Glitter Litter – Back To Bubblegum Boulevard

In nowaday’s music world, GLITTER LITTER might appear as a strange kind of UFO but here at Veglam, we were excited from the start when we learned that former Sugar Shock singer Andreas was working on new songs. We asked him a few questions about GLITTER LITTER, SUGAR SHOCK, Glitzine and the state of music today…

When did you have the idea of starting GLITTER LITTER?

I have had the idea of finalizing song ideas that I had in my head or written down ever since Sugar Shock broke up. To finally execute the idea, however, was quite recently, about two years ago. I was lying on a beach and trying to learn Unreal engine 5 when I suddenly thought, Naah, I should make music instead. That was the starting point. I had two different ideas. One was about making a comic book about the rise and fall of a rockband and the other was to make music. I thought it would be cool to combine the two. Some of the early Glitter Litter songs were old Sugar Shock ideas. « Banana split blues » we actually played with Sugar Shock live a few times. There is a recording of it from a radio show we did but I don’t have it. Anyway, I didn’t remember how it was arranged so I had to re-arrange it all over and add some lyrics. « Baby’s got a boyfriend » we rehearsed a few times with Sugar Shock but never played it live. I re-arranged it and added lyrics. Some of the other songs were ideas I had written down from the Sugar Shock period as vocal melodies with some lyrics (like Candy heart and Dear one+me=us) but that we never did with Sugar Shock. I have many such ideas left that I will mix with new songs in the future.

Did you have a precise idea of how it would sound and look from the start?

I did have an idea but that changed over time. At one point it actually wasn’t supposed to be about a rockband but another type of storyline. The project was then called Blaster disaster and was about a guy, a slacker, rocker teen (a butthead type) that was given a crystal by an alien (who judged the guy to be very responsible since he was the only one who followed the instructions in an anonymous text message to meet him deep into the woods at night). The crystal gave the guy many talents but it was also hunted by all kinds of space bounty hunters. I actually recorded a few short episodes of this which included no music at all. It was like radio theater with sound effects. I thought they were hilarious. I played them to some friends but after rolling around on the floor for awhile I noticed I was the only one laughing ! I sent home my « former » friends, but then it strucked me that maybe this was only funny to weirdos. So I dropped that idea.

Musicwise, I always pictured it to be bubblegum punk since that is what comes most naturally to me. I didn’t picture is to be this glammy or close to Sugar Shock in style. I just gravitated in that direction over time.

The cartoon aesthetic is very important in GLITTER LITTER. I’ve read that you might even release a cartoon some day?

That was the original idea to combine comics and music but I dropped that. I don’t have time to do both and my drawing skills didn’t progress as I anticipated. The art I use in Glitter Litter is not drawn by me. I’m quite good with editing photos and images so I work quite a lot on that. I’m also interested in animation so I worked a lot on that in early stages of this project. I did stuff with the Blaster Caster character animated and there was a funny banana who did lots of cool dancing moves to the Banana-split blues song. It was fun but I dropped that when I dropped the Blaster disaster concept.

Do you do everything alone in GLITTER LITTER?

No, I have gotten some help from friends but I have done most of it myself. This meant that I had work with the resources that were available to me, mostly concerning time but also money and my skill set. Thus far it is has been a very much of a studio project with a lot of digital tinkering and some MIDI-keyboarding. That was the only way to possible to get something out at all for me and see whether this was something worth pursuing. The last release (« Sleeping beauties…) was the final with this set-up though. In the future releases more people will be involved, perhaps not in Glitter Litter as full members but as contributing musicians but who knows where this will end up. Maybe Glitter Litter will be a full band in the future.

The production of “Sleeping Beauties” is raw. Was it intentional to keep a DIY sound reminding of the 90s bubblegum glam punk bands?

Haha ! No, I didn’t intend for it to sound raw ! I did the best I could ! But you raise an interesting question. Since I grew up listening mainly to demo tapes from underground bands, and demo tapes that have been transfered tape-to-tape several times, sound quality, mixing or production were never that important to me. In Sugar Shock, our drummer was a sound engineer so he did most of that stuff. So these areas were pretty new to me and also something I had to learn. I’m still a noob of course but I know enough to at least get something out, but to answer your question : no, it was not intended ! Haha

Have you ever thought about a live version for GLITTER LITTER?

Playing live is an incredible experience. It is a dream of course to play at a packed club where everyone is going crazy and knows and loves the songs. Now I came to think of one time with Sugar Shock when we played for an audience that were clearly expecting something competely different. One guy screamed that I sounded like Woody woodpecker ! It was meant as an insult of course but given my preferences in vocals it really was not. Anyway, playing live for a devoted audience is of course a top experience but that is rarely how it starts. It usually starts in half-empty bars that let you play for a few beers. It takes a lot of work. First you need a band… haha.. then there is the booking side of things etc.

Part of me really want that but it is a process because Glitter Litter started at a completely different point. To better understand how I was thinking, let’s talk a bit about arts and artists and the distance between them. When I left the music scene after Sugar Shock I engaged in other crafts, primarily writing. In writing, painting, movie directing or whatever it is the product, the art, that is interesting, not the artist behind it. When you are reading a book you are not supposed to think about the author, you should engage in the story. Thinking about the author and the design of the art just breaks immersion. In Lord of the rings, Tolkien adresses the reader in the foreword but not as a storyteller but as a historian that has recovered documents that describe real events that really happened a long time ago. Star Wars starts with « A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away ». There are no credits, no mention of who directed the movie or on whom the actors are. Because it breaks immersion. When I pictured myself publishing a novel I imagined it having no front cover image and not my name on it as an author, just look like a real book, a journal, that someone found somewhere and somehow ended up in the book store. I’m of course not comparing myself to George Lucas or anything, just explaining my mindset when I started Glitter Litter. It was not meant to be about me, it was an outlet for little stories, like daydreams or comic book dramas, with music, words and comic art. Concerning that, the song « Boy meets girl » was titled « On a storyteller’s night » for a reason. In the first version it actually included a storyteller, not just an announcer, reading from a book like in one of those children tv shows where a storyteller reads fairytales. I took it out, it was a bit too over the top (even by my standards!)

In music, especially rock music, it is very different. In rock music the artist is very important, to such extent that it is difficult to seperate the two. In some cases I get the impression that the artist is even more important than the actual music and there are many cases in rock history where a band remained popular even though the art, the music, dropped substantially in quality (from my subjective point of view). I used to think KISS 80s production was an example of this. I couldn’t understand their great popularity. I like it much more today then I used to back then. So it is very different in music compared to other crafts, maybe due to the magic of live music. It’s more fun watching a rock band play then watching a painter’s paint dry on stage. Hehe. The importance of the artist is also one of the reasons I don’t think AI music will hit rockmusic as hard as it will probably it other arts and perhaps other types of music too.

Anyway, back to the topic. I think about playing live but originally I didn’t intend Glitter Litter to be a band or a live act.

Your former band SUGAR SHOCK has reached a kind of cult status in that scene. I remember it kinda disappeared without giving much information, do you remember why you guys stopped playing? The demos will be released on streaming platforms soon. Have you ever thought about doing it sooner?

Thank you ! My take is that Sugar Shock had a window of opportunity to really break through but we failed to jump through it. One big reason is that we always had so little money. After the Runaway teens recording the bassist and guitarist left due to differences in musical direction and also in amibition. It took a lot of time to find new members. We found a new bassist after some time but were struggling to find a new guitarist. At that point, I left. I felt that we had already peaked and for me it was also sort of « mission accomplished ».

Yes, Sugar Shock will soon be on streaming platforms ! They actually were on streaming platforms a long time ago but was taken down. I was not involved in it.

Things have changed a lot in the music world since the end of SUGAR SHOCK. The way bands record or promote themselves is now very different from how it used to be in those days. How do you feel about these changes?

Haha ! We could sit down on a carpet with 15 bottles of wine and the bottles would be empty before this topic ran dry. There are so many things that have changed dramatically.

First, the technological development. The digital revolution. I wouldn’t say that an individual recording of demo today is cheaper than booking a studio to record a demo because there are a lot of quite expensive software that you have to buy, but you have no time limit. You can work continously on the music. So overall it is much cheaper and record companies are not needed to the same extent to finance studio time. This is all good and gives more control to the musicians.

However, that it easy and relatively cheap to make music has together with new platforms and ways to distribute music (this started before the streaming services with MP3:s and platforms such as Myspace) has changed the role of the record companies in many ways. One way is that the record companies used to be gate keepers. They decided what music that would be available and they did not like to risk losing money so they played it very safe. That is why there used to be such huge shifts in popular music. One such huge shift is when Nirvana broke through. There still were many fans of the 80s style of metal (me!) but the interest of the mainstream audience had shifted. The shift wasn’t as rapid as it might seem because of how the record companies operate. Today, when the record companies aren’t gatekeepers many different styles co-exist. That is a very good thing, I think.

However, the record companies didn’t just control the kind of music that was available but also the amount. Today music are released at ridicolous pace and the streaming services also provide back catalogues of almost all recorded music ever published. It is a very different situation. Before, when you walked into a record store there would of course be some classics in their assortment but most of it would be recent stuff. As a musician you were then primarily competing with other recently released stuff. Today you are competing against all music ever recorded in music history !

From the listeners point of view it is of course positive that there is much more music available to you but there are downsides. People’s attention tends to spread among the available options. If there are many options, every option will get less attention. My experience is that people’s listening habits have really changed. People might listen to the same amount of music measured in hours (even though I don’t think that is true either. I think people listen to music less nowadays given that there are many more options for entertainment) but many more artists and songs than it used to be. I didn’t have much money when I was a kid so I had to chose very carefully what to buy and then I had to stick with it. Give it several listenings. It was just a matter of survival. It meant that the limited music that was available to me, I listened to a lot. I have albums that defined a summer. That I listened to intensively during a relatively long time. My memories and feelings during that period are like a personal set of lyrics intertwined with music. I get the impression that it isn’t really like that anymore.

From the artist point of view this also means challenges. Bands used to release albums maybe every second year and a perhaps 2-3 singles from that album. The singles were the songs that was judged as commercially viable rather than good representatives of the album as a whole. Today, releasing an album means you have people’s attention for pehaps a few weeks if you are lucky. Then you are out of the loop. This might not be much of a problem for established bands that play big shows and are interesting interview subjects for the huge media outlets etc., but for small artists it means death. You will be pushed into the shadows of the social media algorithms. It means you have to start over again and again. That is why bands release singles, to stay relevant. This might, in turn, change the music itself because a single must work on its’ own, independently of the artist’s other songs. An album is very different. It can include songs that serves different purposes or are tied together. An album was very much about the mix of songs (given the range of the artist). The single-mode can lead to more streamlined music, which I think is a bad thing. Personally, for Glitter Litter, I have tried to take the middle road between these polars.

In the new environment other actors have sort of replaced the role of the record companies. Since most people stream their music nowadays, the streaming services have much power. There is a huge focus on getting on playlists. I don’t know if this is a hoax or not. Do people really listened to curated playlists ? I get the feeling that it is much less common than how it is portraited.

Instead of sending demos to record companies you now submit it to curators and similar functions. However, since there is so much competition they will not pay you much attention (many get several hundreds of e-mails per day, according to their own reports)… unless you pay. There is also lots of scams concerning this with fake followers etc. Promoting the music used to the role of the record company or publisher but nowadays the artists have to do it themselves, at least until you get a substantial record deal. Given the role of social media, the artists also have to be content creators. Maybe the music was never enough on its own to break through as an artist but it is more true than ever, I think.

It has also changed who is selling what. It used to be that the magazines sold content with the artists to paying readers. It still works a bit like that of course but for some of the smaller magazines it is often the other way around, the magazine is selling its readers to the artist. That is, you have to pay for reviews or interviews. I understand that they have to make money in some way, I have nothing against that in itself of course, but it has also changed journalism to a form of advertising. I suppose this is a product of the revolution of the internet where everything suddenly became « free ». Too few people would be willing to pay for reading a web music magazine, I guess.

And that was fifteen bottles of wine worth of discussion on that topic ! Hick !

You also used to run Glitzine, a glitter-glam-sleaze-punk webzine that had a big influence on me when I started Veglam. It was also a great way to meet glam people from all around the world. At some point you stopped running it but it remained online for a while and mostly turned into a forum. You didn’t have enough time to keep on running the website?

I handed over Glitzine to a friend (Spicy D Warlock) when Sugar Shock started to take most of my time. I had also lost a bit of interest in the scene. There weren’t a lot of bands I really liked. After the D-Generation wave (with Romeo’s Dead, American Heartbreak, Toilet Boys etc) ran out I think the glam/sleaze scene was pretty poor. I gravitated more towards bubblegumpunk and ramonescore. I thought, and still think, that these genres are closest (concerning the music, not the visual style) to the (what is now called) bubbleglam wave that made me start Glitzine in the first place.

Before that I had started Glitzinet which was the community forum. I had a friend who programmed such stuff and thought it was a good fit for Glitzine. I think the community forum is still online though no one has posted on it for many years.

Favourite bubblegum glam bands?

The usual suspects: Heart Throb Mob, Revlon Red, Champagne Suicide, Wikked Gypsy, Glamour Punks, Legs Up, Sassy Scarlet. I wouldn’t call all of them bubblegum glam bands but they were a part of the same scene. I don’t know if they qualify as bubblegum glamband but one of my favourite bands is Candy, both the Kyle Vincent and Gilby Clark era.

Most of these bands only released demo tapes in those days although some of them got reissued on CD later. Cassette tapes have been making a come back these last years. Have you ever thought about releasing a GLITTER LITTER tape?

I actually never really liked the cassette medium. It is a cool piece of plastic but as a music medium it kind of sucked but back in the day, it was the only medium to copy stuff. I would love to release anything as long as people will buy enough of it to not make me lose too much money. My impression at this point is that the number of people that are interested in buying a cassette of Glitter Litter music that is freely available on streaming services is very small. However it that would change it would be awesome.

Are you satisfied with the reactions about GLITTER LITTER? What’s coming next for it?

I’m very satisfied with the quality of the reactions but not in the quantity. Haha ! In other words, I’d love to reach more people. However, as long as this is a studio/soloproject I suspect it might be relatively small in scale, which is fine as long as it is fun.

Next up is the release of Candy Heart as a single. This will, in some ways, be very different from the album version. The arrangements are the same but the guitars and the bass guitar has been re-recorded and the song has been remixed ! I will try to push that single because I really like that song.

Then there is the Sugar Shock re-releases which will happen in a couple of waves. First there is a release of the « Runaway teens » single with a brand new cover art, done by Jeremy White who did the previous artwork for Sugar Shock. I think that is very cool ! After that the Higschool Sweethearts e.p. will be released. Then the First date e.p. After that I might put up some extras, previous unreleased stuff. We’ll see about that.

Then, this fall Glitter Litter will release an e.p. with four songs. I plan to release this at Halloween. I do not see this release as a follow up to « Sleeping beauties ». Musically it is not that different but the themes are not bubblegum. It is more fun, serious and weird ! All are related to horror in some way, since it is planned to be a halloween release. The song titles are :

Bedtime horror stories

Otherwordly girls

Shapeshifters in love

She’s so creepy (previously released but very different version).

This release will also include other musicians. More on that at a later point.

Then it is back to bubblegum. I’m working on three songs that will be released as singes later this year.