Glass People is track 10 from Whapper Stormer our first album.
This is the Story of the Song. Glass People was written around 1994/5 inspired by the rock nightclub scene at Pennies. We went there every Saturday for a few years.
http://weirddecibels.bandcamp.com/track/glass-people
it was a rainy night
Rain was a recurring theme in Whapper Stormer I wrote many of these songs around 1994/5. There was localised flooding and the Dawson Mission next to the river Carron was hit, that inspired the Rain. Many of our Saturday nights were spent down at a rock club called Pennies. It often rained. We’d get soaked on the walk down from Falkirk town centre to Pennies but we’d soon be dry in the muggy atmosphere of the club. Smoke would fill the room obscuring the DJ who would flip CD’s in the booth huddled in the corner of the dance floor. Nirvana had been around for a couple of years but were still popular, Rage against the Machine always played, Blur, Pulp, Elastica, great tunes. We all had Doc Martins, checked shirts and long hair. We moshed to Smells Like Teen Spirit although occasionally the DJ would cheekily play a rap version instead. Dick.
for the night I was going to witness, people who are desperate to escape all that lies before them
We were all in our late teens and early twenties. Most of us had been average at school. Personally I had wasted my education and went to college to stall the inevitable step into an unknown world. As a group we were close then, most of us took comfort in each other and the shared fear of having no idea what to do with our lives or how our lives would turn out.
all are congregated, maybe not at church but a place we can worship our freedom and our choice
I’m speaking for myself here but I don’t think many of us went to church or practised our religion. I certainly did not. Pennies was our ‘church’ a community that would meet every week to dance and drink or take drugs perhaps all three. There was a level of tolerance in our scene, many of us didn’t fit in at our earlier social settings. School alienated at lot of us. We were free from that.
the only place where I can let go for recreation, but I noticed, I noticed something spectacular, so spectacular
The lead up to the chorus, one night I probably had too many drinks but I remember the lights cutting through the smoke and the silhouettes. There were tears on many of the nights. The grunge era promoted an outward pouring of emotion. Sometimes it seemed people were trying to out do each other, to see who could be angry or the saddest, myself included. I thought I could see through people, hence Glass People. However looking back my opinion was naive as I’m sure many of my old friends had real issues that I was ignorant of.
glass people, looking so polished, looking so clean, looking so sweet now, perhaps it should’ve been, glass people
A simple descriptive chorus of ‘Glass People’
you wanna know where I witnessed. it was around a rectangular table in a lonely corner, there were a few beacons sitting there
Where the first verse describes Pennies and sets the scene, verse 2 focuses more on the area where we sat, it was often in the corner near the bar where they severed draft Tenents Special. Cheap beer. The glass theme is still present. We would sit around these basic rectangular tables and drink, roll cigarettes and dance when our favourite tune come on.
and on the table, a few bits of paper, glasses, generally, I looked around and I saw them, I saw them slipping so far away
We’d tear up beer maps, scatter them about the table. There would be Rizzla papers crushed and disregarded. This is the line that often transports me back to that time. That last part of this line describes what would happen at the end of the night, we’d slip away to smaller groups, some of us drunk some of us high. As the years went by we’d slip away into our lives never to return to Pennies. The lights would be switched off, the floor would lie empty and the doors would be closed.
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