Blood Red Shoes

Brighton, late 2004

Blood Red Shoes came together in Brighton in late 2004 out of two bands that had just stopped existing: Steven Ansell's Cat on Form and Laura-Mary Carter's Lady Muck. The name came from a story about Ginger Rogers dancing take after take opposite Fred Astaire until her shoes filled with blood — showbusiness folklore about work that hurts, which turned out to be a reasonable description of the next twenty years. The first single, "Victory for the Magpie", appeared on 18 July 2005.

The shape of the band was set immediately and has barely moved since: one guitar, one drum kit, both players singing. Carter carries most of the riffs and the melodies; Ansell plays hard enough from behind the kit to make a two-piece cover more ground than the arithmetic suggests, and sings from there. There was no bass on the early records and no attempt to hide the gap — the guitar was simply pushed until it filled it. The pairing sits between alternative rock, garage rock and noise pop, with punk and shoegaze audible in the corners.

Two majors, then their own label

The debut album, Box of Secrets, came out on 14 April 2008 through Mercury, at the tail end of the period when British guitar duos were being signed quickly. Fire Like This followed on 1 March 2010 and In Time to Voices on 26 March 2012, both on V2, with the Water EP between them in January 2013. Those records took the band from the sweaty, short-song end of their catalogue towards something slower and more deliberate.

The decisive move came in 2014. The duo founded their own label, Jazz Life, and put the self-titled fourth album out on it on 3 March 2014. It reached number 49 on the UK albums chart and number 8 on the UK independent chart — a smaller headline number than a major would have wanted, and the start of an arrangement the band have never abandoned. Every album since has been theirs to release.

Get Tragic, ghosts, and a twentieth year

Get Tragic, released on 25 January 2019, is the record where the guitar-and-drums formula stopped being the whole story: synthesiser, drum programming and a colder production sat alongside the riffs. It reached number 58 in the UK and number 3 on the independent chart. The Ø EP followed on 18 June 2021, and the sixth album, Ghosts on Tape, on 14 January 2022, reaching number 9 on the independent chart. In September 2023 the duo issued THE STONE TAPES, a set of reworkings that pulled that material further towards electronics.

2024 was given over to the band's twentieth year. A short run of anniversary shows included a performance at La Gaîté Lyrique in Paris on 13 September 2024, played to a setlist voted for by the audience — the band added only "Je Me Perds" themselves. It was recorded from the sound desk by Frank Wright, mixed by the duo at Jazz Life, and released on 6 December 2024 as 20 Years of Blood Red Shoes: Live in Paris, 22 tracks across a double LP. For those dates the two were joined by James Allix on synthesisers and samples and Dan Rumsey on bass and guitar — the fullest the band has sounded on record.

Afterwards they worked apart. Carter released a debut solo album, Bye Bye Jackie, in 2025: lo-fi, dreamier and considerably gentler than anything with her name on it before, built around heartbreak handled with a straight face and the occasional joke.

Stay Lonely, made with nobody else in the room

The seventh album, Stay Lonely, arrived on 18 September 2026 on Jazz Life, with V2 handling it in Europe. Its defining fact is procedural rather than musical: the duo wrote, recorded, produced and mixed it themselves, with no manager, no A&R involvement and no outside producer. Nobody else's judgement is in it, and the record sounds like that — direct, close-miked, unpolished in places where a producer would have intervened.

Ten tracks run to just under 31 minutes: "Start To End", "Get Back Into Myself", "Don't Say A Word", "Screams", "Two Weeks", "2020 On TV", "The Reader Is A Deceiver", "Useless Sentiment", "Grande Valse" and "Fire On Water". "Start To End" and "Get Back Into Myself" were the two tracks put out on the announcement day; "Screams" was already in the live set by the summer. The band describe it as "a romantic but melancholic record" that "comes from a place of truth and understanding that could have only come from two people who are so comfortable with each other", and the theme running through it is the paradox of spending a working lifetime alongside somebody and still being on your own.

Reception has divided along a familiar line. Musikexpress heard a return to the band's classic configuration, singling out the layered guitars of "Get Back Into Myself" for recalling the indie-disco years of 2005 to 2007 and "Two Weeks" for folding 1970s rock into something close to pop, while noting that the record trades some of the old chaos for clarity. German reviewers less taken with it pointed at the same self-sufficiency and heard thinness rather than economy. Nobody has accused it of being a compromise, which is presumably the point.

Where they are now

Two festival appearances bracketed the album. On 24 July 2026 the band played Das Fest in Karlsruhe, an hour-long early-evening slot of thirteen songs, and on release day itself, 18 September, they played St Pauli Kirche at Reeperbahn Festival in Hamburg.

The touring proper runs from Porto on 29 September through to Brighton on 31 October: 28 dates across Portugal, Spain, France, Switzerland, Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and the UK, in rooms of a few hundred capacity rather than the theatres the anniversary run reached. The British leg closes it — King Tut's Wah Wah Hut in Glasgow on 27 October, Gorilla in Manchester on 28 October, Village Underground in London on 29 October, Thekla in Bristol on 30 October and ALPHABET in Brighton on 31 October, finishing in the city the band formed in. No support acts have been listed for the UK shows.