Fair play to Richard Foster for pulling together a lengthy feature on The Long Blondes, centred on an interview with vocalist Kate Jackson and guitarist Dorian Cox, without once mentioning Pulp. Not only did "this disparate bunch of provincial arty refuseniks" craft some splendid "bedsit visions of the pleasure principle" on their 2006 debut Someone To Drive You Home (recently reissued by Rough Trade), but the album was produced by Pulp's Steve Mackey and they too hailed from Sheffield - Steel City shaping their sound and style in the same way that it did many others.
While the reverence Foster affords to the record and its songs is arguably overegged, you do have to remember that the mid-00s were a strange, bleak period when the UK was in the malevolent grip of landfill indie. It's not hard to see why some of us eagerly latched on to the seedy, glam-punk glamour and arty pop of The Long Blondes, as well as fellow fringe artists like Young Knives, Howling Bells, Los Campesinos! and Semifinalists.
Sadly, second album Couples failed to live up to the first and the band split six months after its release, in October 2008, owing to Cox's stroke suffered earlier that year. It wasn't just the nation's cravat manufacturers who mourned their premature demise - there was more than enough promise in Someone To Drive You Home to suggest that, had fate not intervened, their legacy could have been considerably greater.
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