The Long Blondes - A Woman’s Touch

The driving force behind Brit-rockers the Long Blondes is in touch with his feminine side. Nobody can express the mindset, frustrations and pleasures of being a young woman growing up as well as a young woman in the midst of growing up. Well, nobody except the Long Blondes’ lanky, scraggily-haired (and veritably male) lead guitarist and keyboardist Dorian Cox. Having written all but two songs on the Sheffield, England quintet’s critically acclaimed debut full-length.

Someone to Drive You Home (Beggars Banquet), Cox created a loose story about aging and the embittered jealousy, feelings of inadequacy and the desire to feel normal that accompany it—all from a woman’s perspective. Luckily for him, the group’s lead vocalist, svelte, fashion-savvy brunette Kate Jackson, happens to be a twentysomething woman who can relate to the lyrics.

Supported song-by-song with an excited mix of Blondie-influenced new wave, Le Tigre-like girl-group punkiness and almost Grease-like faux-’50s rockisms, Jackson often sounds as though she’s in the midst of a nervous breakdown as she sputters out various, increasingly frantic insecurities. On the album’s first song, “Lust in the Movies,” she says she wishes she were a “sweetheart” like Edie Sedgwick, Anna Karina and Arlene Dahl, and from there, her anxieties escalate. She sounds sexually ambiguous, coming on to a 19-year-old girl on “Once and Never Again” and by “You Can Have Both,” she’s lamenting about other girls beating her to success. Finally it seems she’s achieved some realization on “Weekend Without Makeup,” when she separates wants from needs and “love” from “in love.” It’s sometimes heavy stuff, but the Long Blondes have turned it into a party album with their joyous, giddy cacophony. It’s clear that it’s not just for women.

Screech Louder, the Blondes’ only other male member, known for his ’60s specs and Brillo-like hairdo, opines that Cox’s lyrics have nothing to do with gender. Since everyone in the band is in their mid-to-late 20s, they were all going through the same life changes. (Incidentally, Louder maintains his real name is indeed Screech, despite his hometown newspaper reporting his name is actually Mark Turvey, which he smirks off as “just one of those rock-and-roll myths that isn’t true.”) “[The album is about] coming to terms with that kind of shift from being an adolescent and a teenager to becoming a bit more grown up and how you kind of deal with that,” says the drummer from his parents’ home in Birmingham. “It’s a bit dislocating. We were all going through that period of time and it sort of rubbed off on the lyrics and the theme of the record.”

About his brother-in-arms’ feminine thought patterns, Louder says, “I think he kind of finds women more interesting than men… I think we are quite a feminine band. But then a lot of the bands I like a lot are feminine bands. I really like things like the Slits and the Raincoats, things like that. It’s like bands that I listen to anyway… I’m just in a band with my friends.”

Luckily for Louder, after a string of successful singles, the Long Blondes found their way onto the roster of legendary indie post-punk label Rough Trade, home to some of the band’s audible influences, such as the Smiths, Super Furry Animals and Belle & Sebastian. With a door to opportunity wide open, the band snagged sometime Pulp bassist—and one of the Long Blondes’ hometown heroes—Steve Mackey to produce Someone to Drive You Home. He was very affable in the studio and inspired them to push themselves to record exciting takes. Once, while Jackson recorded her vocals, the other members were watching television and, coincidentally, a documentary about Britpop came on, featuring Mackie prominently, validating their giddiness. Moreover, Mackie used this to his advantage to inspire the band. “If we did a good take, we got rewarded with a little snippet of Britpop gossip,” says Louder, like the cat who swallowed the canary. “We were kind of told on the [promise] that we kept it quiet.”

Upon the album’s UK release last November, the British press showered the band with praise, garnering near-perfect ratings from The Guardian, The Observer and NME, which placed their album seventh in the magazine’s year-end top albums list. But due to restructuring at Rough Trade’s distributor, the album’s US release was pushed back several times until Beggars Banquet picked it up. Finally, over half a year later, the band can tour the States beyond New York and Philly.

When they get here, Louder is most excited to see how his songs are received in different parts of the US so he can relate to the rest of the world. “Germans like ‘Only Lovers Left Alive’ and don’t like ‘Once and Never Again,’” he says. “Over in Germany, people are into sort of heavy songs. I don’t know why … ‘Once and Never Again,’ in England, especially, is the big crowd-pleasing song. ‘A Weekend Without Makeup’ has done really, really well in Italy. I think it’s just one of those things. People just latch onto different things and sort of relate to different aspects of the songs, maybe.” Saying this, Louder has inadvertently stumbled upon something about how the group’s universal appeal eludes more than gender stereotypes. Their songs overlap the human condition like a musical Venn diagram.

“I don’t really overly talk to Dorian about what the songs are about and sometimes I kind of like to not know,” says Louder, placing himself alongside everyone else. “I think he would like people to take what they want from the songs rather than to have some sort of a pre-subscribed idea as to what they’re about… It’s interesting to look outside of yourself from a different perspective.”

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