Gaz Coombes – Long Live The Strange

November 2022: Cavetown night out, then the mannequin chorus lands

Bright indie-rock guitars, a chorus built to shout, and just enough of a glam edge under the clean sound. 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 lets go of its quieter mood and remembers the pub-rock cheer 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. Issued 28 November 2022 ahead of Turn The Car Around (13 January 2023), the cut is track four after Don’t Say It’s Over and Feel Loop (Lizard Dream), the moment the record loosens its reflective collar without copying Supergrass wholesale.

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 bite 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 energy and a lighter song. It sits between the album’s quieter songs and the title track: the lyric celebrates oddity, then the album turns toward another ending.

Niall Trask’s video for GazCoombesVEVO places him among mannequins he had lived with for months of promo imagery. Early 2023 club dates, including Paris La Maroquinerie, caught crowds shouting the title phrase.