New Idols: The Long Blondes

“David Bowie, Jeremy Clarkson and I think probably Nancy Sinatra.” Sadly Kate Jackson, lead singer with The Long Blondes, does not have the list of people entering the next series of Celebrity Big Brother in front of her. Instead she’s revealing her fantasy dinner party line up,“ I think Nancy would have lots of great stories about growing up and her Dad, Clarkson would just get drunk and not care whilst Bowie would add the wildcard element! I think we could have a really good discussion”. Quite what this discussion would entail we’re not too sure but we’d love to see it.

“We’re 3 girls, 2 boys from Sheffield. We’re quite glamorous and enjoy dressing up. We have a broad range of danceable pop songs and one ballad”. For those of you that have been living under a rock for the past 18 months this is Kate Jackson’s description of her band for you. The Long Blondes have well and truly crashed the radar with their mixture of sultry pop and floor filling tunes. Owing as much to the 1960’s and arty films as they do to Jarvis Cocker and their Sheffield mentors Pulp they have captured peoples hearts having only released a couple of official singles. “Basically we formed three and a half years ago when we all moved to Sheffield to come to University. I met Dorian when I was DJ-ing and we would go out as lot and see bands like The Coral and The Cooper Temple Clause and became a bit disillusioned with the state of music in the UK at the time. We started the band out of boredom, wanting to do something creative and wanting to be the band we would want to see.”

The Long Blondes first emerged with a series of low key releases on indie label Sheffield Phonographic and have slowly built up a fan base over the last two years but Gigwise wonders whether Kate found it frustrating being so hyped yet having nothing solid in the shape of an album or busy touring schedule to give the fans? “We have been touted as ‘Britains Best Unsigned Band’ for quite a long time, which was good but the longer you spend unsigned the more people begin to think ‘Well they can’t be that good if they are still unsigned’ and it becomes quite a burden. The reason we have spent so long getting this album out is because of that and we were juggling day jobs with playing gigs until April of this year so we never had time to record an album, until we got signed.

Finally making themselves at home with Rough Trade, a label synonymous with the high quality pedigree of artist from The Smiths to The Strokes, Arcade Fire to the Libertines. So besides the historical legacy of the label what was it them to Rough Trade? “As a band we have always had a lot of control over what we do, from our sound to our videos and artwork we control it all and we didn’t want to sign to a label and then have that control taken away. Add to that the amount of great bands that the label have dealt with over the years like The Fall, Belle and Sebastian, The Smiths, these are all our favourite bands all on one label. So we knew Rough Trade could release an independent record that we could retain control of but could still become a number one hit.

The aforementioned “danceable pop songs and one ballad” have been compiled onto the album called ‘Someone To Drive You Home’ released on November 6 and preceded by the glorious single ‘Once And Never Again’ two weeks earlier. Kate enthuses about the new single “ I guess it’s like me as an older woman giving advice to a young girl, there’s a line in it that goes ‘19, you’re only 19 for Gods sake, you don’t need a boyfriend’, that always gets sung back to me when we play live and I think it’s a thing a lot of people identify with. It also has a twist at the end where I sing ‘How I’d like to see a girl your age’ which could be taken a couple of ways. “Myself and Dorian (guitars) write the lyrics for the band. We take our influence from 60’s British cinema, Penguin classic books and 60’s pop” says Kate regarding the bands lyrical influences.