As the singer in cult indie band the Long Blondes, Kate Jackson experienced all the thrills of the mid-00s music scene: chaotic gigs, hedonistic parties, an abundance of winklepickers and angular fringes. But years later, when she went back over all the photographs she’d taken during that period, things looked rather different. “I’ve got tons of photos of airport lounges and long stretches of road in Europe,” she says with a shake of the head. “Lots of German service stations. Nothing of the band! No backstage fun, no frolics!”
Jackson may regret not capturing more of the band’s short but spectacular heyday, but the road has always been important to her. As a Pulp-obsessed teenager in Bury St Edmunds, she would gaze out of the kitchen window and dream of escaping small town life via the A14. The Long Blondes track Separated By Motorways told the story of two girls doing a runner down that exact road (“Wipe your eyes darling, it’s OK / Meet me on the dual carriageway”). And over the last decade or so, roads have become a central feature of her second career in visual art.
Using bold, pop art-inspired colours and sharp geometrical lines, Jackson’s paintings transform parts of our unloved motorway network into dazzling scenes of romance and possibility. Think Ed Ruscha’s gas stations propelled along by the motorik beat of Kraftwerk’s Autobahn. The service station at Leicester Forest East has never looked more beautiful.
Jackson lists Andy Warhol, Australian surrealist Jeffrey Smart and printmaker Paul Catherall as influences – but also the lyrics of Jarvis Cocker. “I love how he could write about the interior of a bedroom and make it seem like the most exotic, romantic place in the world,” she says. “I try to do the same thing with my paintings of flyovers and bridges. Nobody really takes any notice of them. You’re always whizzing by. But there’s always a moment when the light catches them in a particular way and makes them seem incredibly beautiful.”
This month, Jackson has been selected to pick the theme for DRAW!, a nationwide drawing project backed by David Hockney that is part of Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture. She has chosen “landscape”, and will be on social media encouraging people of all ages to pick up a pen or pencil or iPad and sketch something fitting. The project’s aim is to get people to pause and reflect on their surroundings, and it’s already having an impact – on Jackson herself.
“It’s funny,” she says. “You spend years trying to develop your own style, to make your work recognisable. But then you get stuck in that style. You stop experimenting and you stop being playful. And art is all about experimentation and being playful. So this has made me go back to my sketchbooks and try different things.”
Jackson is actually creating a new body of work as we speak, saying she’s “completely changed everything” as a result of DRAW! “I’m using a celestial astrological wheel, drawing the symbols that represent the star signs and bringing some animals in.”
She has drawn and painted since she was young, sketching boats on the harbour with her “very talented” artist mother. She would have completed a fine art degree in Sheffield had the Long Blondes not taken off during her final year – even then, she carried on making art for their record sleeves. In fact, she thinks a painting of Diana Dors made in her student bedroom may have helped the band crystalise their aesthetic: a mixture of retro glamour, film and literary references, and spiky guitars.
With her neck scarf and beret, Jackson added some much-needed style and intellect to the era’s male-dominated indie scene. The band earned a devoted fanbase and wrote one of the defining anthems of the 2000s: the disco-punk single Giddy Stratospheres. But after two albums, guitarist and songwriter Dorian Cox had a stroke and was left unable to play the guitar. The band called it a day.
Jackson released a solo album in 2016: the excellent British Road Movies, written with Bernard Butler. But that record’s painful gestation convinced her to redirect her attention towards painting. She spent four years refining her style in Rome, and has developed an eye for brutalist landmarks as well as all the motorways and bridges. More recently, though, she has caught the music bug again. During lockdown, and with her then two-year-old son asleep next to her, she found herself messing around with Logic on her iPad and began pushing herself to compose electronic music. Heaven 17’s Martyn Ware was impressed with the results and offered to produce them, and a Terry Farley remix of her track Don’t Doubt Your Power (recorded under the name Corselette) will hit clubs later this year.
It took a while before Jackson could look back fondly on the Long Blondes’ time in the spotlight. “We didn’t make Kaiser Chiefs money,” she says with a wry smile. “But I think [debut album] Someone to Drive You Home still stands the test of time.” And despite the lack of photographic evidence, Jackson knows she had a lot of fun too. “Oh definitely,” she says. “In terms of getting to be in a band, that whole period was really the last hurrah.”
• DRAW! a Landscape with Kate Jackson at bradford2025.co.uk
