Listen to an exclusive stream of Glasvegas performing Daddy's Gone in Glasgow

The Wayfarer Ray-Bans are hardly necessary in a Kensington basement bar. However, the black-clad Glasvegas frontman James Allan momentarily removes them, then decides that he’s happier keeping them on. “I was walking down the street in Glasgow yesterday and some kid recognises me and shouts, ‘James Allan! F***ing Glasvegas! Who the f*** do you think you are with sunglasses on?’ ”

There’s no such thing as off-duty when it comes to projecting rock’n’roll insouciance – although Allan’s attention to detail doesn’t extend to his choice of drink. “This is a Banana Bliss,” he explains when asked about his cocktail. Stirring the top layer of pureed banana so that it merges with the daquiri-like bottom half, the quiffed singer adds: “I can confirm that it’s all that Glasvegas have been drinking since we checked into this hotel.”

It’s hardly going out on limb to predict that the release of Glasvegas’s self-titled debut album on Monday will make stars of them. Indeed, closer to home the transition has already happened. In July, security men at their T in the Park set were forced to stop admitting the converted and the curious into the marquee. In a wave of adulation reminiscent of Arctic Monkeys’ early ascent, unreleased songs such as Lonesome Swan and It’s My Own Cheating Heart That Makes Me Cry brought a word-perfect response.

When Allan sang Flowers and Football Tops — in which a bereaved mother attempts to make sense of her teenage son’s murder — he had no way of seeing the hundreds of fans outside the tent singing the Everly Brothers-influenced refrain: “Baby, baby, my baby/ Baby, why you?” It’s just as well, he thinks. “So much of what I’m seeing from the stage has an almost psychedelic strangeness to it at the moment.”

Working-class frontmen who brandish their vulnerability don’t come along often, but when they do they inspire fierce loyalty from male audiences who would rather sing their feelings in unison than talk about them in private. In that sense, the forbear of Glasvegas is Liam Gallagher singing, “There are many things that I would like to say to you/ But I don’t know how.” They’re Madness singing It Must Be Love and Rod Stewart croaking I Don’t Want to Talk About It. They’re Kevin Rowland testifying his inadequacies on Searching for the Young Soul Rebels.

Musically though, it’s a different story. Setting Allan apart from all of them are the infatuations that gave birth to Glasvegas’s epic pop clatter. What Allan casually calls “the Spector thing” is an obsession of which Spector himself would have been proud. Just as the producer’s youth was spent replaying the same jazz and classical records to analyse how he might make people feel the same way, Allan appears to have spent much of his adult life doing the same with Phil Spector-produced albums such as Dion’s Born to Be With You and, in particular, A Christmas Gift to You. “People used to think I was weird,” he says, “because I would even play it all through the summer.”

“When we were being courted by all these major record labels,” says Rab Allan, the singer’s cousin and lead guitarist, “the stipulation was that whoever we signed with had to let us put out a Christmas album after the first record.” The calibre of the songs, he argues, is enough to vindicate the enterprise. “For the longest time, people in Glasgow always thought we were a novelty band. I mean, in a way, why wouldn’t you? We’re so far removed from what every other indie band were doing,” Rab shrugs. “So the idea of a Christmas album should be playing into their hands. I didn’t write the songs so I sort of feel I can make that claim. In particular, Cruel Moon is the best song I’ve heard by anyone in years. I even shed a tear, and I never, ever do that.”

Britpop scholars might recall that the last band that came along making claims for their second album before even the first one was released were, again, Oasis. The parallels are unavoidable. Both bands’ primary songwriters enjoyed the early evangelical patronage of Alan McGee (alas, this time around, McGee didn’t have a label to sign them to). Both bands have songwriters who grew up in a household where the father was absent. In the case of Glasvegas, the lack of a fatherly presence appears to have directly inspired the extraordinary current hit Daddy’s Gone. It must take some guts to write: “All I wanted was a kickabout in the park / For you to race me home when it was nearly getting dark”, especially as Allan’s father will have heard them.

“As it happens, I don’t know if he’s really heard it,” Allan says, “I mean, that wasn’t directly him, you know? It’s also a note to myself saying that when I get to 50, I don’t want to be destroyed by the thought of all the things I didn’t do.”

Starting a band was one of them. Faced with the prospect of becoming a professional footballer or a pop star, most young men would happily settle for either. After eight years of doing the former, Allan resigned to attempt the latter. Had he been a first-choice mainstay for his favourite team, Celtic, it seems doubtful that he would have made the leap. Instead he was a gifted midfielder who struggled to settle at any one club.

As is well documented, he was on the books at Premier League Falkirk, but it was at the lowlier Queen’s Park that he was briefly something of a star player. “The thing about James,” Rab says, “is that he’s fiercely competitive. He’d rather not compete than be stuck somewhere in the middle. It’s all or nothing with him. I once saw him lift a player on the opposing team and throw him up in the air. That’s his passion, you know? He was physical.”

The singer himself suggests that the expiry of his footballing career was as much down to the culture. “It’s a world away from rock’n’roll, you know? The two just don’t fit. Golf and football; having a really expensive car and football – those things fit. I was always late, and I wasn’t a healthy eater.

“The good thing about being in a band is that you’re left to your own devices. There’s no one breathing down your neck once you’re in the studio.” Having played to a soundtrack of terrace anthems, perhaps it isn’t so surprising that Allan has cultivated such a facility for writing songs that might achieve the same status, I suggest. “It does my head in to even think about where it might all end up,” is his response.

What he will say is that he’s glad that he never stopped to analyse what might happen when his songs reached the wider world. “The more you reveal yourself in your songs, the more extreme reactions you provoke. I was ignorant of that in many ways – and a good job too, because the songs might have come out differently. Who wants to know their future?”

While the present is this charmed, Glasvegas certainly wouldn’t. Is there any way that James Allan’s life could be better right now? If he was prone to displaying the same emotions that burn so intensely at the heart of his music, he would be perpetually on the brink of hysteria. Instead, just like, well, a professional footballer playing down his last-minute winner in the postmatch interview, his tones are measured and precise. “My girlfriend could be here. That would be nice. She’s just graduated from Manchester University and she’s now trying to make sense of her life. A bit like I am with mine. I guess everybody’s doing that, aren’t they?”

Then remembering his Glaswegian tormentor from yesterday, he takes an impeccably timed slurp on his Banana Bliss. “I mean, really, whoever you are, you never stop wondering who the f*** you think you are. The sunglasses don’t come into it.”

Glasvegas is released by CBS on Monday

Explore Music

• CD Reviews

• Live Reviews

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of 2008
• Hitler and the Downfall mash-ups
• Britney Spears: The Circus