Transition EP – Now Streaming
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.
20 Years of Transition
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.
Bluesky
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.
— The Longcut (@thelongcut.com) 19 November 2024 at 07:48
[image or embed]
By Way Of Explanation
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
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
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’.
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.
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.
Lockdown Archive
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
Arrows is 1
This Saturday Arrows turns 1.
That’s a sentence that at many times over the 9 years it took to make and release I honestly doubted I’d ever be able to say, so here’s a not-so-short story about its birth.
It was an absolute beast to make.
We started writing it right off the back of releasing Open Hearts. Conscious that it’d been 3 years between A Call and Response and Open Hearts, and with what felt like little momentum left, it was an effort to quickly put out new songs, to try and ‘stay relevant.’
We put way too much pressure on ourselves and it definitely showed. Writing was difficult. Deathmask came quickly, we gave that its live debut at Plissken festival in Athens in 2010, but after that ideas were hard to come by, and the longer it went on the worse it got. We were frustrated with ourselves and each other, and to me a least all I wanted was to get the thing finished.
I spent hours and hours sat in front of my laptop, in my house in Northenden, trying to wrestle tiny sparks into ideas with enough substance to start working on together. I had a baby on the way and just couldn’t see how we could continue trying to write in the same way after the baby was born, so I was desperate to finish it.
We didn’t make that first baby deadline, or as it turns out a few more baby deadlines!
Three years after Open Hearts was released we were finally in a position to deliver an album to Melodic Records. We’d recorded everything ourselves, in our rehearsal room, a damp and leaky place underneath a gym in Salford. It wasn’t a good record, it was half baked at best. There were some good ideas for sure, but also a lot of rushed songs and ideas we should have discarded, and it didn’t know what it wanted to be. Thankfully, Dave at Melodic was, as he always has been, honest with us, and helped us to get some perspective on what we’d delivered. And we’re extremely grateful for that. Melodic, understandably, declined to release it.
We took some time, stepped back and reassessed, and made some important decisions.
It no longer mattered how long it took to get album 3 written, recorded and released. It had already been so long, we had a lot of important things happening in our personal lives, and we really, really, needed to start enjoying being in a band again. We also realised that the ‘first draft’ of album 3 wasn’t a complete write-off. It had taken a lot to get it to the point it was at and we knew it could be a good album. Removing the self-imposed deadlines was liberating, and whilst progress wasn’t exactly fast, it was definitely more enjoyable. Arrows (the song) was a big momentum boost too, that song came together quickly, one of those that almost writes itself, and we really needed to know that we could still do that. We rewrote old songs, again and again, wrote new songs and rewrote those too, and slowly the album properly started to form.
Another short three years on and we were in a position to start recording. We recorded in our homes, rehearsal room, and a borrowed studio (thanks Rob!)
Chris Snow, sound engineer extraordinaire, recorded the drum tracks and some guitar tracks which shaped the sound of the whole record, in a way we could never have done ourselves. We recorded in whatever free time we could find, and though progress was slow, it was progress nonetheless. At last, by mid-2016, we were done… with the recording at least… so we set about trying to find a home for Arrows.
We tried to send the record as far and wide as we could, but it had been so long since we’d done anything in the music industry we had very few contacts. We’d kept in touch with Andy Booth, our lawyer since we signed our first deal, and he was a huge help with both advice and getting the record to people, but no one was biting. I’d also sent the record to Mick Shiner. He’d signed us to his publishing label back in the early days, and he got in touch with an offer of help. He sent the record around, and whilst people liked it and were kind enough to tell us they liked it, still no one was biting. The fact people were saying nice things though was vindicating, and spurred us on.
A little while prior to this I’d seen a few posts from Ann at Deltasonic Records, they were releasing new music, so I sent a demo and Ann got in touch. She liked it and wanted to put it out!!!
Now eight years on from our last record, this news was as exciting as the first time Deltasonic had wanted to release our songs, 13 years earlier.
We enlisted the ears of Tom Knott to mix the record. We’ve known Tom for a long time, I first encountered him as part of a math rock band in an extremely odd venue in Manchester that I can’t recall, but later as the live guitarist / trumpeter in The Earlies. We’d recorded with Tom before too and knew we were in safe hands. We even managed to persuade him to play a little trumpet on the record. He knew straight away what we were aiming for and the record was mixed by mid-2017, then mastered by the brilliant Carl Saff shortly after that.
Liam Palmer, our long suffering artwork guru, did another spectacular job with the artwork, and we were ready. We just needed to figure out how to tell everyone else that, so we did the only sensible thing, went to the pub and got drunk with Will and Alex from InHouse Press. They were up for doing the promo. InHouse Press have always done our promo, on everything we’ve ever released, and it just wouldn’t have felt right to do this one without them.
In one final twist, a final attempt to scupper this album, the universe saw fit to place a spec dust/fluff/something on the stamper for the first run of the lovely blue vinyl. We listened to the first 30 seconds of all 500 copies, and an awful ‘clunk’, loud enough to kick me in the chest every time, was present on almost all of them. Thankfully Republic of Music, who were distributing the album with Deltasonic, were great and quickly ordered a repressing.
Arrows was released on April 6th 2018.
We owe a huge thanks to many, many people, without whom we would never have released this album. It was the most challenging thing we’ve ever done as a band, and we’re eternally grateful to everyone that helped, supported, worked with us, put up with us, and gave us advice.
We’ll be celebrating its first birthday at The Soup Kitchen in Manchester on May 18th, come join us.
Lee
You Are Not Alone Festival
We’re playing the You Are Not Alone Festival on the 30th of March, raising money for the brilliant Manchester-based mental health charity, Manchester Mind.
Click here for tickets. £10 allows entry to any of the three venues. We’re playing at Jimmy’s at 7:30pm.
Popic x Maps
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:
Autumn Office Playlist
A few songs from the bands supporting us at the upcoming gigs and some others that have been bouncing around our earphones and speakers.
Autumn Shows
We’re playing a few more gigs before the end of the year, starting in Chester this Friday. Come and get drunk with us.
Support is from these ace bands, so get in early:
