nerves, Kerrang!’s review noted the frontman “popping moves like a post-hardcore Prince”. Far from having fucked it, it was the opening shot on what’s proving to be a glorious new chapter.
“Afterwards, I felt so different,” grins Aled today. “It was just like, ‘Oh, we’re Kids In Glass Houses again.”
The boyos are back in town. Cardiff, to be precise. Today Kerrang! joins Aled and Iain in the Welsh capital, the place where it all started and, despite members scattering (the pair are visiting from London for the weekend), still Kids In Glass Houses’ home.
Aled did actually used to live just round the corner from the pub we’re sat outside – The City Arms, in the shadow of the city’s massive Principality rugby stadium – in a flat above The Moon rock bar. Handily, this was also across the street from the bigger Clwb Ifor Bach, the site of regular early shows. “It was about 10 seconds’ walk,” he recalls. “It was better than a dressing room. We did two Christmas shows there at the time as well, so the flat paid for itself that day. I would just be like, ‘Sound check? Cool, I’ll just come downstairs.’”
Almost a year and a half on from Slam Dunk, Kids In Glass Houses’ reunion has bloomed into a fully-formed comeback. Immediately after Slam Dunk, they announced a 15th anniversary Smart Casual tour, at which they sold-out no less a venue than London’s O2 Forum Kentish Town. Even more exciting, and more permanent, next week they will release Pink Flamingo, their fifth album and first new music since 2013’s Peace.
It was actually in this very pub – possibly this very table, the pair reckon – that the idea was first properly mooted.
“I’d been greasing the wheels with it, sneakily with the other members of the band, going, ‘I think it could be good, you know?’” says Aled. “Joel was like, ‘I want a creative outlet,’ and everyone else thought, ‘Yeah, it could be fun.’”
“Aled was literally, one by one, tapping everything on the shoulder, doing an album, getting the conspiracy to get me while I was in there queuing up for a pint!” laughs Iain. “He said, ‘Oh, I spoke to the boys, they’re up for it. We’re all doing a record.’ That’s literally how it came about.”
Doing a record, rather than just a couple of reunion shows, was important to both men. Aled says he was worried about the whole thing looking “like a cash-in” or “settling on old glories”.
“That was one of the things I was reluctant about, being like, ‘Remember when we did this?’” he says. “I’d rather we brought something new to the table, because I think as a band we have a lot more that we can do and say. So I was always quite keen to do that rather than just go, ‘Hey, remember when we did Smart Casual 15 years ago?’”
“It’s a fucking privilege,” nods Iain. “Not everyone even gets to that stage. To go away and then come back to it like we have is incredible.”
“I love that fucking record,” adds Aled. “But I was excited to be like, ‘Let’s try some new shit and see what comes out.’ It’s amazing that we still have fans, and people are engaged with this record. And the fact that they care that we make music, and they’re intrigued to hear something new, that’s enough of a driving force, apart from my own desire to just make music.”
“As a band we have a lot more that we can do and say”
It’s worth a quick look back, though. The first half of the Kids In Glass Houses story explains the eagerness for their comeback. After forming in 2003 (Iain would join later, after playing in fellow Cardiff outfit Dopamine), they properly picked up steam around the city a couple of years later, eventually signing to Roadrunner and releasing their debut in 2008.
They were operating in a flush time for British music. In particular, Welsh music. “People were always going, ‘There’s something in the water in South Wales,’” recalls Iain. From their home country, their peers included Funeral For A Friend, Bullet For My Valentine, The Blackout and Skindred. Further afield, this was happening around the same time that Bring Me The Horizon, You Me At Six, Enter Shikari and Gallows were taking their first steps.
In the earliest throes of this, Aled and Iain say that any night of the week you could go out to a gig in Cardiff. It was here that Kids made their first live forays, concerts that the singer remembers now as being “hopeless”, but that didn’t stop them. At their first show, he hadn’t even prepped far enough to have words.
“I think we had four songs, but I’d written lyrics for probably none of them. It was pretty awful,” he laughs. “But you get the buzz, don’t you? I can’t remember loads of it. I just remember vividly having no lyrics, but because I liked Glassjaw so much, I just knew that if I made sounds like Daryl Palumbo – ‘Weeeurrrgh’ – or just screamed, that would save us.”
Soon, though, this gave way to actual lyrics and actual singing, and leaning more into their natural talent for something poppier, helped by an older sister’s influence of the ’80s. “Everyone was screaming,” notes Aled, “We wanted to do something different.” Eventually, the gigs went from Cardiff Barfly “where everyone could get gigs”, says Iain, to Clwb, “Where you had to really earn it.” And the band did stick out from their peers, with a bigger lean into ’80s pop on 2009’s Dirt, not to mention a guest appearance from The Saturdays’ Frankie Sandford on ultra-banger Undercover Lover.
Kids did a lot. Walking around Cardiff now, they point to venues both still open and lost to progress that they played. Which is basically all of them. Principality is the only big place in town whose stage they haven’t trod upon, but they have appeared at Cardiff City Stadium with Bon Jovi (“Shit and wet” Iain recalls, after they got soaked thanks to not being allowed to set up under the cover of an enormous car stage prop that would have sheltered them), as well as Welsh legends Stereophonics (“Your family understand what you’re doing when they come to something like that, all Welsh,” says Aled).
They toured the UK relentlessly. They did a run with Fall Out Boy. They got taken out by their countrymen Manic Street Preachers. They went to Europe and Japan and Australia. And yet, Aled recalls, they usually made just enough to scrape by.
“I’d be fucking decked out in Atticus, I’d got Vans coming out of my arse, Dr. Martens on tap, but unless your eBay is popping off, that’s not real world currency,” he says. “I guess the older you get, and the more serious the challenges of life become, the more that comes into play. It becomes really difficult, and it becomes stressful to your creativity.”
When you’re young and living cheap, this ain’t such a problem. But after 10 years, when real life begins sprouting beside you, it becomes more of an issue. Which is why, in 2013 when they called it a day, Iain explains that “there was no big falling-out, no sense that we were stopping in the middle”. Things had run their course and everyone had noticed.
“There was always a sense of: if it stops being fun, or if we start to feel like we’re not doing it for the right reasons, or it’s becoming a chore, that’s the time to stop doing it,” says Aled. “It’s just hard being in a band. In the ’80s, I’m sure it was a lovely time when the money was free flowing. It just felt at the right time. People still loved our band, and that was cool. But I was like, ‘I would rather like end it on our own terms.’”
“That was the main thing – us deciding to end it, not being told to end it,” agrees Iain. “There was a fear of one day management going, ‘We need a meeting.’ We just thought, ‘Let’s control this.’ Creatively, maybe we'd sort of veered off in slightly different paths, or maybe we were feeling a bit lost collectively. Whatever, it felt like it had run its course. There was no falling out, nothing like that. It just felt like the right time.”
It’s a similar thing the other way, why Kids In Glass Houses have got back together when they have. It’s why their reignition feels like an event, and why Pink Flamingo sounds as energised and sharp as it does.
In the intervening years, Aled says he’s got quite used to making normal money, paying the bills, being an adult. In 2019, he moved from Cardiff to London. When lockdown happened, he took up playing guitar, eventually writing songs, wondering what Kids In Glass Houses might sound like today. He admits to “manifesting” this whole thing, and that he feels like there’s a bit of him that really wanted it, having been got by the writing bug, but also that if it were forced it would be shit.
Talking to them about picking up a thing from a past life as older men, both say they feel very lucky to have a vessel like the band that they’ve found to still be a good place to put their creativity. There’s also a sense that it’s somewhere to put some of the feelings that come with the passing of years.
Though they don’t want it to be a look back, there’s a bridging between then and now, a connection. Take the album’s title. Though it’s also (almost) the name of the 1972 John Waters schlock movie in which drag icon Divine eats a real dog turd on camera, in KIGH world, it’s a reference to something much more innocent.
“I love that movie,” grins Aled. “But it’s a reference to the first T-shirt we made, which was a flamingo. I don’t know why I settled on a flamingo, but we had this ’80s thing going on when we started out. I got obsessed with Americana and motel visuals, palm trees. It became a part of the visual identity at the start.
“There’s such an innocence to where that all came from, and how linked to the music and the influences we had at the start. I was kind of chasing, not necessarily the music that we were doing then, but the spirit. We were throwing shit into a melting pot, whether it was Refused, or literally fucking Duran Duran or Whitney Houston. It was that sort of freedom you have with your first record where you go: ‘Fuck it. We’re doing this.’ And I did feel like we had that sort of that license to just be like: this is a clean slate. Yes, we’ve done this, this, this and this, but it feels like a fresh start, rather than a fifth album.”
“We were throwing sh*t into a melting pot – whether it was Refused or Duran Duran”
Lyrically, Aled says things are a bit scattered – A Ghost Delivered was written in 2015, about a relationship that broke down not long after the band split, a demo of which he’d sent to Iain ages ago just as an idea for something – but the big focus remains on connection, whether that be with others, or your past. More internet now than when they were last in business, he says. It’s also the most open he’s been on a record, something that initially felt odd.
“I’ve always been a bit guarded, and sometimes cryptic is the easy way out, right?” he ponders. “On this record, it’s a lot more cut and dry. I’ve always felt uncomfortable doing that before, because I don’t really want to be examined, or I don’t want to be cringe. Now I’m going, ‘Well, no, this is actually how I feel, and I’m not ashamed of it, and I’m willing to express it.’
“I really wanted to make sure with this album that the things I was saying mattered to me. Whether it’s relationships and my own feelings, or whether it’s society and the state we’re in, and the way I perceive the world at the moment, which is a very dark place. I’m quite a cynical person, but I think there is hope in the record, like on Human Touch. Here’s basically a song I think the world really needs, because we’ve become so detached and internet-focused. What actually makes people happy and what connects people is human connection.”
And how do you feel now that you’re about to put yourself out there like that for the first time in a decade? Aled pauses for a second.
“Obviously there’s anxiety,” he replies. “But there’s a confidence with it all. It’s such a different world now as well. The whole process of releasing music is so different, and it’s so instantaneous. But I feel like it’s probably the most confident I’ve felt with something we’ve put out, because I know it came from an authentic place.”
Both Aled and Iain will tell you that the best part of all this is that there’s nothing tied to it. With everyone in the band paying the bills without it, it means all there is to this is music, friendship, and the fans. It’s given them creative license on Pink Flamingo to rediscover themselves, without having to worry about where it all goes. It’s meant there’s no external pressure to perform, or wonder where the next meal is coming from. And though both knew this caper would probably go pretty well, they’re both a little surprised – maybe relieved, in self-confessed anxiety-thinker Aled’s case – that it’s gone quite so spectacularly.
“I think we expected it to be good,” says Iain. “The response online was super positive. And then walking out at Slam Dunk, it’s difficult to go too deep on it. It was a shock in many ways. It just felt like an honour, if anything, it was just a privilege. We’re in a position where we can do this and this many people give a shit. That doesn’t happen for everyone.”
“I genuinely think back to Slam Dunk and those headline shows as the best shows we’ve ever done,” adds Aled. “We’re a way better band. I’ve renewed my love for doing it like. I loved every minute of those eight shows. To look out and see people beaming and happy that you’re doing this thing that you dreamed up in a fucking industrial estate in Wales, you would be a c**t to not take stock of that moment and see it’s something special and savour it. I can literally take stock in this and be like: ‘I’m an adult now, what an incredible situation, what an amazing moment.’
“It’s really fucking great to be doing this again, and taking it in and not being about, ‘Oh, I’m a 20-year-old dickhead in the band.’ It’s about really appreciating and enjoying moments. I’m stoked.”
Glancing back up the street outside the pub, toward Clwb, toward the flat where Aled used to live, both he and Iain say that their younger selves “were probably knobheads”. Such is often the view of an older generation looking at youth. But they also remember those days fondly. This new phase isn’t to recapture youth, but to understand that some things, like being in a band, can become engrained in who you are. And when the right time comes, it’s a very good thing to plug back into it. To do otherwise would be a waste.
“It’s an amazing thing for [a band] to be a part of your life,” smiles Aled. “Because it was our whole lives. And now it’s this beautiful thing that we used to do that we’ve now brought into our day-to-day lives. We’ve got kids and dogs and families, but then there’s this as well, and we’re really lucky to have it, and that we can have it now for its own sake.
“It is a surreal job to have, but what a fucking incredibly cool thing to be able to do.”
Pink Flamingo is due out on October 25. Catch KIGH live on their November headline tour – get your tickets now.
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