Our second EP, A Quiet Life, was released in June 2005 on Deltasonic Records. To mark the 20th anniversary, the EP is being made available on streaming in its original form for the first time, and the we are releasing our first ever cassette.

Available now on Bandcamp and limited to 100 copies, with A Quiet Life EP on side A, backed with the first EP Transition, and a reversible sleeve featuring artwork from the original vinyl releases. 

 

 

The EP still means the world to us, but what it means to everyone who’s listened to us over the years is equally as important. So we asked our friend Ollie Wright, a musician and writer who was a key part of the Manchester scene, to write about his experience of the time.

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“You may find yourself in a house of multiple (multiple) occupation on Argyle Avenue, Victoria Park. The front room is crammed with scores of people, who are facing three people, who are in danger of causing all of us a serious problem. 
 
The floor is shaking with the impact of bass, the drums, the ceaseless moshing. Maybe it could collapse. But that’s OK. It hasn’t yet, and this slinky Scottish dude is hollering “FACES AMONG THE FACELESS MEN’ (I think). All right, I don’t have a clue what he’s saying, it’s impossible to pick it out, but it hardly matters because I do know that tonight he is a shaman, and he’s leading all of us a long way astray. 
 
That was Stu Ogilvie, conducting the lightning, face half-hidden behind a mop of dark hair, calling out these dense, unintelligible, undeniable odes to… What exactly? Then he drifted away from us, disappearing behind the drum kit. Into the void where a frontman had stood, he summons and unleashes a mesmerising, apparently endless roll, before calmly floating back to the front of the stage as if he’d never been anywhere else. Two acts in one, both equally compelling. 
 
At his side, a genial Yorkshireman named Lee Gale. When he isn’t torturing his guitar with a drumstick, Lee is strutting forward, as far as he can get into our enraptured faces – a massive, shit-eating grin plastered across his – banging out the chords he knows we want, because we are just so dirty. 
 
Did I mention that The Longcut were incredible live?

Somehow always seeming at a step’s remove from this tumult, despite being at its epicentre, was the bassman, Jon Fearon, a member of a creative Cumbrian tribe who had meandered down to Manchester in winding ways from the Lakes. What he brought to The Longcut was an intense seriousness and almost religious focus, but also a complete understanding of what the bass guitar is supposed to do. Listen to their debut single, Transition, which is something you should do whenever you need to reconnect with the essence of life. All I hear this time is Jon’s hook twisting with the cunning and charisma of a snake through Stu’s sprechgesang chorus, and then, throughout those brutally beaten-out instrumental passages, the monumental slab of Jon’s fuzz-drenched low-end that bludgeons past any resistance. That bastard knew what he was doing.
 
The crowd that gathered at Argyle had come from all over the UK to this city to create a moment that would endure, for us at least, indelibly ours. The Longcut were our house band – literally, on at least a couple of occasions. For a thrilling moment, they were the defining sound of our city, and they deserved much more attention from the world at large than they got.  
 
Transition was a first act to wake the dead. A Quiet Life, despite that deeply ironic title, was somehow an even bigger hit, to my mind anyway. It was effectively the same formula – the splash of electronic and organic cymbals, sadistically churning bass, staccato chug from Lee – only this time, it had been honed to a finer, more deadly point. Even Lee’s resonant, chiming, treble guitar hooks are essentially a rhythmic adornment, the whole thing is a fearsome ball of rhythm. And the thing was, you just had to turn it UP. There wasn’t volume enough for this motherfucker. Fragments of ideas floated up out of Stu’s Caledonian dreams.
 
Mostly I heard a command to ‘keep on dancing’ and, galvanised, I did. We all did.
 
The Longcut’s first album was named A Call and Response, but really, Stu’s voice and the band’s overwhelming sound was a call to action. Not that they ever told you straight what that action was supposed to be – that was up to you. Stu would never expressly order you to kick out the jams, or be so direct as to sing that he wanted to be your dog. But the power of the music made it crystal clear that it was time for you to do something. What were you going to do? Make of this city, this time, your moment, your energy, whatever you could.

20 years have passed since these records were born. What I get now when I hear this startlingly urgent music is exactly the same thrill, the sense that nothing else matters. But you didn’t have to be there. Once the party’s over, what remains is the music and the feelings you get when you hear the music. If you’re hearing these tunes for the first time in 2025, I envy you. I hope that you get the same ferocious kick out of The Longcut that I did back then, and always will.
 
The Argyle days are long gone, Manchester itself has changed out of sight, but the fearless attitude and precocious spirit of the times was captured for us in these songs, and can be summoned back into being whenever we need it, to remind us of what is possible. 
 
Music is everything, will always be essential. Never forget that.
 
A mind enlightened, body flowering. 
 
Now move.”

 

 

The original Transition EP is now available on streaming. Click the embed below or here to listen.

 

Cath Aubergine from the legendary ManchesterMusic.co.uk has written a few words reflecting on the release, far better than we could.

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Turn of the century Manchester: a music scene left bruised and battered by its long nineties hangover blinks, rubs its eyes. Time to wake up. There are pockets of life, here and there, in the basements and upstairs rooms. Branded nights – just a couple, at first – where you know the acts have been selected, you can trust them. Akoustik Anarkhy, Chairsmissing. Then there are more. Blowout, High Voltage. Something is happening here. By 2004 you can go out pretty much any night of the week and see three or four new acts, at least half of them local. Suddenly everyone seems to be in a band and you come home from a night out with CDRs in your pockets and cheaply photocopied flyers for the next gig. Sometimes the venue is someone’s house. Whose house? No idea, someone who knows someone, but everyone is welcome.

That summer, Castlefield Bowl belongs to the new breed. Blowout packs the D:Percussion main stage with the best of them, and suddenly the name that’s been whispered in back rooms from the Northern Quarter to Chorlton goes overground. The arena fills up as The Longcut hit the stage. This is the moment we have been waiting for, that Manchester has been waiting for. Something new and young and exciting, a jumping mass of cool kids who give not one fuck for the behemoths of the last century. Faces among the faceless, voices among the voiceless. The mutant post-rock disco punk drum machine beat is relentless, then the singer steps away from the microphone, takes up position behind a real drumkit, and it all explodes.

56 seconds. That’s all it takes to know Manchester has a new favourite band.  The gigs are wild now, people hanging off the walls. Weeks later Night and Day is packed to the edges and the music press are on their way up the M6.  Yet still no official releases. How the hell is anyone going to capture this? But somehow they do. “Transition” hits the shops in November and copies are like hens’ teeth within days. The future has arrived.

How was all that twenty years ago? Manchester is barely recognisable now, all shiny tower blocks, and the wild kids grew up as every generation must. But press play and the years evaporate, you’re not sitting in the office any more, you’re waking up in a bus shelter in south Manchester with a mysterious bruise and a half drunk bottle of Smirnoff Ice and it’s nearly time to go out again.

It’s 20 years today since we released the Transition EP. Recorded in a studio in Liverpool, above a garage, where Space would periodically come in to grab equipment from their rehearsal room next to the live room, and released by the legendary Deltasonic Records. We were generally amazed and slightly bewildered by the reaction to the song, which isn’t the most conventional pop song we’ve written, but still got people chanting the words back to us and crowd surfers hoisted towards the stage. 

To celebrate, we’re making the EP available as a PWYW release on Bandcamp in its original form, and look out for the streaming release in the coming weeks.

https://thelongcut.bandcamp.com/album/transition-ep

We’ve also recently unearthed a video from one of our gigs just before the time of the recording. It’s on YouTube now for anyone who wants a nostalgic (and slightly glitchy) 20 minute blast.

 

 

We’re now on BlueSky, updates and responses on Twitter will be pretty limited at this point.

 

Hi Bluesky, nice to see you. Here’s some home movies from Fuji Rock from a lifetime ago, we really should get around to posting more of these.

[image or embed]

— The Longcut (@thelongcut.com) 19 November 2024 at 07:48

Hello. We thought we’d best post an update at the end of the incomprehensible time-fog that is 2020.

First up, a link to replay our Tim’s Twitter Listening Party for A Call And Response. This was absolutely great fun and genuinely mind-blowing at times, with people dusting off memories we’d long since obliterated with lack of sleep, too much alcohol, etc.

Let us know if you’d like Arrows or Open Hearts for the next one…

https://timstwitterlisteningparty.com/pages/replay/feed_374.html

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The first confirmed gig of 2021 is the Fair Play Festival, where we’re playing at the request of our friends at Speedy Wunderground with The Lounge Society and PVA.

Tickets are available here: https://www.seetickets.com/event/fair-play-festival/st-philips-church-salford-manchester/1466854

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We’ve been working on new stuff in between the bedlam, including Stu’s remix of Equinox from the excellent Astral Bodies album ‘Escape Death’.

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We’ve also unearthed and compiled some odds and ends of various songs and half songs that we’re fond of but never quite worked their way onto a record, from way back in 2003 up to 2018.

Available to stream and download from our Bandcamp.

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There’s been a lot of time spent messing around with new sounds, melodies, and FX pedals while in lockdown. More to come, and hopefully soon, but here’s some melodies from Tier 3 from Lee for now.

Whilst we’ve been holed up in lockdown we’ve been sifting through the Longcut archives and thought we’d share some of the unreleased recordings and demos that we’ve built up since we started. You can listen to these on our Soundcloud. Some are pretty fully realised, some more failed experiments, some completely all over the place. They range from our very first songs and demos to tracks that never made it to albums. We’ve loved revisiting them and hope you find them interesting.

Bandcamp – https://thelongcut.bandcamp.com/album/offcuts-2003-2018

Years ago we did a remix swap with the excellent Maps (James Chapman) on one of our favourite tracks, Start Something, and he repaid us with an absolutely mint remix of Holy Funk from A Call And Response. Once we’d sorted our heads out and finished Arrows, we though we’d see if he fancied a crack at any of the album, and the result is a version of Popic that we think deserves it’s own release.

Popic (Maps Remix) is out now on Spotify, Apple Music, Soundcloud, etc. The lush full version (before we tried a cheeky edit to turn it into a four minute pop song) is available only on our Bandcamp page for streaming and high-res audio download.

The video was shot by Rick Bebbington during Iceland’s worst summer on record.

Streaming links: