For a band which allocated its positions and instruments according to how individual members looked and dressed, The Long Blondes have proved that they take their music just as seriously as their image. Lead singer Kate Jackson tells Jim Carroll how Sheffield spawned another success

KATE Jackson says it's really all Jarvis Cocker's fault that she ended up living in Sheffield. When the lead singer with The Long Blondes was a teenager considering where she wanted to go to university, there was only one city on her list of places to go. Sheffield, the setting for Pulp's kitchen-sink dramas and minor-key epics about everyday desperation and tiny triumphs, had captured a piece of Jackson's heart.

"I think all of us in the band came to Sheffield primarily because of Pulp," she admits. "I was certainly attracted by Jarvis Cocker's lyrics. He made the city sound like such a fascinating place to be. I thought if I came here, all these exciting things would happen to me."

Few others were thinking along similar lines. "When you are making your mind up about where to go to university, you do consider if there's a scene in the city. When I was thinking about where to go to college in the mid-1990s, there were loads of people going to Manchester because of Oasis and Madchester. Then Glasgow became a trendy place because of Belle & Sebastian. I also think I didn't want to do what everyone else was doing, so I came here."

Naturally, Yorkshire's once booming steel capital didn't live up to Cocker's billing when Jackson arrived in town. "You realise it's just like everywhere else," says Jackson. "It's slightly boring and there's nothing to do, which is why everyone here is in a band." But The Long Blondes are unlike so many of the other bands who've set up shop in the city Jackson now refers to as being like an "eccentric aunt".

For a start, none of them had ever picked up an instrument in anger before coming together for this venture.

"That's true," says Jackson. "We allocated band positions and instruments according to how we looked and dressed. We knew each other from around town because we kind of stood out from everyone so we thought that was a good start for the band. We chose Screech as the drummer, for example, because he looks like a drummer and not because he could sit there and play jazz beats all day."

They quickly made up for their lack of technical know-how with a slew of sharp indie-pop gems. Over the last 18 months, one single after another has charted the development of the Blondes from just another bold-print name on a long list of small-town next big things into something rather special.

The pinnacle of their achievements to date is their just-released debut album, Someone To Drive You Home. With superior sass and effortless style in spades, it's an album where giddy melodies duke it out with pointed lyrics for the attention of your ears and dancing feet.

Be it the darts of pleasure which propel Giddy Stratospheres or Jackson's pointed advice on Once and Never Again that "at 19, you don't need a boyfriend", the album contains many Blonde moments to note for future reference.

Not surprisingly when Jackson talks about the acts who have cast a shadow on The Long Blondes, she emphasises the importance of the ones with striking lyrics. "All our favourite bands from when we were teenagers, bands like Suede and The Smiths, were always about the lyrics, and those lyrics always seemed sardonic and sarcastic. The lyrics come from an outsider perspective and are about feeling quite alienated and alone in a city or town because you don't fit in.

"Those bands had great upbeat pop songs with catchy melodies which sounded great on the radio and the dancefloor. But when you scratch the surface with the lyrics and examine them more closely, there's a point to those words which mightn't have been very obvious the first time you heard the song.

"Lyrics like that do become important to you and you tend to take those bands with you as you grow. We definitely want to be that kind of band and to mean something to people who find us."

There's an intriguing ambiguity driving many of the songs on Someone To Drive You Home, mostly because it's guitarist Dorian Cox and not Jackson who's the main songwriter.

"Dorian is quite interested in the old-fashioned idea of writing for someone else, something which goes back to the tradition of Joe Meek," explains Jackson. "He's also obsessed with songs that make people dance but have really sad lyrics. I like the idea that I can portray many different characters and I'm not just writing or singing from my own personal perspective. I like the idea of lyrics working in many different ways and how people respond to the words. That's more important than my perspective or Dorian's perspective."

She points to one of Cox's songs, Once & Never Again, as an example of this. "It's me giving advice to a younger girl and it's quite straightforward until the last line, which is about how I would like to feel a girl your age. Now that could be seen or taken in many different ways. It's written by a man and sung by me. But if it was sung by a man, it would be a very different song."

Jackson is well aware that The Long Blondes have gone about things a little differently to everyone else. It was, she says, a deliberate ploy. "I think a lot of the thrill about new music is how you discover it in the first place. I remember hearing things on the radio from people like Steve Lamacq on BBC Radio One or you'd get word of mouth recommendations from friends or you'd hear something at an indie disco. I always thought that would be how I'd like to do things if I was in a band."

But this is very much at odds with how the record industry operates in 2006. "Bands seem to appear from nowhere and the first time you see them is on a TV ad or a billboard," says Jackson. "You've never seen them live, you've never seen them in small fanzines and you know they've basically been invented or manipulated by a record label to target a certain market.

"We've already released five or six seven-inch singles so people can trace back and see how we've developed as a band, as songwriters and as lyricists.That's something which you don't get anymore. And we haven't done any TV ads or big posters for buses either because, well, we didn't have the money!"

But don't take this to mean that The Long Blondes want to shun the big time. Far from it, they'll happily make the jump when the opportunity comes along.

"We've always had the ambition to cross over to the mainstream and to have that kind of bigger appeal," points out Jackson. "We never wanted to be this underground lo-fi band who just put out a few seven-inch singles on some tiny label.

"We had an idea of what a good band should be and we went for that. It's about more than just the music because the artwork, the videos and the image are just as important. Image and pop music going hand in hand is not a new thing. It has always been the case, going right back to Nancy Sinatra and David Bowie. Maybe it hasn't been the case with the bands who have emerged in the last four or five years, so it's time for a change. We're well aware of what we're doing and how it will affect other people."

Who knows, maybe the rise of The Long Blondes will even influence a whole new generation of British freshers to plump for Sheffield as the site for their third level studies? Jackson hoots at the idea. "I think people will come here because of the Arctic Monkeys now. Everyone wants to be in the gang with the Arctic Monkeys, no one will want to be in our gang!" Some, though, will still prefer Blondes.

Someone To Drive You Home is out now on Rough Trade