November 2022: Cavetown night out, then the mannequin chorus lands
Bright indie-rock guitars, a chorus built to shout, and just enough glam grit under the polish. Long Live The Strange landed on 28 November 2022 as a single ahead of Turn The Car Around (13 January 2023). It is track four on the album, after Don’t Say It’s Over and Feel Loop (Lizard Dream), the moment the record loosens its reflective collar and remembers the pub-rock grin without copying Supergrass wholesale. From the first hook you hear why winter promo needed it: forward motion and humour after the darker love song that led the campaign.
Coombes wrote it after taking his daughter Tiger to see Cavetown in Oxford in 2020, thinking about how music gathers people who feel outside the room. That origin keeps the lyric grounded in a real night out with his kid, not abstract manifesto language. The official video, directed by Niall Trask for GazCoombesVEVO, places him among a community of mannequins he had lived with for months of promo imagery, turning the strange into a literal cast. Later reviews flagged glam grit at the heart of the track inside an otherwise meditative solo trilogy. The chorus is the part that survives without the clip; the mannequins were a visual gag with staying power.
On tour in early 2023 the song became an easy set peak: Paris’s La Maroquinerie and other club dates caught crowds singing the title phrase. It followed Don’t Say It’s Over in the single sequence and kept the album campaign visible through the winter before the January release. As a single it did not need to reinvent Coombes; it needed to prove the trilogy still had legs and a smile. Play it between the album’s quieter meditations and the title track and the pacing clicks: celebrate oddity, then turn the car around.
When I was brought onto the project, Gaz had already been living amongst the community of mannequins for several months. His knowledge of them allowed me to have no issues directing them.
(Niall Trask, director of the Long Live The Strange video, 2022)
Put Long Live The Strange on again and the guitars still announce a night out rather than a thesis. The Cavetown spark explains the warmth; the glam edge explains why the shout lands. Press play for the chorus alone, then stay for how cleanly the song opens space before Turn The Car Around closes the trilogy with a different kind of resolve.
