Written by: Dave Cantrell

Having already established with a certain (gentle, we hope) ferocity our current love affair with the Last Night From Glasgow label, we’ll resist restating that adulation and move on to the preview at hand. While the term ‘supergroup’ has perhaps been used a touch too liberally since its coining over fifty years ago by Jann Wenner in response to the formation of Cream, we try to be as judicious as possible in our own deployment of the term. Even as the scenes around the world and the countless genres – and their offshoots – they represent have grown so wildly over the years to make the word ‘exponential’ wholly inadequate, it’s still incumbent upon us to confirm the integrity of any such ‘supergroup’ claim even if the bands from which said groups derived are not quite as broadly known as The Yardbirds, the John Mayall Group or The Graham Bond Organization, and in the case of Scotland’s The Gracious Losers, it would be a mistake not to use that moniker. Drawing members of Sister John (see link above), Thrum, God Help the Girl, the Parsonage, Sporting Hero and the Berie Big Band, it’s best, we think, to consider TGL’s claim to the supergroup tag (even as it’s not them making it but publicists and the media) as analogous to, say, if there’d been a band in the early 80’s made up of musicians from APB, the Fire Engines, Boots For Dancing and the Dog Faced Hermans. Such is their regional pedigree, and certainly the noise the assemblage makes, as witnessed on upcoming album Six Road Ends‘ second single “The Fire at the Bottom of the Sea,” manifests the expectations such talk conveys.

With production as crisp and bright as a new spring day, an aggressive sprightliness of pop guitar, an insatiably joyous ‘romp’ feel to it even as it hugs closely to its chest the piano melody on which it’s built, the song has all the hallmarks of a personal early summer hit, one of those tracks that elicit a spontaneous desire to get up and dance to the inveterate ebullience of life, to celebrate, for one of those eternally brief moments, the very fact of being alive. The resilience of the thing isn’t a surprise given the inspiration behind it, which is best explained by main Loser Jonathan Lilley (also of Sister John): “I’m not even sure if I just imagined this [He didn’t – ed], but I recall seeing film footage of flames that exist on the ocean floor, and that seemed to perfectly sum up the impression Gena Rowlands made on me. Impossible, outrageous, absurd, a natural wonder! In the 1930’s Glasgow was known as Cinema City, as it had more cinemas per person than anywhere else in the UK. To pay a small tribute to that, I spent a day singing THE FIRE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA in front of a few of these dream-houses that still remain.” The results, we must say, evince a similarly wondrous quality, and we look as forward to the release of The Glorious Losers’ full-length as we do the arrival of summer. As the song itself is wont to say, “Whooo!”