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.”