A childhood spent fighting for a games controller led to a guitar, then arenas.
Before Dylan John Thomas was selling out the Barrowlands six nights running, he was a boy in foster care fighting his foster brothers for the controller. The game was Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. Nobody actually got to play it for long. Whoever lost just sat back and listened to the soundtrack instead.
“Ring of Fire would come on every five minutes, and we’d all be jumping around the room singing it,” he remembers. That Christmas, he asked for a guitar. Johnny Cash was the first thing he learned. Paul Simon, The Beatles and Leonard Cohen came soon after.
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He picked up the banjo two years ago, on a road trip round Scotland with the band. They were messing about with old folk songs. By the time the new album came together, a couple of those songs had banjo woven through them, including lead single ‘Got You on My Mind’, which leans on brass too. That brass sound traces back to the ska he loved as a kid.
From the bedroom to the studio
The album, Nothing Here Worth Taking, was recorded with Scotty Anderson of The Snuts. Dylan wrote it all himself, and played most of the instruments. “I let the album grow naturally,” he says. “I didn’t want too much of a time constraint on it.” Unlike the debut, which the band had already road-tested live before recording, this one was built in the studio first and tested on audiences after.
Gerry Cinnamon spotted him sneaking into his Glasgow jam nights as a teenager, and ended up taking him on tour and onto arena stages. Dylan calls it more than a music lesson: “It was life lessons as well, becoming a man and trying to figure the world out.”
He’s had messages from people who grew up in care, hearing something of their own story in his songs. “It’s warming to hear folk connect with it,” he says. “Because I know how lonely it felt growing up in there.”
What you need to know: Dylan John Thomas plays at P&J Live on Saturday 12th December 2026. Presale tickets go on sale today at 9am, with general sale from Friday 26th June at 9am via AXS.
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