By August Edwards
Glam punk quintet Glitz Biarritz is set to release their debut album, In Poor Taste, on January 31st. With sprightly riffs and dirty beats, the record is a masterclass in having fun—a true punk rock party.
The self-described “Craigslist conglomerate” has a spark. Talking with the band was an energizing experience for me, even with the frustrating limitations of Zoom. When a band starts making moves to play and get their music out, tumult can ensue, with triumphs and hardships alike. While I have respect for the entire journey a band will take, it is enlivening to listen to an impassioned group talk about what they love to do.
Below, we discuss their songwriting process, putting on a show, and the perfect sound of a beer can cracking open. Check out In Poor Taste when it drops on the 31st and join Glitz Biarritz for their release party at As Above, So Below Distillery.
ABQGR: I’m such of a huge fan of glam rock and punk and that specific era of music history. What does a glam rock band look like at its inception, today? Or, like, how did you find that balance of paying a tribute to a history before you and creating a fun and fresh sound?
Johnny, bass: When the band started, it started because I put out an ad on Craigslist. My thought was, let’s get together and see if we can get some people that like some of the music that I want to play. I had said specifically New York Dolls, Stooges, and MC5. I put that out and Tom reached out—
Tom, guitar: And I was like, fuck yeah! Me! So, we met, and then Olivier came in the fold here—
Johnny: Yeah! So, just from the beginning, the Stooges and the New York Dolls are proto-glam, proto-punk. So, the glam and punk crossover was there from the very beginning with us. We started out playing songs by the Stooges and the New York Dolls and MC5 and some other stuff, and then we started writing some new material.
Samantha, drums: What it looks like now, besides a Craigslist conglomerate of people—it looks like middle-aged people that still wear cool buttons on their jackets and play music from bands they liked growing up. What’s cool is we’re kind of reliving our youth a little bit. Keeping it alive, too. I think people really appreciate hearing old rock and roll—it’s become a bit of a novelty. When people hear us, they’re stoked to hear an older, dirtier sound.
Tom: It’s just dirty fuckin rock and roll, and we like it.
Samantha: So, it’s a little less glamorous. We’re not wearing vinyl all the time.
Olivier, guitar: I do! I like it!
I think the album has, like, a brilliant gaudiness and sloppiness and it is, like, glamorous to me. I’m curious, what did your songwriting process look like?
Tom: Pretty much everybody here is a songwriter. We just come in and go, “Hey, I got a song!” “I got a song!” “I got a song!” And we just bang ‘em out.
Olivier: Yeah, I love the collaboration, and just throwing ideas and putting them together.
Johnny: Our friend who mastered the record, he was talking about how the album sounds very cohesive, but he can tell which songs I wrote, which songs Tom wrote, which songs Olivier wrote. But it still sounds like one band—it doesn’t sound like different acts that are putting together a record. It’s just one thing, but we all have our own point of view that comes through as well. I think that’s really high praise from somebody who listened to the record.
Olivier: And the way we play, as well. There’s no other way I can play guitar, really. I like to play that way. And that comes from back when I started, back in the 80s, and I was listening to all those bands, and I always loved the sound. And yes, I evolved that throughout the years as a guitar player, but that’s really what I like to play. I’m really in my element with the band.
Tom: You wanna know why the band is named what it’s named, it’s this guy [Tom points to Olivier], our Frenchman here.
Olivier: Oh yeah, Biarritz is my hometown. It’s in the southwest of France, by the Spanish border. The Basque Country.
Tom: And as guitar players, we’re totally different, completely different. Like, my man, I call him my mon amigo, is a complete and total shredder. He’s amazing. And I’m way more on the Joe Strummer side of things, not like the most great soloist in the world.
Olivier: But we’re really complimenting. Sound-wise as well. His sound is way different than mine, and it gives what you’re hearing, and I think it’s pretty cool. I don’t wanna play with someone who has the same sound or plays the same as me, because that’s kind of dull.
Johnny: That goes to kinda what you were saying about the sloppiness. A lot of times, when bands have two guitar players that are playing pretty much out of the same rig, everything sounds smooth and clean. And with these guys, their sounds are clashing with each other in a lot of ways, but in a way that is pleasant. That’s why the name of the album is In Poor Taste, because what we’re trying to do—it was something I said when we were recording it, and everybody was like, that sounds like the album title.
Tom: I don’t want the album to sound like it’s nice, crisp, and clean. I want the record to sound like it’s in poor taste.
Johnny: I was saying, I want it to sound kind of ugly. And I think we achieved that.
Samantha: Vince is a singer/songwriter type, and he brought us kind of a singer/songwriter type of song, but with all of us playing the song, it’s automatically punk and glam. Every song that each of us brings, it ends up being a glitz song, because that’s what it sounds like when the five of us play together.
Tom: I’m not doing anything over two minutes!
I love listening to you guys speak together, too, because it sounds like you all come from different places, but there’s this unique cohesion, like, you find this harmony between the five of you. Would you say that’s kinda true?
Vince, vocals: We heard it. We heard it when we first got together, we definitely heard something, you know. Of course, we didn’t know each other. I didn’t know them, I had just met them. But I recognized it right away—we all did. We all kind of looked at each other like, this is pretty good.
What was that like, your first time playing together?
Tom: Like I’ve been looking for this my entire fucking life! Finally!
Johnny: It was interesting, because Olivier, Tom and I had been playing together a little bit—we didn’t have a drummer, we tried a few drummers, it didn’t really work—
Olivier: We tried Tom as a drummer! I tried as a drummer as well, because we both play drums. But, man, but not the way Samantha plays. The beginnings were—[Olivier laughs]—exactly like that. A big laugh.
Johnny: We were just kind of getting to know each other. And then the first time we all played together—Samantha had answered a separate ad that I’d put out for a drummer. And we talked and she decided that she would come out and check it out. She came, and Olivier brought Vince, who he met online.
Olivier: Yeah, I found him, you know, on the side of the road.
Vince: I had a big sign that said “Looking for a rock band.”
Johnny: Once those two were in the mix, it was pretty much immediate. We were like, this sounds really good, and this is gonna work.
Vince: Honestly, I feel like every time we play, it’s incrementally better. And that’s sort of odd. A band can plateau, even a huge band. But every time we play, it gets more and more exciting.
Olivier: Especially live.
Tom: A lot of respect for the stage. You’re gonna get on stage, put on a fuckin’ show. Don’t just stand there.
Vince: Yeah, we got a super high energy.
Could you talk a little bit about playing on a stage and playing in a studio, and what the two different venues bring out of you?
Samantha: I’m a studio person—I love the studio, that’s what I like to do, is record and write. I don’t want to speak for everybody, but it definitely seems like these dudes love the stage a lot. Which is great because it helps me. I really enjoy it now, too, especially with this band. I’ve learned to put on a show when we play live.
Tom: I just wanna get really fuckin loud, and play loud. I can’t do that at home—my neighbors get mad. There’s nothing like stage volume.
Olivier: I’m a live guitar player, that’s what I like. I’m an entertainer, I like to be on stage. The studio is a little bit frightening for me. Not super frightening, but that’s not too much my place. My career was always on stage. And yeah, of course you gotta record anyway, but stage is fun, yeah.
Samantha: We are now embracing this old school stage style where each show I’m like, what kind of vinyl shorts am I gonna wear? Or, Vince, what are you wearing for the show? Now we’re embracing this fuck off stage performance, especially now that we’re really comfortable with each other and we’re performing live at a high level where we don’t have to think as much about what we’re playing.
Vince: Unfortunately, we haven’t played large stages. There’s not a lot of room to move around. There’s a lot of kicked-over beer.
Samantha: It’s been pretty punk rock. It’s been pretty house-show. The beer we kick over—we’d be fine at a bigger venue; we wouldn’t kick over as many six-packs.
Vince: It makes for an intimate environment, certainly. Being so close to these guys, trying to avoid Olivier’s constantly moving guitar neck.
Tom: And I’m six-foot-four and pretty wide. I fill up stages my-big-fat-self.
Vince: I’m snuggled up to this guy—
Tom: A few times.
Vince: He barely tapped me and literally launched me across the stage.
You kind of touched on, like, what you’re wearing to the show, and everything. When I think of glam rock, I think of the aesthetic, so that’s cool you can bring that to what you’re doing as well.
Tom: We play in a scene where everyone wears black. I’m not fuckin wearin black! Give me something else! Give me rainbows, give me something.
I’m gonna consult my notes real quick. So—a crack of a beer can kicks off “Shut up, I’m Classy.” And “Dim Lights” sort of sets the scene for a party. And “Cans of Beer” offers insight into the feeling of emptiness after a party. Is there a significant relationship, to you, between your music and a party?
Johnny: I think you tapped a vein that maybe I wasn’t really aware of, because what you said is totally right. And we talk about being a punk rock party all the time, but I didn’t realize that the record plays out like partying. You opened my eyes to that.
Tom: Because none of the songs are related—they’re completely different songs. “Shut Up, I’m Classy” is mine—
Johnny: “Cans of Beer” is mine, and they [Vince and Olivier] wrote “Dim Lights.”
Tom: In a world where everybody is so heavy, we try to bring the party. Hey man, have a good time while you’re here.
Samantha: Also, I do think some of the songs are the comedown. We experience like, we just played a show, and now it’s over. We’re adults. We go to work. We have families. The heaviness of life when you’re an adult but you’re still playing punk rock—it’s not as wild and carefree as it was twenty years ago.
Vince: The in-between is the part where I’m the most anxious. We’ll have weeks between a rehearsal and it’s just business per usual. I cannot wait to get back in here. You know what I mean? And exert that kind of energy. I can’t wait for it to happen again.
Samantha: The beer can cracking on the recording was pretty organic. We were drinking a lot of beer during that process, and I think we picked up a beer crack on one of the takes, and—my husband recorded the record, and he was like, Oh, Vince, you gotta do that again—put it right in the microphone. And we got the perfect kshhhh. We were like, we’re gonna save that, that’s going on the record.
Tom: Shut up! I’m classy!
Did you find anything surprising in the process of making this album?
Samatha: Both Johnny and I laid down bass and drums together on day one. We got all eleven songs done on day one. So, the two of us just got to sit back and watch everything else happen. I never realized that Tom had so much reverb spring. Or that Vince had this vibrato on some of the vocal melodies. When you play it live, you just hear the loud yelling parts, you don’t get to hear the neat nuances of the vocals. It was so cool watching Vince put down vocals, watching Olivier shred. I got to sit back on the drum throne and watch everybody in front of me perform.
Tom: It was just a totally different experience. We were playing individual parts, as opposed to playing together.
Johnny: Samantha and I [recorded] together, because that was important to me, but we did that mainly because of where we would record and what equipment that we had available to us. It was kind of hard to do a live recording, which is what I’ve always done in the past. I like the way that we did it, I think it came out sounding really, really good, and I like the whole process. We’re writing new material now, we all have some pieces that we’re bringing to the table that we’re gonna be working on in February, and we wanna get something recorded pretty soon. I would like to do it live and see how we can get that done. I like the sound of this record, and I just want to put out another record that has a different sound. I just don’t wanna do the same record twice. That’s something that is really important.
Vince: I feel like we’re growing so quickly that the next record will be different just organically. Just to add to what everybody’s saying about making this record, it’s like, you get to listen to the songs objectively, as opposed to being on the stage, or being in a small space, jamming and stuff or whatever. It was then that I was like, woah, these songs are actually really good. Each one has its own hook…in fact, the early demos, the early mixes, I listened to about a thousand times. Not just critically…it was just really, really fun, super high energy, I was having a great time driving around to it. Anyway.
Tom: Anyway.
What’s the most rewarding part of it all? Of being a musician?
Tom: For me, it’s playing live. That energy, you cannot fucking get that from any drugs—trust me, I’ve tried. When you’re bouncin’ that energy out, and it’s coming back at you, it’s so great. Pretty much everything else can be a giant pain in the ass, but those 45 minutes you’re on stage is heaven.
Olivier: Same. I couldn’t say it better.
Samantha: All of us are fairly new to New Mexico, except for Vince. Vince is a veteran of Santa Fe. We’re all kind of transient and have only spent a couple years here, but I feel like being in this band has really gotten us a finger on the pulse of what’s happening in New Mexico. At our age, we are a little bit out of the loop with what’s new and what the really young people are doing, and it’s fun seeing what kind of cool punk bands are up-and-coming in New Mexico. Even though we’re too old to learn anything, it’s still fun to interact with it and be a part of it. It makes us feel more involved with our town and with the music scene in this state. That part’s been really rewarding for me. I’ve also made four really good friends [gesturing to her band].
Vince: Just having the opportunity to participate in a community and an art scene—it’s fun.
Samantha: New Mexico’s got a good punk scene going on right now […] but it is harder to find if you’re not doing something like this. You have to get involved with it, and it opens up.
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