|
 They
were hotly tipped before they picked up the Philip Hall Radar award at the NME
Awards, which in previous years had been won by Kaiser Chiefs and Franz
Ferdinand. Now they’re preparing to release their debut album, Someone To Drive
You Home. But as lead singer of the Long Blondes, Kate Jackson tells us, the
journey started three years ago.
“From actually forming the band to getting
signed was three years, but the first year doesn’t really count because we
didn’t know what were doing,” says Kate with a laugh as UK Music meets her
before a sold out gig. “We’d never been in a band before and feeling
our through and trying our best to play instruments and things. But after a year of doing that we got better
and it became like a real thing. The
better we got, the more gigs we were offered and the more we had to turn down
as well because we were all still working.
We couldn’t really physically balance the day jobs and the band because
it was like having two full time jobs all at once”.
Soon
enough NME put the quintet on their New Music Tour alongside Forward Russia,
Boy Kill Boy and the Automatic. It was the first time the Sheffield band had
actually been able to put together a string of dates for a UK tour. As
Kate puts it: “As soon as we got signed,
we agreed to do the NME Tour because we knew that would be such a good
introduction to touring for us, and it really was”.
They
signed to legendary independent label Rough Trade, home of the Strokes, Jarvis
Cocker, making headlines along the way.
They’re adamant that the independent label was the right choice for
them. Hopefully mainstream success will be achieved for the band, who have two
top forty singles, when Someone To Drive You Home is finally released. The album was produced by fellow Sheffield native and former Pulp bassist Steve Mackey.
“When we were talking about producers with
Rough Trade initially, we’d jokingly said in an interview, that we wanted to
produce it, but it was never like serious,” explains Kate. “We
didn’t seriously think Rough Trade would go ‘well, we’ll just give him a ring
shall we?!’ No, they laughed at us obviously but they suggested Steve. We were like ‘of course, Steve Mackey!’ He
also produced M.I.A, which has quite a pop sheen to it, so we knew that he’d be
able to take the sound up a level in terms of production and bring the kind of
style to the song that we wanted. We never wanted it to be like a lo-fi live
set, we wanted it to be a produced pop album and I think he’s done that really,
really well”.
She
also notes some similarities between themselves and the legendary Britpop band.
“There are lots of similarities between
us and Pulp, just in the way we formed. We’re not really a band of musicians,
we have a multi-gender band as well, it’s just five friends doing this and
writing songs that we believe in and Pulp were like that too”.
They’re
bringing back some much need glamour into the charts with their brand of quirky
but stylish pop punk, but Kate is keen that the band does not get pigeon holed
as one particular genre of music.
“We try to evolve, musically, all the time,
so we don’t really know where that’s going to take us,” she says. “But I do think that essentially, Dorian
writes pop songs and you can’t help but be influenced by all the things that we
like, which is a really broad range of different styles of music like fro Dusty
Springfield and Nancy Sinatra to the Fall, Suede and Pulp obviously”.
It’s
been a long time since a female fronted band has had any real commercial
success, and this is something the glamorous frontwoman has noticed too
“There were a lot of women in music at the
time of Britpop, but it was almost as if they wanted to be guys in bands and
they were just trying to copy what the lads were doing and certainly with
Elastica that’s what they were doing,” reckons Kate. “I
liked the music and everything, but I didn’t want to be that. So I guess what I
want to do is to balance them both. I’m not ashamed of dressing up and being a
woman and being glamorous and everything, but I’m still rocking out at the back”.
As
for the future, well they’re going to busy touring the world and are already
thinking about festival season.
“It’s amazing how quickly it comes around
again! We’ve just had an offer for a festival next year already. We’ve just
finished the festival season, you can’t seriously be thinking about festivals
again! But they do, they like to book up
really early,” laughs Kate. “If you
want to plan anything you have to sort of book time off six months in advance.
Like ‘it’s my mum’s birthday August 24th, I’m spending the day with her, so I
better take that day off now!’”
Someone To Drive You Home is out
now.
For more info:
www.thelongblondes.co.uk
Words: Helen Duong
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