The Long Blondes have had their career cut short and, not surprisingly, I am sad. Partly because I had such high hopes for them but mainly because I had that special feeling that, despite their faults, they were "my thing".I first saw them in Tangents and a Plan B gig review and thought, "This sounds like my thing". I first heard them on an instore listening station a year later and thought, "This sounds like Arctic Monkeys". Then one hot afternoon I heard "Weekend Without Makeup" on the radio in my bedroom. Perhaps I'd dropped my unfair expectations by then but it sounded like exactly what I'd hoped for; I put the album on my Christmas list and never looked back. For something so brash it was a hell of a grower.
In a Plan B cover story, Everett True wrote that a friend of his whispered to him that the Long Blondes looked like they used to be in ska bands - and he didn't mean they played Desmond Dekker covers. True was kinder, saying that if he was honest (hmm) they reminded him of his old "Pastels crew". The Long Blondes did have a bit of the over-enthusiastic late convert about them - you know, like the annoying "I'm indie!" singer from Los Campesinos! or your friend who at age 15 suddenly gave up sport and got piercings, running around dividing everyone up into "us" and "them" and thinking they were the first person ever to namedrop various second-tier punk bands and French philosophers. That is, the Long Blondes were try-hards despite being old enough to know better. And I loved them for it. My Long Blondes badge is one of my most proudly displayed.
Like most bands these days they claimed, as one anonymous Wikipedia contributor put it eloquently, somewhat more eclectic influences than their sound suggests. They knew what buttons to push in 2003:
"Our shared influences include The Mael Brothers, The Marx Brothers and The Bewlay Brothers. We do not listen to The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors or Bob Dylan. We chose an instrument each and learnt to play it. Approximately three months after we formed, we played a victorious 25 minute
set at Leeds Hi-Fi club. We inherit the aesthetics of early Roxy Music.* We have a lot of influences, sometimes we sound a bit like them, sometimes we sound a lot like them. Sometimes we sound nothing like them at all."
They sounded like the mid-point between the Au Pairs and Blondie, but only to the extent that the Strokes sounded like Television and Interpol sounded like Joy Division. The guitars and drums were a bit like Arctic Monkeys.
Their studied glamour was chintzy. Some of the words (mainly, intriguingly, written by a man who was in a relationship with a woman in the band for another woman in the band to sing to men about women and sometimes to women about men) were squeezed awkwardly into lyric patterns and hung on chord progressions that resembled a modernist hat-rack you can't fit in your car to take home. But this was because, like any band worth watching, The LBs were in love with ideas. In any event, honesty always shines through and it did in rousing shout-along choruses and even more so in quiet moments like, "Never ever ever try to tell me it's a pleasure being alone/Because all I have around me are the records and the books that I own", and "That's what happens when you listen to Saint Scott Walker/On headphones/On the bus."
The "adventurous" second album was more brash if not plain grating in places (mainly due to harsh modern pop production), even more ideas-heavy and a bit slower to grow. If anything it only increased anticipation but in the meantime it added detail to their enticing world of boredom, affairs and belief in the redemptive power of glamour and had a couple of bangers to boot. "Guilt" has been playing in my head since I read the sad news.
I imagine an alternate reality in which The Long Blondes, having gone on to great fame, appear as talking heads on a documentary in 20 years' time. In my mind several of the band members are like Viv Albertine from the Slits: charmingly attractive and well-spoken but disappointingly ordinary, talking about a mere phase of their life. Guitarist and principal songwriter Dorian (who in this parallel universe never had the tragic stroke that the band blames for their break-up) is like the ever-wistful Glen Matlock, the man who had the brain and the dream but not the face or the voice; who "got it" more than anyone else but attracted suspicion more than adoration because he seemed a little too smart. He's much cooler than Glen though. Singer and looker Kate Jackson has her own interview and sits on the edge of the couch fiddling. She's an out-of-touch, chain-smoking, self-obsessed diva with destroyed hair and the corners of her lips curling down like Siouxsie Sioux - in other words, she's wonderful.
Kate was the star for better and for worse. For better because she deserved it. She was a fan first and foremost who painted portraits of '60s British movie stars, memorised Jarvis lyrics and carefully cultivated a darts-watching, vintage skirt and scarf-wearing persona. For better beacuse she relished her meagre fame and wore it well ("How does it feel to be a style icon?," the former vintage clothes store clerk said to Plan B. "Fantastic. Fan-bloody-tastic! Fan-bloody-bloody-tastic!"). For worse because it took something away. On stage at the Zoo in Brisbane, during the first song while the too-well-lit room was still cold and the small audience's feet were firmly planted, she danced and pouted towards a point 10 degrees above our heads with such professionalism I longed for her to trip on a cord and burst out laughing at the ridiculousness of it all like Karen O. Alas, that didn't happen but nor did we take our eyes off her.
The Long Blondes got somewhere by taking themselves too seriously: by authoring arch melodramas, acting like stars and dressing glam in Sheffield pubs. Perhaps what held them back - like most bands on their second album (or their first album if they've come to prominence through a series of feted, unexpected singles) - was that they took themselves too seriously. Your 15-year-old friend with the op-shop makeover was exciting at first, but after a while you wished she would let her guard down and have some fun without checking whether the NME approved. The Long Blondes obviously had to get some things out of their system, like "This is who I am" and "This is what I've read". I believed that the imminent release of "Singles", a compilation of their early, legendary you-know-whats (a great idea and long awaited by this foreign press reading ebayophobe) would bring that era full circle and give them the freedom to fulfil the potential I saw. I'm not sure what I hoped for, but maybe having seen that they had the influences and the ideas, and having heard them chance upon the odd beauty, I hoped they'd pull it all together and make something universal. Then again, it's hard to imagine anything better than "Weekend Without Makeup", "Giddy Stratospheres" etc.
*More bands should inherit the aesthetics of early Roxy Music.
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