GLASS Animals will be performing at Blissfields festival this weekend fresh from success at Glastonbury.

The three-day boutique festival gets under way today at Vicarage Farm near Winchester and sees Glass Animals playing the main stage on Saturday.

The four school friends from Oxford may have only come to prominence last year but global success has seen them repeatedly touring America and Australia and playing to increasingly bigger crowds.

It has been quite a journey for the four 26-year-olds. None of them had intended to form a group – but fate saw differently.

Singer-songwriter Dave Bayley was at medical school three years ago studying to be a neuroscientist.

But, one night, unable to sleep, he messed around with some music on an old laptop and by the morning the bare bones of Glass Animals’ first songs had taken shape!

Inspired by South London’s bass music scene, he recorded the tracks secretly and quietly in a small room near Elephant and Castle and the result was a beautiful piece of ambient electronica called Golden Antlers.

He showed it to his three close friends, now bandmates Joe Seaward, Drew MacFarlane and Edmund Irwin, before putting it on the internet. Within days of publishing, managers, artists, promoters, agents and lawyers began to contact them.

The friends formed a band without even realising it.

Band member Joe Seaward said: “It wasn’t scary but silly. We had a band and two songs but we had never rehearsed. I didn’t really play music – none of us did, although two of us studied music at university and they had played piano and violin at school.

“We needed to decide what to do so we removed it from Myspace and put it on hold until the end of university. Then we decided to give ourselves a couple of years and if it didn’t work we’d do something sensible. We put it back online to see what happened. People got excited but we had to move on fast.”

Then producer Paul Epworth, who worked with Adele and Florence and the Machine, visited the band in London. But it was not the greatest start.

“He came to see us at a show in London. We’d just released our EP Leaflings and Dave walked on stage, tripped over a wire and fell flat on his face.”

But Epworth liked what he saw and Glass Animals became the first signing to Wolf Tone, his new record label.

Joe adds: “There was never an enormous amount of hype. The band seems to have grown organically. We still write and rehearse in a shed in the woods. It’s got lots of pillows in it – mainly to soundproof it. It’s actually a very old stable, big enough for two horses. There are not many people around to annoy and it’s very beautiful.”

This year the band has played their biggest headline shows yet, such as a sold-out show at London’s 2,500 capacity Shepherd’s Bush Empire in March.

Joe added: “When we played Glastonbury we only spent two hours there as we had to get an overnight ferry to Holland to play a gig there. Our life is crazy. None of us expected this – it never even crossed our minds.”