The Stool Pigeon music newspaper

You’re smart people. You have The Long Blondes’ number? Over-hyped, ironic janglers with a charity shop obsession and clever-clever, referential lyrics, can’t play their guitars, right?

Well, they know what you think of them. And they don’t care. Rather than sticking in a comfortable niche, adored by those who shared their reference points and glimpsed a heart and soul under the flicks of eyeliner, vintage dresses and paeans to Edie Sedgwick, they’ve taken a few lessons to heart.

“I learnt that we should stick to our guns a lot more,” says drummer Screech of their experience with debut album Someone To Drive You Home, “especially in the studio. I mean, it’s not that I’m majorly unhappy with the record, but there were certain things that we wanted to happen that didn’t really happen. This time we very much wanted to be a bit more confident in the studio and try to get our own voice across a bit more.”

Darker, more grown-up and less hand-clappy sounds are certainly apparent on second album Couples - Numanesque synths on ‘Century’; guitar effects to spook the Banshees and Krautrock drone on ‘Round The Hairpin’, and real disco-goddess singing from Kate Jackson, one-time queen of the aloof bark, on the luscious ‘Too Clever By Half’. The presence of indie-dance renaissance man Erol Alkan is bound to attract accusations that the band have gone for a bolt-on big-name producer fix, but they’re clear that they’re the architects of their own sonic refurbishment.

“It was collaborative, really,” says Screech. “He was involved in the process, certainly, but like, not in a svengali kind of way.”

“His ideas weren’t jarring at all, because we came from a similar sort of place,” asserts bassist Reenie Hollis.

Indeed, Alkan is an old friend of the band, having been a fan ever since he spun their first ‘New Idols’ 7” at his legendary Trash club night and subsequently produced some of their debut’s B-sides.

“Just through hanging out and playing at the club, we just started talking to him and he was saying he wanted to get into record production,” recounts Screech. “It was around the time we’d just got signed to Rough Trade and we were trying out producers. We were like, ‘Oh, why don’t you just come into the studio with us?’ We just built up this relationship through him doing the B-sides and hanging out socially as well. When it got to the stage where we actually went in to do the second album, we had such a trusting relationship - we were totally willing to try different things. Like if he suggested drumming in the toilet or recording the vocals outside or cutting out bits of songs…”

“It was really good to go into the studio with some of the tracks unfinished as well,” adds singer Kate Jackson, “because we didn’t really have any preconceptions about how they should sound. With the first record, because we’d been playing the songs live for so long, people had expectations for how they should sound and so did we. This time, working with Erol, it was really cool, because if we had a guitar-based track or something like that, it wasn’t constrained to just being that - we could take the guitar out completely and build it up from the drums if we wanted to, or an a capella vocal. The whole process of recording the album was really quite fun, I thought.”

Yet, despite the joys of their clearly developed musicianship (proud amateurs no more) and studio experimentation, the last thing you’d have expected the recording of Couples to be was ‘fun’.

It’s not just their sounds that have gone through a reshuffle; there’ve been a lot of personal changes too. Whereas once The Long Blondes seemed inseparable from the cultural heritage of their adopted home of Sheffield, now only Reenie remains in the Steel City. And even more gruesomely fascinating for the onlooker, the two couples in the band (Reenie and Screech, Emma and Dorian), have broken up. That would destroy most close-knit friendships, let alone bands; it would, you’d think, have made the difficult second album as much “fun” as pulling toenails.

Dorian starts to sing ‘You Don’t Bring Me Flowers’ into Emma’s ear, and the rest of the band crack up.

“Oh, we laugh at it now…” says Reenie with a wry roll of the eyes.

“But, at the time, it was terrible!” chime in the others.

“In the long run you just have to move past it,” says Screech as the giggles subside. “It’s totally been beneficial for all of us personally and in terms of our relationships within the band. It’s just one of those things that happens.”

Is there something wrong with these people? How can they be so well-balanced?

“We’ve kind of just… it’s not really an issue to us now,” shrugs Reenie.

They never thought about calling it a day?

“Not at all,” says Screech, shaking his head. “I don’t think it even crossed anyone’s minds. I think it’s the sort of thing that probably seems more stressful from the outside than it was to us going through it.”

“We’re cold, emotionally,” deadpans guitarist Dorian. “All the dramas were over before we went in to record the album, so it didn’t affect the writing process.”

Weeeeeell, but there is that title… While there’s nothing confessional or messily personal about Couples, events within the band have clearly fed into the lyrical themes. Lightspeed Champion it’s not, but there’s definitely new emotional weight to the songs, and you can almost hear a collective lowering of eyebrows. Rather than stitching together an album of dirty laundry, though, the band detached themselves from a sticky situation, analysed it (fuelled by a studio stuck with pictures of dynamic cultural pairings - Morecambe & Wise, Serge & Brigitte, Richard & Judy) and made it into a set of songs full of intrigue, seething emotions and humour, examining the whole idea of coupledom. It’s an album about twosomes for sure, especially on the heartfelt, mournful ‘Nostalgia’ and the sassy, shimmying disco-Blondie strut of ‘Guilt’. And they’re still too fond of a dry one-liner like ‘Here Comes The Serious Bit’’s “I could be a shoulder to lie on / Or I could be a body to cry on” to navel-gaze for long. Instead, strengthened in the fires of life’s occasional shitness and going from musical strength to strength, The Long Blondes are brushing the dust from their vintage frocks and coming to shake up your ideas. You really ought to let them.