Blossoms: a bunch of (pri)mates

“When we first got Gary, he was dead cold,” Blossoms guitarist Josh Dewhurst reflects. “But I’m convinced he’s smiling more and more every time we open the doors to our lock-up. You can see him on our CCTV app. Look, there he is! Aww, he’s facing away.” From the way Dewhurst is speaking, you’d be forgiven for failing to realise that the undoubtedly beloved Gary in question is not a living, breathing creature, but an inanimate, eight-foot fibreglass gorilla that currently guards the band’s Stockport lock-up and unofficial HQ.

He’s fast becoming an imposing mascot for the band’s latest era, and they’re desperately hoping that this Gary doesn’t meet the same fate as that which befell his fibreglass namesake, whose real-life story inspired the title track of the band’s upcoming fifth album, Gary. When frontman and lead songwriter Tom Ogden heard the bizarre tale of a fibreglass ape that was stolen from a garden centre in Scotland last year before eventually being found sawn in half in a lay-by in March, he was inspired to write a song about it. 

The result marks a surreal and exciting new evolution in Ogden’s songwriting for their latest album and — in a not-so-crowded field — probably the greatest indie-pop song ever written about the theft of a gorilla. It’s given the band the chance to offer up some pretty unexpected visuals, too. The track’s music video sees Everton gaffer Sean Dyche — a friend of the band — portray a fictional gang leader who planned the theft, while their frequent collaborator Rick Astley takes the role of IRL garden centre owner Andrew Scott (no, not that one). With all this in mind, it’s perhaps no wonder that Scott began wondering if the band had masterminded the theft themselves in the name of publicity.

“Mr Scott’s daughter actually reached out to a few people on Instagram and asked if we had [the original] Gary. She said, ‘We need to know what’s going on,’” Ogden explains. “I ended up on the phone to him for 15 minutes, and he refused to believe me for the first eight minutes of the call. It was only when I said Hamac Trading, the place where I’d bought [Gary II] in Northern Ireland, and got it shipped over that he believed me. But they love it now!”

The unusual album title has also brought them into contact with some of the UK’s most notable Garys — namely Numan, Neville and Lineker — after all three gamely agreed to appear in a video where they spoke about having their name immortalised on an album cover. In the case of the latter, the Match of the Day presenter even invited the band to his London home for lunch before they filmed his cameo.

“That was fucking mad,” reflects Ogden. “There’s that idea of a butterfly effect, and when I wrote a tune called ‘Gary’ about something I heard on the radio, I didn’t think I’d get to meet Gary Numan or go round Lineker’s house for home-made gnocchi.”

“Or going to the toilet in Gary Lineker’s house and seeing it’s where he keeps his Golden Boot from Mexico ’86,” recalls bassist Charlie Salt. “I remember he had cheese on his hands when we got there, and I’d gone straight in for the hug!”

Everything Gary aside, Blossoms’ fifth album sees the band stepping out on their own for the first time since leaving Virgin EMI, who had released all four of their previous efforts. The band say there’s no bad blood with the label, but that a sense of maturity that comes from being in a band for 10 years led them to take a leap of faith and start their own, ODD SK. “There’s a freshness that naturally comes with leaving a label,” says Ogden. “There were no horror stories, but we wanted to have a better deal on our masters. It felt like the right time to do that. We’ve got a bit older, and we’re 10 years in as well. 

“We’ve always been hands on, but now we’ve got no choice but to be even more hands on,” he adds. “It does mean that you have to do a bit more stuff yourself, and that’s why it’s been a chaotic three months leading up to this release, but it’s that old saying of ‘If you want something doing, you do it yourself.’”

This period of evolution is reflected in the album, too. ‘Perfect Me’ might be a classic Blossoms earworm, but there’s a charming, tongue-in-cheek wisdom to it all as Ogden lists his manifesto of how to achieve the best possible version of yourself. It’s a song that life experience simply wouldn’t have allowed them to write 10 years ago.

Longtime producer James Skelly is back once more, but there are flavours of other collaborators, too. Jungle’s Josh Lloyd-Watson worked with the group on the recent single ‘What Can I Say After I’m Sorry’ and ‘Nightclub’, a pop-soaked gem that provides one of the highlights on the album. Working with such outside influences, you sense, has helped broaden the group’s musical horizons.

It’s a similar situation with ‘I Like Your Look’, which sees Ogden delivering a spoken-word-cum-rap in a style not entirely dissimilar to Pet Shop Boys’ Neil Tennant on ‘West End Girls’. That particular track came when they decamped to Wales — and brought Irish singer CMAT along for the ride. 

“We went to Wales for a little reset and to find a new way of making music — the five of us in an Airbnb with no distractions by the sea. We’d met CMAT in Brighton when we had a day off, and she’d planned to come to Stockport, but when it [became] clear she couldn’t do the dates we had planned, she just said, ‘Fuck it, I’ll come to Wales,’” recalls Ogden. “She didn’t know us that well, so it was a pretty brave thing, but it was fucking amazing.”

The singer would encourage the band to throw out random words from books — which allowed Donovan to land on the title of ‘I Like Your Look’ — while also acting as a positive influence on Ogden’s new delivery style. “She was really encouraging and told me I could get away with it. She said, ‘This is your way of doing that kind of thing.’ She was adamant it worked, and I think it captures the fun of making it.” 

But even some newer elements of the band’s latest era have a hint of the old school, too. It’s the first record that the band have ever recorded live, but Donovan explains that the spirit of it harks back to the early days when they formed 11 years ago. “It feels new in our sound, but it’s also going back to an old way. The five of us together in a room and playing live was great,” he says.

“This time around, we’ve learnt stuff in a rehearsal room together. We’ve learnt it live and lived with it a bit,” adds Ogden.

When we last spoke in 2022, Salt mentioned there was “a really weird frequency running [through] the Stockport water, and we’re all on it”. 

From the hour I spend in the band’s company, it’s clear that their bond remains as strong as ever. Blossoms still seem like a proper gang of mates before they do a band. It’s evident in the sweet enthusiasm they have as keyboardist Myles Kellock excitedly recalls a trip he took the previous evening to see a local synth keys artist called Legato Live (“I would absolutely fucking love it if his name got in Rolling Stone!”), and equally in the way they’re adept at finishing each other’s stories about making this album.

This togetherness is likely part of the reason why they’ve been able to weather the storms of a decade in music and have reached a position where they played a hometown gig to 30,000 fans at the end of August. Ogden says he also constantly points towards the experience of seeing David Byrne’s American Utopia on Broadway as a transformational moment for him as a frontman. 

As a band, meanwhile, they’re upping their live game by rehearsing side by side in a line to emulate their gig formation, while a GoPro ensures they can forensically dissect each rehearsal. These incremental steps and a desire to consistently improve seem to have helped their longevity.

“We always say that being a band in this sort of time is a bit of an anomaly,” Donovan reflects. “How many bands are there really like us? Five actual mates? The fact too we can sit here 10 years on, doing our biggest gig, and we don’t seem have to plateaued or even gone down a bit? That’s good, innit.”

Taken from the October/November issue of Rolling Stone UK – you can pre-order it here now.