VLURE and the quest for connection

“It can be bleak to do a shift, then look at your phone on your lunch break, and it all seems really heavy,” he tells me, sipping a Guinness in the band’s local, music venue and de facto Celtic bar McChuills on Glasgow’s High Street. “Then you see your mates after work, and it feels like we're in this together.”

“If you can take that feeling and extend it to the world, which is what we’d like to do as a band, hopefully we can start getting each other to see everyone else’s point of view, and help people realise we are all in this together. Nobody’s existence is the reason for your problems.”

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Like their music, VLURE’s aims are big and sincere – a far cry away from the usual detached pessimism Glasgow can get oversimplified with as a city. And this band adores their city. After a few years of touring, and shows across Europe as their star rises, their debut Escalate is a love letter to growing up here.

The five-piece get this across musically with a high-chasing dance and industrial hybrid sound, live guitar and drums mixed with brutish breaks and peak time synth lines, all presided over by Hamish Hutcheson’s urgent spoken word. There are pieces of Arab Strap in Hutcheson’s poetry, and more than a touch of For Those I Love, but the group are just as indebted to the current openness of the scene in Glasgow.

“I used to promo a wee DIY label,” says Goldie. “At that point, in your late teens or early twenties, you’re paying the venue fee and just bringing your mates, having a party, and finding spaces that can accommodate. Then people have your back throughout that.

“That crosses genre scenes. Glasgow’s got an amazing club scene where everyone’s got each other’s back. There’s the rap scene which doesn’t get enough attention. The community here is amazing, and everyone shares ideas”

VLURE have quickly moved to larger venues, supporting their heroes Primal Scream on tour as well as slots at TRNSMT and Glastonbury, but they are just at home in places like McChuills, which they played back in 2021 with The Murder Capital.

“You can play some massive show, and it’ll be amazing, but I’m lucky when I play smaller venues,” Goldie says. “Playing a 200-cap venue in Glasgow with everyone here who’s on the same wavelength, screaming in their face, and they’re right in front of you. It’s just chaos. We need more of that.”

“So much of that is struggling in the UK. We did the Music Venue Trust tour a couple of years ago, and it was amazing. Independent venues are the lifeline, to any access to making music, for young people to have the opportunity to go to spaces and get involved.

“You’re also left with all the people who are really up against it and really give a shit, so you start to find common ground in that. The techno guys and the rappers and the visual artists, we’re all in the same shit here.”

Despite finding joy and comfort in their home city, starting any new project can be met with scepticism here. “We actively stuck it out,” Hutcheson says. “People are just not arsed. Our aim was to go around other countries, do lots of stuff, and when we come back people will be like ‘you are class, actually.’”

“A lot of young people, and especially artists and musicians, feel like they need to leave Glasgow to get to that stage, whether that’s going to London or another major city,” Conor agrees. “That’s something that we’ve been conscious of trying at any opportunity, that you can be Glaswegian, be in Glasgow and have a music career.”

“Glasgow itself, even though it can be pessimistic, hedonistic, crazy – people have each other’s back.” says Hutcheson.

He’s passionate, warm, and clearly in his comfort zone. Throughout our chat in the pub’s back room, he waves to people as they pop in, or gives a cartoony ‘I can’t talk right now’ face when a mate comes over to speak to him.

“There’s an optimism for change in Glasgow, and in pubs like this,” he continues. “I’ve been drinking here much longer than I should have been. I came in here for my first pint, and I found a place where no one cared where you came from, what your sexuality is, what your gender is. It was ‘are you sound?’, ‘Aye’. ‘Well, come on in’. I fell in love with this place. It stands for the right things, for what Glasgow should be – a welcoming place where people can do what they want and be proud of who they are.”

The band were galvanised by their time supporting Primal Scream, who Conor describes as a foundational reason for him picking up an instrument. “You’re doing the soundcheck, and then you look down and there’s a pedal board with the Screamedelica logo on it,” he says. “How did I get here?”

“Bobby Gillespie is solidified in my eyes as being a Glasgow icon”, Hutcheson says. “There have been moments on tours where you don’t always get an amazing welcome reception. Everyone’s always been nice – but with Bobby and the Primal Scream team it was ‘come upstairs and have a drink with us after the show.’”

“If there was a specific moment it was Vienna, sitting out until two or three in the morning, and one of his tour managers says ‘Bobby, you need to go’ and he was like ‘no I’m talking to the guys’”

Gillespie features on Escalate, delivering a poem Conor wrote a few years ago. In an odd coincidence, it was written in the same place Gillespie grew up; he lived on the same street Conor’s brother and VLURE’s bassist Niall Goldie used to live on.

“The lyrics to that poem are a train of thought at a formative and turbulent time in my life. It was about my place in all this, referencing growing up in the South Side, realising that everything that I need is there”, Connor says. “What I want out of life doesn't need to be this grand idea.”

At the centre of VLURE are the Goldie brothers. Conor and Niall have been playing music together since they could hold instruments, spurred on by gig-going parents who introduced them both to punk, goth rock, and rave music in the form of Underworld, The Prodigy and Faithless.

“They have been obsessed with music since we were kids,” Conor says. “They’d take us to festivals, and they still go to gigs three, four, five times a week. They definitely go to more gigs than me or Niall do. That continues to inspire me. My dad will still show me stuff that’s class. We’ll be pure sat in the car, and he’ll say, ‘have you heard this I.Jordan song?”

It was Conor’s mum who discovered Hutcheson, in a way. Conor put Hutcheson’s then-band on at Tenement Trail in 2017 when he was running a stage as part of his DIY promotion. “I think your mum and dad were in the crowd and your mum said, ‘that’s the frontman for your new project’” Hutcheson says. “Isabella was like, ‘that’s it, you’re doing it.’ We started messaging and a year later we got in the studio together.”

The trio of Goldies and Hutcheson are completed by keyboardist Alex Pearson, who Niall had met at a party, and percussionist Carlo Kriekaard, who met the Goldies after moving from the Netherlands to Glasgow to play music.

The initial sibling dynamic is still central to the band: “It offers such a unique thing because there’s a filter that’s removed,” Conor says. “You don’t hold back in your honesty to each other,” Hutcheson agrees. “That encourages the room to be that way when we’re creating. It actually breeds such a healthy creative environment.”

The familial connections continue on Hutcheson’s side. His dad Sandy was also an obsessive music fan and a huge supporter of the band. He was sat in their tour van when they got the call to play Glastonbury. He took his son to traditional music sessions at the pub Babbity Bowster when he was little. "We would sit in Babbity’s and watch the full fiddle band play," Hutcheson tells me. "I’d be totally tuned into this old boy with a Saltire violin. I played the violin for a few years, but I didn’t know anything. I think I could only play ‘Frère Jaques’.”

He's quick to downplay his skills in relation to his bandmates, describing what his does as bouncing about and saying some silly words. But his command of a crowd and his intense vulnerability on stage has helped translate the band’s impulses since the beginning.

“I remember that people would come to the shows, and maybe it’s a bit of a hard sell at first”, Conor explains. “I’m making weird industrial tunes where I’m screaming over it and Carlo's playing a full drum kit, but because of the honesty and the vulnerability, Hamish just has a way of connecting with people through his performance.”

Hutcheson beams, as he does throughout our chat - but as the word ‘aggressive’ comes up when describing his delivery, he’s quick to correct. “I get lost in the music they make, and there are different ways to show vulnerability and portray my emotions. For me, because I’m speaking, not shouting, it’s about trying to get the point across.”

“I would love for it not to be seen as aggressive. I’m very far from an aggressive person. It’s passion. You see when you just need to say something, it needs to come off your chest, and you feel so much better for it? It bursts out of me.”

Hutcheson is an impressive stage presence. He sees his role as bringing people into their sound with stories that are both grounded in our place and time, and heightened in their scale.

“If you listen to the way Maxi Jazz tells a story, he was able to command a crowd on stage,” Hutcheson says. “One of my favourite albums to listen to is the Faithless Alexandra Palace live album. You don’t even need to watch it – you can hear that he’s in control, and he knows what is going on. The stage may be huge, and I don’t think he was a big man, but it was his. When I write lyrics, they’re not ambiguous. You can tell within three lines what I’m talking about and what it’s making me feel. It’s what people resonate with.”

Making the record has given Hutcheson the chance to push himself as a vocalist. Escalate's title track is a rave tune built from hyperspeed breaks and rhythms. Working with rapper Psweatpants, who features on single ‘Something Real’, he had advice to pull from. “P was teaching me to speak at that pace. He’s an amazing rapper, and I had no experience. I needed to hit the syllables and hit them on time.”

“I wanted ‘Escalate’ to feel like this mad moment when you’re on a night out or a weekend away with your mates,” Conor says. “It’s that moment in the club, in the gaff or at the afters where everything is out of hand, but in a good way. It’s peak time, everything is happening all around you. It’s overstimulation in the best way.”

And the song isn’t the only time the band have pushed themselves. “Feels Like Heaven” is Hutcheson’s most bare and obvious love song, which was new territory by itself. But the incorporation of chirpy vocal samples threw him.

“I was coming to terms with where I then sat in the song, and I really struggled,” he says. “One day I was sitting in the studio by myself. I went out for a smoke and a coffee, and the rapper Paque came past. I was talking to him about it. He said ‘don’t worry about fitting yourself in the song, let the vocal sample go, and you’ll naturally find space. Don’t worry about having too much in it, let yourself sit.’ That was a real learning curve for me and my writing process, learning how to write within this dance world.”

Like many touring musicians, the band have sacrificed time with their loved ones to perform. Written about his wife, “Feels like Heaven” thanks her for their time together.

“As a young person, I had big walls, and as I got older I realised to feel love and be loved, you have to drop the barriers and be open to being hurt,” he says. “If not, you’re not going to feel what love is, because there has to be a trust that this person won’t hurt you, and you won’t hurt them. When you build that trust, that's what love is."

Hutcheson has no fear about writing and performing such vulnerable thoughts. For him, it’s therapy, encouraged by those around him. “I’m very lucky that I grew up in a household where my mum was a very strong woman, and my dad was a very emotional man,” he says. “Not a lot of people have that in father figures, but I did. He was so honest about how he felt and he told us when he was struggling. He taught me from a young age not to be feart of my emotions.”

“It took me a long time to become one with that, but once I learned how to show that, I never looked back. I’m an open book. You can read it on my face, so it’s easy for me, and hopefully it’ll help other people feel that they can be open about their emotions.”

“What they forgot was that between the two speakers there was a cable on the shelf with all the CDs. So the speakers fell, and so did all the CDs. Our Sunday morning was me and by big sister finding all the matching CDs and putting them back together.”

“There’s a cassette in my garage. One side is ‘No More Heroes’, and on the other a song they wrote called ‘I’m Bored’. It’s really weird that the first song I ever wrote on acoustic guitar by myself was also called ‘I’m Bored,’ and I had no idea.”

Sandy Hutcheson passed away after three years of cancer earlier this year. “How to Say Goodbye” from the record wrestles with the complex feeling of knowing a loved one will pass away, perhaps imminently, and figuring out how to be around them, knowing that each day with them could be the last. “No matter who it is in your life, whether it feels like the right time to tell them or not, tell the people who you love that you love them,” Hutcheson says. “I wish I said it one more time.”

“That song wasn’t ‘how do I say goodbye to a dying man’, it was, how do I say goodbye when we’ve had a few pints in the pub, and you’re clearly not well, but I don’t want overly embrace and say goodbye like it’s the last time, but I also don’t want to be too nonchalant. Where is this perfect middle ground?”

“I don’t think there is that perfect middle ground. I know that he loved me, and he knew that I loved him. We said goodbye, and I’ll see you next time, and then there wasn’t a next time.”

VLURE shows offer a space for people to feel the weight of the day, to let something out without any judgement, surrounded by friends and strangers. Songs like “I Want It Euphoric”, “Heartbeat”, and “Between Dreams” tap into that feeling.

“Just to be in a room with other people and to add something to that, it’s a beautiful thing,” Conor says. “Maybe there’s someone else in the crowd who gets something from that and will never forget that moment. So when I feel tired it’s like, ‘nah, this is why you’re here’. I owe it to this thing that’s bigger than us.”

“Euphoria for me, is standing in a room, and it doesn’t matter what music is on, it doesn’t matter how the room looks, but in the circle around you are the people you care most about, and there are smiles, and for a moment, this is what it’s all about,” Hutcheson says. “Euphoria is everywhere. It’s just about getting it.”

Escalate is built from the memories of a good night out, but there’s a trap in spending too much time in those memories. You can begin to spend more time in the past than the present. On ‘Better Days’, a low-fi club track produced out of thin air by the Goldies in a day at home, they warn of the flatness of living in the past.

“That’s an inner dialogue that I have quite a lot. I think nostalgia is beautiful, and I love to dwell on it sometimes, but then I have to snap myself out of it and remember that I’m feeling nostalgic for something when one day I’ll feel nostalgic for this day soon,” Conor says. “It’s a no glory days mentality. I never want to get to that stage of my life where I’m like ‘that was it’ with revisionised nostalgia.”

“What you’re looking back on was incredible and beautiful, but what you’ve got right now is incredible and beautiful, and what’s going to come next is going to be class as well.”