STACK NZ Magazine April 2015 Issue 61

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30 APRIL 2015 JB Hi-Fi
visit FEATURE MUSIC
where A-list actors can become down-and-
out actors who have ‘lost their way' a bit,
living in a wing of their homes. There is
still a lot of love in the air. It’s going to eat
and swallow you up... yeah, there’s a lot of
broken dreams there.“
Listening to Glitterbug, it could be the
audio equivalent of an Instagram account
– just darker, funnier, and with audio
accompaniment. Songs like Your Body’s
a Weapon and This is Not a Party give us
all an inside view of the snapshots behind
the songs; a mad night out here, a surreal
scene in a strange place there. And not
all of them are based on Murphy’s LA
experiences either – Your Body’s a Weapon
being one case in point. “I went to a Brit
Awards after-party and Harry Styles was
there, and I was walking out – in the days
when I was still smoking. I was walking
out behind him to go have a cigarette, and
some kind of suicidal-looking paparazzi took
a picture of him, and that’s where the idea
spawned. Like a first person narrative of a
creepy paparazzi guy, following someone
around.”
The album’s other ‘big’ song after Greek
Tragedy is Emoticons. But Murph is using
social media as a metaphor, rather than
explicitly singing about the tiny symbols
that substitute words for emotions on all
manner of social media. “That song is about
– to quote the legendary R. Kelly – ‘My
There are few Wombats in the English
city of Liverpool. STACK would be
betting on about… three. One might
conceivably exist in a zoo – the other two
being in a band. Truth be told, there are
three members of The Wombats, but their
bassist is Norwegian (you have to hand it
to him: he is the world’s first – and only –
Norwegian wombat).
But if wombats are thin on the ground in
Liverpool these days, they’ve been sighted
quite often in Los Angeles, California
recently. Frontman Matt Murphy took an
extended sojourn to the City of Angels (and
in fact is considering a move back), and
the inspiration he took from the legendarily
surreal town fuelled much of Glitterbug ;
the city is a larger background character in
the story of a relationship Murph insists is
purely fictional.
“It’s a very bizarre town," he explains
over the phone from the UK. "A town
mind’s telling me no, but my body’s telling
me yes.' The emoji or emoticon references
are just a quick way of spraying cold water
on a potentially hot situation. I just thought
Emoticons was a cool title for a song, way
before even writing that song. So, I don’t
know if I’m making this definitive statement
about social media in 2015 or whatever. It
should have been called Emojis, because
emoticons are different to emojis – which
someone wonderfully pointed out to me.”
At the end of the day, pop music and life
intersect in weird ways. For Murph, the
whole experience of making and touring
Glitterbug is partially about everything
coming full circle.
"The creepiest thing was, I’m twisting my
life up to get these songs out. I’d stay in LA
and – there was a point where everything
kind of went full circle and became real,
and now I’m in a relationship, we’re touring
in LA, and in the UK,” he reflects. ”I was
never expecting that, because everything
was so solid back home for me, hence why
I found the need to create something that
was slightly more tumultuous or just a bit
weirder than the reality of my life.“
Fame, lust, the paparazzi, love and tackle
all this and more on new album Glitterbug. By Jonathan Alley
Glitterbug by The Wombats
is due out on April 17
All That
Glitters