All The Right Moves: Kate Jackson interviewed

“I’m fine but very tired. We’ve been driving back to Suffolk in between shows – we’ve not been staying over. I’m the driver and we didn’t get back until about 3am last night, so...” Kate Jackson laughs and well she might. But rather than nervous exhaustion, her buoyant mood is surely due to something else entirely. Speaking to The Skinny from her home in Bury St Edmunds, the former Long Blondes singer has much to celebrate. Just 24 hours since the release of her tremendous debut British Road Movies, and part way through a short run of dates to promote the album, Jackson’s critical stock is as high as it ever was: reviews have been entirely – and hugely – positive.

“It’s been wonderful,” she says. “It’s more than I could ever have hoped for. I wasn’t expecting this. I was kind of expecting people to go, ‘Oh, it’s her from The Long Blondes, good record...’ and that would be it, but actually people seem to be genuinely excited to have me back. The record’s getting some great reviews and people are really getting it – really getting the track listing, the narrative, the concept, the artwork: how everything works together. I’m so happy and proud of it.”

Seeking out Bernard Butler

Produced by Bernard Butler and featuring his playing throughout, British Road Movies is a savvy stylistic shift away from Jackson’s work with The Long Blondes: a much more catholic set than the advanced indie of Someone to Drive You Home and the electro-influenced Century. “Yeah, a lot of that is coming from mine and Bernard’s personal musical tastes,” says Jackson. “I was only used to writing with Dorian [Cox] in The Long Blondes and we had a certain sound that the five of us made. We tried to vary it on the second album because we were listening to quite lot of Italian disco and upbeat pop at that time, whereas the first one was more of a straight up indie pop album."

“So when The Long Blondes finished, I was thinking about writing on my own but I’m not a musician. I couldn’t sit down with an acoustic guitar or at a piano and start writing a song. I need to write in collaboration with somebody else. So I went to Rough Trade and spoke to them and I said to them, ‘Look, I’d really, really like to write with Bernard Butler.’ I’ve always admired him, Suede were my favourite band as a teenager and I knew that they managed him. I didn’t know that he would say yes, but fortunately he did and we got on very well. It’s resulted in this quite eclectic record but I think it hangs together on Bernard’s guitar playing, Bernard’s production and my vocal and the lyrics. It does work.”

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It does, work, no doubt, and credit to Butler, whose continuing collaborative endeavours work on the basis of a shared vision rather than typical muso-for-hire contracting. “Yes, he is very good at that,” agrees Jackson. “He brings ideas out of you that you might not even know are there. But he does it in a very subtle way. I’d say that 80% of the time when we wrote together, something good would come out of it. The demos for Wonder Feeling and Metropolis were made on the first day, in our first writing session, or was it the second? But we had a real chemistry, I think, which is quite a difficult thing to find. I’ve done lots of writing sessions with other people since then and it’s never been quite as good.”

Becoming principal songwriter

Aside from its compelling narrative and thirst for melody, British Road Movies showcases the Jackson voice in a way her previous recordings only hinted at. Testing her range with real courage sees her emerge as a genuinely accomplished singer. Did the personal nature of the songs help with that? “Yeah, definitely. Songs like Velvet Sofa and 16 Years are very personal. On this record, I wrote all the lyrics, whereas with The Long Blondes, Dorian wrote most of the lyrics and I wrote one or two songs on each album. It was very much Dorian’s band, so I didn’t always get to write a narrative from my point of view. But on this record, I did, and I could explore things that had actually happened to me.”

“So, for example, 16 Years is a song about friendship, a song about my best friend, Erica, who I’ve known now for 25 years. But there was a period in our lives where we lost touch for a few years while she went to university in London and I went up to Sheffield. And when we met up again, she’d had a really hard time and I realised that she was a completely different person. A lot of stuff had happened and I felt awful, and I swore that I’d never lose her again. So it’s about that, really. I had to stop myself crying it when I was singing it live yesterday. So, yes, I’m glad to hear that comes across in the way it’s sung, as well.” 16 Years is a stirring spoken word piece with a nod to classic girl groups, but also a hint of Debbie Harry’s The End of the Run from her Def, Dumb & Blonde album. “Yeah! Lovely. Brilliant, brilliant song. Love it.”

With a lyric sheet that deserves proper investigation, much of the album shares that same visual dynamic. No surprise, perhaps, as Jackson makes her primary living these days from painting (her work adorns the album cover and inner sleeve.) “Yes, well that’s the point in some ways. Bernard’s got this very cinematic production sound anyway and I do write visually. I do see in images rather than words, a lot of the time. When Bernard and I were writing, he would come up with a piece of music and he might play it over and over again. I would be sitting there listening to it and the images were coming to me from the music he was playing. And I was writing them down almost in a stream of consciousness.”

“Homeward Bound is, basically, a poem about the Suffolk landscape and driving through it, because that was what that guitar riff evoked in me when he played it. And that was a very immediate thing. I edited it a little bit, but not very much, really.” Homeward Bound’s roaring guitar riff is classic Suede – Jackson allowed him one, right? “Yeah! Well, there’s a great story about that riff and the guitar he played it on. I don’t know if I should tell you.” Too late. “Well, that guitar riff was written on a guitar that was given to him by Johnny Marr, who is his guitar hero. And he was playing it, just strumming away, and he came up with that riff and he said, ‘Oh, I always play good stuff on this guitar because it’s Johnny Marr’s guitar.’ He’ll hate me for telling you that.”

As we wind up, Jackson reflects on the practical difficulties of being based in East Anglia and having to plan gigs around her backing band’s full-time jobs (The Wrong Moves are, ostensibly, Horse Party, an excellent guitar act in their own right and deserving of broader acclaim). But she’s excited about the coming months: “My focus is on this record now and I’ll record an EP of new songs with The Wrong Moves in the summer. I’ve got a real backlog of songs, so I’m keen to get as many recorded as possible.”

We finish by pondering a recent Twitter comment where somebody had reckoned that the worst thing about being in a band was surely having to go out every night.. Jackson laughs but dismisses it as someone who’s been there, done that. “Oh, I don’t think that’s the worst thing about being in a band. Trust me!”