The Longcut - No Shortcuts to Success

Post-Arctic Monkeys, the British indie landscape is one of sharp ascents and sharper descents, bulldozed into ever more precarious peaks and pitfalls by a veritable glacier of fickle hype and false scene-setting. In this context, the Longcut are an anomaly: the slow burner.

The band met at university in Manchester and took time to focus their music and build a reputation on the city's gig circuit. But even with an album – A Call and Response – finally released back in June and a support-slot on the forthcoming Charlatans tour, the band are hardly burning a path across the covers of the nation's music magazines.

Talking to the Skinny, lead singer/drummer Stuart Ogilvie postulates why: "Obviously we'd love to get as much press as the Kooks or whoever, but they're the sort of band that are naturally into that and we're not, and we'd feel uncomfortable with that type of thing. We'd rather just stay in our little comfort zone of living in Manchester and making music rather than spending three nights out a week in London bullshitting with journalists just to get a feature in a magazine."

Although touted as a Manchester band, none of the members are native to the city. Guitarist Lee is from Yorkshire, bass player Jon is from Cumbria and Stuart lived in Fife for nine years before moving south to Huddersfield as a teenager. A fourth member, "a singer who couldn't sing", was sacked along the way, unsurprisingly. So really how important is Manchester to them?

"When we first came here none of us were into the Manchester thing. We just knew there were a lot of venues where we could get gigs. At first I kept hearing Oasis and Stone Roses clones, but eventually I realised there were good underground bands around, like the Sonar Yen, Tsuji Giri and Oceansize. That hardcore scene really influenced us."

Hardcore is an apt choice of word. The Longcut are in a direct chain of inheritance from earnestly progressive post-rockers like Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Sonic Youth – an already-loud aesthetic to which they add propulsive drums and grumbling basslines. Lyrics are really of secondary import, as Stuart admits: "It's about getting a feeling across rather than the specifics of what's being said."

Anyone who has seen the band play live will know that the Longcut are a unique proposition, with Stuart dashing between his drum kit and the stage-front microphone when the song demands it. Whose idea was that?

"After we let the original singer go we were just going to be instrumental. We were writing 'Transition' and we had this pointless fucking ten-minute ending which was rubbish. I decided to stand and sing with a tambourine and it worked. So we bought a drum machine to fill out the sound for those parts."

This can still be challenging for the multi-tasking Stuart: "When we were starting out in small venues I sometimes had to climb over a couple of amps to get to the mic, and on bigger stages it's further to run back to the drums. But we always have a five to ten second window for this at the very least."

A Call and Response is a confident, surging debut that pummels the senses from its opening single 'A Last Act of Desperate Men' and carries the momentum through the epic 'Gravity in Crisis' and the impassioned 'A Quiet Life'. How do three apparently normal, well-adjusted guys make such hugely panoramic, utterly emphatic music?

"We all sit in a room with three or four keyboards and get them all going on loops and drones, all out of time, then we add guitars and drums and make noise for an hour. A lot of pointless jamming goes on in our rehearsal room, but making sense out of all the chaos is a great feeling."