NOTTINGHAM’S finest, Tindersticks, are all set to release a new album in 2021 on City Slang, their home for most of the past decade; and they’ve dropped their first single, paying homage to one of the lost greats of Eighties’ British post-punk and indie – Dan Treacy, and the Television Personalities.
They’ve decided to take on “You’ll Have To Scream Louder”, from 1984’s The Painted Word, and refashion it in their own image: they take the raw-edged anger of the original and bring a little soothing acoustic bossa to soften it, while losing none of that lyrical seethe. Have a listen for yourself.
It’s a taster for the new album, Distractions; keep ’em peeled for further announcements once the calendar turns.
Stuart says: “Late May, early June, 2020, was a twitchy and angry time for many of us.
“There was a growing agitation inside of me. I woke on a Saturday morning with no plans but just this fucking Television Personalities song going round in my head, it pushed me into the studio.
“Four or five hours later I had made the basis of this recording, though I had to wait for windows of opportunity within our confinement to work with the band to bring it to a conclusion.
“I have loved the TVPs since buying the Bill Grundy EP with its photocopied sleeve on one of my regular after-school bus trips to the Virgin record shop in a basement on King Street, Nottingham.
“Some years later, 1984, I was living around the corner on the 17th floor of Victoria Centre flats. They swayed in the wind. I was working a few days at a local record shop and The Painted Word was released. It became at the soundtrack to that semi-slum, those times. I was 19.
“To be young in the early 1980s; there was much to be angry about, battles to be fought – Thatcher, racial and gender injustice – and, one of the motivations for this song, nuclear disarmament.
“Although we may not have thought those battles were ever won, we believed we had helped push things in a different direction, that changes were made.
“In the spring of 2020, we were shown painfully that these battles are ongoing.”
Follow Tindersticks at their website, on Bandcamp, and on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.
