The Research: 'It felt like a real honour to be asked to play at the last Long Division festival'

The indie trio of Russell Searle, Georgia Jakubiak and Sarah Williams last trod a stage together 15 years ago around the release of their second album, The Old Terminal, but now they are finally reconvening for a slot at the Wakefield festival on Saturday June 10.

Gathered with her fellow bandmates for a joint video call, Jakubiak says the reformation has much to do with Long Division’s director, Dean Freeman.

“A few people over the years had said to me 'When are The Research getting back together?' and I'd be like, 'Ah no, probably not',” she says. “Then Dean sent me a message saying 'What are the chances of a Research reunion for Long Division?’ and I said ‘Probably slim to none, but maybe contact Russell’.”

“I was at a karate class with my youngest son and I got a message from Dean,” says Searle, picking up the story. “I was just having one of those philosophical days where I was thinking ‘Everything is just at a really comfortable pace at the moment, I need to take on some more fear in my life’ and then this message came through and I was like, ‘Perfect, I’m terrified of the whole concept of that, so let’s do it’.”

The fact that this was to be the 10th and final edition of the festival “probably was” a motivating factor, he admits. “I was aware that had been announced and I was genuinely saddened by it, so hearing from Dean, it felt like a real honour to be asked,” he says.

Williams, who had moved to Brighton and then Shropshire in the years since the band split, says she was “the last to know” that Searle had agreed to the reunion, but adds that she and Jakubiak had idly discussed the idea a couple of years before. “It just felt like it was one of those things that wouldn’t happen, that we were just dreaming about,” she says. “I was aware of Long Division coming to an end and that Dean had sort of mentioned it, but I didn’t think that anything would come of it.

“When Russell texted me and said, ‘Do you want to get back together and play a gig at Long Division?' I was like 'What? Can I think about it for a bit’ and he said, 'No, I've spent so long thinking about it myself and we just need to know now'.”

“Dean had to prompt me for a response two weeks after he’d asked me, and then I asked Sarah,” says Searle. “I’d usurped all the time that we had to think about it, so Sarah didn’t get any thinking time.”

Williams, who was busy at the time, says she sent it to a vote on her family WhatsApp group chat. “I texted them all and said, ‘I’ve had this message, I can’t even work out what to do, could you make the decision for me?’ and it was a unanimous four thumbs up, so I had to say yes.”

The trio held their first meeting at Searle’s house near Wakefield. “There was about 20 seconds of us going, ‘Ah, this is weird’, and then it was as though no time had passed at all – that’s how it felt to me, anyway,” says Williams.

Because the band are “geographically challenged now”, with each member having a young family, they will only meet “a handful of times” before the gig itself, Searle explains. “Before we even practised we were out doing press shoots with a photographer and just went right in at the deep end, really,” he says.

“That was quite funny,” says Jakubiak. “We got through the door and then we were right out again and doing some photos. We'd not really had chance to catch up or anything.”

“Our first group chat was less about what songs we are playing at the gig and more about what are we wearing for the photo shoot,” says Williams. “Poor Russell was reminded of the old days of me and Georgian going ‘I can’t wear those trousers with that cardi’.”

The three members of The Research first met in 2003 as students at Bretton Hall, then an offshoot campus of the University of Leeds. “I think the final project for something we were doing was The Research,” Jakubiak recalls.

“More specifically, the challenge for the final project was to come up with a practical performance that embraced all the things that you’d learnt on the music course that you'd been studying for three years,” says Searle. “With my young rebellious spirit, I rejected all the principles like technicality and professionalism and thought let’s start afresh on new instruments as if we’ve never played music in our lives. It was that punk ethic of getting together with some mates and doing something really amateurish, kind of to spite the teacher, really, but it sort of backfired.”

Jakubiak recalls Searle talking to her about his band project and telling her she would play bass. “I was like, 'You know I don’t play bass, right?'” she laughs.

Williams was actually a seasoned drummer before joining the band, having played since she was 10. “But by the time I joined the course, I focused on guitar and singing and nobody knew me as a drummer,” she says. “I think I’d mentioned to Russell I knew a pop beat and a rock beat and had something to go on, but as (Russell) said, we were taking the mickey out of it all – and then got a record deal.”

The band applied a do-it-yourself approach to music making throughout their career, which took them all the way to a subsidiary of major label EMI. Early on they were lumped in with a number of their contemporaries such as The Cribs, Forward Russia, Kaiser Chiefs and Arctic Monkeys in what the NME termed the ‘New Yorkshire’ scene. Russell remembers the West Yorkshire contingent being “a really nice scene of people”, but says: “Looking back, I didn’t realise how musically different The Research were from any kind of scene that we were seen to be associated with at the time. I think I thought we were more connected musically than we really were, but we're still friends with a lot of people from that scene and still play music with them.”

“There certainly was a camaraderie,” Williams recalls.

“It just felt like a really nice scene where you were hanging out with your mates,” says Jakubiak. “From Wakefield there were loads of bands, we were all touring with each other. We'd take people on tour with us and we’d get put on tour with a bigger band. It did feel like there was quite a connected scene. I remember when we did South By South West in Texas and it was funny because it was just all our mates out there. I think we thought we’d see more cowboy bands, but it was bands from the UK.”

“More specifically bands from Leeds,” notes Searle.

“Even though The Cribs had really gone before that whole scene, it was always nice that they got us with them, supporting them and introducing us to people that they knew in the industry,” says Williams. “They were definitely one band to whom we felt particularly close.”

Signing to EMI-owned At Large Recordings in 2004, they came close to having a Top 40 hit with the singles C’mon Chameleon and The Way You Used to Smile; they also released an album, Breaking Up, in 2006. Searle says at first he was “really happy” with the band's five-album deal and the way the label initially seemed content to let the band slowly build an audience like his icons Nirvana and Pavement.

“They were talking about with our first three albums they weren’t interested in exposing us to the mainstream, they didn’t want our success arc to be too steep, and saw us as a long-term thing which really suited me,” he says. “It was like the bands that I really liked throughout my life, not being a mainstream band, not being particularly commercially viable, as much as I was aware that the poppier aspects of The Research could be sold in that way.

“I think part of the fun we had was that Georgia was from a very pop-oriented background and did have those kind of aspirations, and found that The Research was quite an unlikely vehicle to be in, travelling towards that place.”

“I don’t know if it was being in the mainstream,” says Jakubiak, “it was just it would have been a lot easier if we had been slightly bigger than we were because when we came off EMI and went to Fake DIY we went back to the venues that we had originally been playing, they used to call it the toilet circuit. It would’ve been nice to have got to the point where there was a bit more luxury involved. We really grafted when we went on tour because we didn’t have a crew, we did all the work ourselves and did all the driving.

“We did a European tour with Maximo Park and they rocked up with these two massive sleeper buses and we had the post office van in which the starter motor had gone so we had to park on a hill wherever we stopped. We had no crew, there was one night where I was selling merch and somebody had slashed the tyres on the van so Russell and Sarah were out trying to change the tyre. It was really fun but it would have been nice for me to get to the next level where we weren't having to graft quite so hard because it was knackering, we were touring for a lot of years and it was hard work.”

“I always remember getting home from the gigs as well,” says Searle. “We had that massive bass amp and we had to empty the van so it didn’t get burgled with all our gear in it, so we had to move the amp from the van and lift it up a lot of steps.”

“It was just things like having a nice dressing room,” says Jakubiak. “There was a tour where I was feeling really ill and we got to this venue and were like, please let there be a nice dressing room. Then we got there and (a well-known indie band of the time) had been there the night before and the place was wrecked. There was nowhere to go to the toilet, the dressing room was like s***. Just to have a nice place to get changed would have been something to aspire to. As you get older, you want a few more creature comforts, but we experienced it the rock ’n’ roll way.”

“At the risk of being the sentimental one,” says Williams, “how I felt about it at the time was similar to how I felt about the reaction that people have had to us coming back together, which is that even though we weren’t very well known to very many people, we meant an awful lot to the few. Some of the fans that we've got would follow us around and come to every gig and recite lyrics and tell me stories about how a certain song helped them in a particularly difficult time in their life. So it,s been really nice now that social media is much more of a thing than it was back then seeing all of these messages and people being genuinely excited, this small pocket of people being thrilled, I love that, I get a heart-warming feeling.”

After being dropped by EMI, the band released a second album, The Old Terminal, on indie label This Is Fake DIY in 2008. Williams says by that stage, the band were finding things harder. “When you,ve got a bigger label behind you, you,ve got more money, so there was that obvious difference,” she says. “But it probably kept our egos in check.”

“I blamed other situations at the time for it,” says Searle. “Everything you get back from the media when you’re in a band...I remember being associated with a twee scene and really rejecting the idea that we were twee, and being associated that we were being gimmicky because it was all based around this noisy toy shop keyboard.

“So on the second record I really wanted to move away from that, but actually in moving away from that stuff and trying to be a bit more musically serious I think that's where the momentum went. I think what we represented was fun for a lot of people, this accessible idea. The songs weren’t silly songs but the presentation of them was fun and I think probably thanks to me, it took the fun out of it without intending to do that. I thought that people would still get the aesthetic of it all even in that new kind of guise, but I think I ruined it for people.”

That said, he adds: “I still really like the second record, I think it was really good and I was really proud of it.”

“I enjoyed the second album because the drumming was difficult,” says Williams. “At the time I was thinking crikey, we've got a little bit hardcore now. I'd begun with three pieces of a small kit and it was easy, I'd pretty much sit still, and then the second album we were going to rock out a bit more and Russell was going ‘Put this fill in there and do this and do that’ and I was thinking ‘I’m going to have to break a sweat on this album’, but I love it now and I’m really enjoying revisiting the second album because it’s a whole lot of fun. My son was watching me the other day with ear defenders and he said, ‘Wow, Mummy’s so cool’.”

Since the band split up in 2008, Searle played with numerous local bands including The Cribs and has, he says, worked on “a lot of things that will never see the light of day”. “In terms of writing, I became really self-analytical and couldn’t really see any gain in sharing it with anyone,” he explains. “I do it because I can’t not do it – I’m too fascinated by the process of being creative and then documenting it in demos.”

Williams meanwhile “hid under the moniker of Polly Garter”, releasing an EP and playing a few gigs in London and Brighton. “But I really struggled doing anything on my own,” she says. “I'm just much better being in a team.” She also toured with Piney Gir – “That kept the drumming muscles going for a bit” – and sang backing vocals with Gaz Coombes on a tour for his Matador album.

“But mostly I’ve taken a creative sidestep into screenwriting and film, so that's actually what I do professionally now,” she says. “Although it was useful being a musician at one point because I made this film that I produced in 2018, called Justine, and we’d finished it and were editing it and we got to the point where we just didn't have any money for music, so I said to the director, ‘Here’s my back catalogue of songs, choose what you like’, so this film soundtrack is littered with songs by me that are in the background in the cafe or playing in the trailer.”

Jakubiak teaches singing and has released five solo albums as The State of Georgia – one of which was a folk album of traditional songs as a birthday present for her father. The most recent was the overtly poppy This Time. “I think I’ve finally got to the point where I want to be with the sound of it,” she says. “The singles that I released from the last album have done the best with radio play, so it's been good but it's still a sideline to professional work.”

To coincide with their appearance at Long Division, The Research are releasing a 12in vinyl single, Back To The Real World, which Searle describes as “The Research at their best”.

“I didn’t know how well received just a reunion would be; I feel like I want to make things more relevant for everybody than just reflective,” he says. “I imagined it would just be a digital thing, because of the timeline. I have friends in indie bands who can’t get vinyl made because of major labels monopolising the European market, so I didn’t imagine there would be an option to put it on vinyl. Then Dean (Freeman) got back to me a few days later saying ‘I’ve got this idea’. I didn’t know about Press On Vinyl (in Middlesbrough)...it turns out we toured in the early days with one of the guys who set it up, he was in Dartz!”

For the foreseeable future, the band intend to take things “a step at a time”, says Searle. “It just makes sense – we’ve all got pretty busy lives,” he adds. “Personally speaking, I could probably make room for doing some stuff with The Research again if I thought anyone cared enough.”

“A lot of people have asked if there’s going to be any more gigs but we very much want to focus on doing Long Division,” says Williams. “But have been very kindly saying ‘are you going to come to our city?’, which is lovely, we just want to know that there is demand there or it would be worth doing. I know that I certainly wouldn’t be averse to popping around the country and playing some drums with these guys.”

Jakubiak seems similarly open to the reunion continuing. “I have a lot of jobs on the go and two kids but if we can make it work practically then yes, definitely, I’d be up for it. It feels good to be playing with Russell and Sarah again.”

The Research play at Long Division festival in Wakefield on Saturday June 10. longdivisionfestival.co.uk