When E.M. Forster gave us the aphorism "Only connect!" in Howard's End (1910), he wasn't talking about the collective musical endeavors of Rob McVey, guitarist Doug Morch, bassist Aidan Banks, and drummer Matt Dabbs, but he might well have been. In the group's brief year in the public eye, Long-View has stepped round the distractions of scenes and posturing to release a run of magically elevational singles and the exquisitely yearning debut album, Mercury, establishing a clear identity for the band as a group of genuine communicators rather than this week's circus act.
Long-View is here to remind us that music is at its best when it cuts straight through to the emotional core, without regard for who, how, when, or why. Pull down the tinsel curtain of increasingly self-referential styles and on the other side you'll find Long-View's beautifully crafted songs of hope, humanity, togetherness, ecstasy, separations, seasons, re-unions, hometowns, and angels glimpsed through the drizzle.
"I think after you've had a great night out and you've listened to whatever kind of music goes with that, you maybe go home and you're on your own and you want something that really gets you, stuff that's deeper," says Aidan. "We have tracks that rock--like 'When You Sleep,' which is essentially about having a good time--but I think what we keep coming back to is the more emotional stuff. I think there's certain records for certain times, and we'd love our record to be one that you put on when you're on your own and you need something to get you, rather than something you just stick on and rock out to."
It was unlikely that either Rob or Aidan were ever going to be confined by the limitations of two-dimensional rock 'n' roll. While they played in guitar bands together during school days in Winchester they also grew up with a wider musical knowledge. Aidan played piano and violin. Rob studied classical guitar throughout his teens. Drawn by the city's history of definitive bands, Rob moved up to Manchester where he continued to study classical music theory at university. A deep knowledge of semi-quavers was not, however, going to serve as an end point.
"I didn't want to be regurgitating classical music in a baroque style, which was a lot of the music I was playing," he says. "I wanted to create music about things I saw. The only interest I've got in music is the way it makes you feel about your own life, and what I was studying wasn't relevant to my life. If you are in a rock band you're not regurgitating, you are the creative force...you are Beethoven."
Of more immediate relevance to Rob's life was day-to-day survival in Manchester as a student and then as an unemployed musician. By the second half of the '90s, he'd met up with Matt Dabbs, occasionally jamming with the drummer at live gigs in the city's Dry Bar and hanging out at the Night & Day cafe with upcoming local musicians. Pre Long-View line-ups involving Rob came and went, but after Aidan had moved up from Winchester to join the band, the three-piece gelled. Finally Doug Morch came on board, quitting his involvement with a Leeds-based band, and adding a complimentary layer of incandescent guitar to Rob's harmonic chord surges.
Long-View's ascent--from the back streets of Manchester to Top 30 in the U.K. singles chart and on to recording in the U.S. with Pearl Jam producer Rick Parashar--might have looked swift and effortless from the outside. But this shorthand version doesn't take into account the group's years of honing musicianship and crystallizing an unshakeable belief in songs which reflect real human experience.
The initial low-level release of Further in June 2002 and When You Sleep, the group's second EP, in October 2002, revealed a band who had clearly fought to find its identity. Even in Long-View's early releases, there was a breathtaking ability to make uplifting spiritual rock without being pompous. In Rob's voice there was humility and compassion. The guitars glowed in stained-glass wonderment without trying to blind you. Here was the first band ever to make sonic cathedrals sound vulnerable. Small wonder that, after a year of U.K. support tours, Long-View had a dedicated fan base who knew they'd found something special.
In January 2003, Long-View released a third E.P., Nowhere, followed by a full-on proper release of Further in July, which led to a Top 30 hit for the band. Riding high in the singles charts, Long-View followed through with the mid-summer release of the group's first album, Mercury. The collection of 12 glimmering studies in celestial melancholy triggered an avalanche of praise in the U.K. media, most critics recognizing that here was a band able to work on the same epic scale as U2 or the Verve, but as adept at bruised emotions as Manchester colleagues Elbow or Doves. The recording sessions in Seattle had only served to remind the band of their unique Englishness. With Parashar at the controls, the sound of the band had become enormous, elemental even, but the location was distinctly recognizable as the lifescape that Rob grew up in.
"You can only write about what you see," says Rob. "When for a time I was living in a field in Cornwall, I wrote 'Falling For You,' which is a song about naivety and that kind of romance in naivety. But what I really wanted to write about was the summer and the sensuality of it and the way the air smells in the summer when you're on holiday and the sense of nostalgia you have related to that. That was the emotion that I wanted to capture, and that was real to me. I wasn't trying to throw myself into any fake situation and it wasn't about wearing a leather jacket and pretending to be from New York. All of the album is like that, its about things I went through or felt, from being at a comprehensive school in the south of England to arriving in Manchester and putting the band together."
The year 2003 saw Long-View make a full connection. Through the summer the group toured for two months in the U.K., and converted huge crowds at festivals. There were over 1000 people in a tent to watch them at Reading. The momentum kept up throughout the year with the September release of the next single, "Can't Explain," and a perfectly matched tour with Elbow in November.
Finding Long-View established in the U.K. by the end of 2003 was of particular satisfaction to the band's members, having done it on their own terms. While those looking for instant labels had sought to place them in a category alongside Coldplay, on rock's sensitive side, anyone with a closer knowledge could trace a deeper history going back to the more reflective early '90s American bands and British guitar. Certainly Long-View had made a deep connection while disregarding the surface vogue for imported 'rock 'n' roll' hedonism. Long-View has its own definitions of danger.
"I think it's a lot safer right now to be in a '70s garage-rock band than being in a band like ours," adds Aidan. "It's much safer to try and be in a scene which is cool. Anyone can identify a period in the '70s or '80s which is 'really cool' this week and trade off that for a bit, but its not going to last."
"I don't think any of that says much about people's lives," continues Rob. "We're not trying to do anything apart from write songs about everyday life, like the Smiths did perfectly, about British culture, about British life. Like Oasis did in their way."
As Long-View glides into the New Year--releasing one of the highpoints from Mercury, the snow-capped peak of rapturous effusion "Still" in January--there's little doubt that the group is about to enter a gripping new phase of its existence. Mercury was where Long-View started to connect. Now the band is set to explore further, hunkered down in a group house in Bury, with a turntable battle between the Cure and Interpol going on in the living room, a bizarre collection of furniture available for guests to sit on while they're "scrutinized," and a growing realization that the singer is more of a visionary and quite a lot "weirder" than any of them ever thought. Out of grey Northern days, real human feelings, the rustle of angel wings, and a musical idealism bordering on sainthood, Long-View is going to make the kind of music that levitates cities.
"I just think that right now we're writing the best music and being the most creative that we ever have been," says Matt.
Just stop, get out, take a deep breath and enjoy the incredible view… Long-View.
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