The Blinders

The Blinders arrived in 2018 as the incendiary, politically attuned rock band to beat. Now they’re back with their game-raising album Fantasies Of A Stay At Home Psychopath.

They arrived in 2018 as the incendiary, politically attuned rock band to beat. Now they’re back with their game-raising album Fantasies Of A Stay At Home Psychopath.

You couldn’t have planned it. Back in 2019, long before ‘self-isolation’ and ‘two-metre distancing’ became part of everyone’s vocabulary, The Blinders were holed up in a mill in Manchester, experimenting with a song called Fantasies Of A Stay At Home Psychopath. It eventually turned into their second album, via an intoxicating brew of personal demons, classical literature, Twin Peaks and Hitchcock and Lynch films, set off with a generous splash of politics and black humour.

Today there’s something darkly prophetic about the song. At the time, however, such deliciously wicked lines as ‘You’ve contemplated how you’d make them scream/And in your head you’ve fed them meat from 2003’ harked back to the stereotypical lone psychopath of Hitchcock’s classic horror/suspense film Psycho. An exaggerated version of many ordinary people most of us know, this trio of articulate twenty-somethings suggest. Perhaps we are, or could be, those people.

“I can’t imagine being an office worker sat down at a desk nine to five and having all these thoughts and feelings that you can’t express,” says singer/ guitarist Tom Haywood. “And I think this is a lot of where the idea of the stay-at-home psychopath comes from. It’s an exaggerated, often abstract… It can be the reflection of quite a normal person, on the outside.”

For Haywood and bassist Charlie McGough (drummer Matt Neale completes the line-up), much of the recent lock-down has been spent reading: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Ian McDonald’s seminal Beatles book Revolution In The Head, Ernest Hemingway’s A Movable Feast, the final Lord Of The Rings installment…

If those sound like the habits of a slightly dry, ‘cerebral’ band with music to match, they’re certainly not meant to. As proved with their 2018 debut Columbia and now with Fantasies Of A Stay At Home Psychopath, The Blinders understand the power of a great hook. Theirs is the sort of urgent, fiercely literate rock that you can also dance to.

“We have a nucleus of bands that unite us, like Arctic Monkeys and Iggy Pop,” McGough explains. “But then Tom will be listening to some 1960s French band and I’ll be listening to something more electronic, or vice versa.”

With Columbia, the young trio drew heavily from the dystopian worlds of writers George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. The album was also charged with eloquent fury that put them in the same ball park as the likes of Idles and Sleaford Mods.

The plan, Haywood says, was to not write more political songs on the next record. Then the past two years happened and… well, it was difficult to stick to that.

Accordingly, Fantasies launches taut, blistering attacks on Trump, human greed, the climate crisis and more, swirled into an expanded, matured palette of musical and thematic touchstones. Moreover, as confirmed by the bracing, furious likes of Forty Days And Forty Nights, the album still packs one heck of a punch.

“It can be a bit introverted at times, almost misanthropic,” Haywood says. “I make no apologies for that, given the state of the world. Just as Orwellian literature really brought some emotion out of us [with Columbia], this feels more like we are talking about exaggerated versions of ourselves.”

Indeed Fantasies is a markedly more personal record, externalising anxieties of growing up in the

Lennon-esque Circle Song. Like other songs of theirs, this one also took some leads from psychedelics (“Everyone should bend their mind at some point,” Haywood says with a grin).

“I think we allowed ourselves to write more personal songs, as opposed to trying to mask what was going on with our lives with dystopia,” McGough says. “Obviously politics feature to a degree, but less heavily than the first record.”

Politics and music co-exist in The Blinders’ DNA. All three of them were born into Doncaster mining families, and have parents who were involved in the miners’ strike. McGough’s dad regularly took him to gigs, Neale started playing in a band when he was just 10, and Haywood’s parents, both brass-band musicians, encouraged him to pick up the guitar. They formed The Blinders as teenagers, played their first gig in a local bar, and ended up with a weekly slot there, playing for their friends and thinking it was “the coolest thing in the world”.

Moving to Manchester, ostensibly to attend university, was a turning point. They quickly began to defy their ‘outsider’ status by selling out small venues and building from there.

For Haywood this involved overcoming a battle with depression, which he harks back to on Fantasies. Creating a character, ‘Johnny Dream’, helped. The black-and-white face paint and slicked- back hair made him a commanding focal point on stage and on photos for the Columbia campaign. It led to some interesting gigs, including a metalcore festival in Lithuania. “They’d obviously looked at Tom’s make-up that he was wearing at the time and thought: ‘Yeah, they fit the bill,’” McGough says with a laugh. “But it was a nice drive there, so we thought sod it… And it was a metalcore festival. But everyone loved it.”

This kind of performance tack didn’t come from nowhere. While still a pre-teen, Haywood was involved with a theatre group, and dark shows such as Oedipus. “I really fell in love with it,” he remembers. “Looking back, I’m really thankful for the people who introduced me to that. I think it’s really important to introduce people from a young age to that sort of thing.”

He’s ditched the face paint, but Johnny Dream still has his uses. “I suppose when we talk about these exaggerated versions of our own personalities, that element of fiction is still there,” he muses. “Because without that it gets a bit too real. But with that element of fiction you can really go to town on it. It’s like watching a horror movie – you switch it off afterwards and the lights come back on and… you’re alright. “I think anyone who goes on stage goes on with some sort of act,” he continues. “People are often really taken aback with how different people are when they come off stage.”

“I think anyone who goes on stage goes on with some sort of act.”

Tom Haywood

Fantasies Of A Stay At Home Psychopath is available now via Modern Sk y U K.