The Blinders
This incendiary trio refuse to shy away from politics - or succumb to rock-star stereotypes.
“Good rock’n’roll comes in times of desperation,” says Charlie McGough, effusive bassist with white-hot Manchester-via-Doncaster trio The Blinders, purveyors of a dark, melodic strand of agit-popping alt.rock, swathed in atmospheric surf-guitar reverb. “The greatest songs always come from a time and place of protest.”
With the world lurching from crisis to crisis on a tidal wave of divisive right-wing populism, you’d imagine today’s rock community would be involuntarily stimulated toward greatness by every news bulletin. Yet apart from a select few voices of dissent (Idles, Strange Bones, The Blinders), numb generic complacency and apathetic denial appear to be the order of the day.
“Bands tend to shy away from taking a stance or addressing anything political,” McGough shrugs. “But if you’ve got a platform you ought to use it. It always felt natural to us. We’re politically minded people, therefore our songs are politically minded. Being from Doncaster, our families were involved in the miners’ strike. The closure of the pits led to the demise of whole communities.”
Rather than being party political, The Blinders’ striking debut album, Columbia, echoes the dystopian futures of George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and in so doing holds up a mirror to today’s societal ills. They get called ‘punk’ a lot.
“We’ve always thought of punk as an ethos rather than a sound, but ‘punk’ is a bit of an outdated term, isn’t it? Especially sound-wise.”
The Blinders don’t want to get pigeonholed. They’re all of an age where punk is no more associated with youthful vibrancy than the tired cliché of the rock ‘lifestyle’.
“The stereotypical rock’n’roll star is an outdated image and there’s no space for it in 2018,” McGough says, smiling. “Times have moved on, the public don’t want to see it any more, so we can act the way we are rather than as misogynistic drug addicts.”
That said, The Blinders kick significant amounts of arse, and Columbia is a veritable wild-fire of incendiary passion, underpinned by McGough’s bass, driven emphatically into back of skull and pit of crotch by Matt Neale’s drums and rendered intense by guitarist/singer Thomas Haywood’s seismic tones and a vocal that’s invariably committed to the point of near-hysteria.
Ultimately, The Blinders’ railing against dystopia mirrors exquisitely the post-millennial angst of our apathetic times.
“I was at the London Trump protest, but left feeling frustrated, thinking: ‘What are we achieving here? Where’s the riots?’ There is protest on social media,” McGough admits, before concluding wearily: “But it’s all just people shouting into the vacuum.” IF