Tindersticks are gearing up to release a new album, Distractions, via City Slang in February.
Today they’ve shared its first single, a cover of Television Personalities’ “You’ll Have To Scream Louder” from their 1984 album The Painted Word. Listen below:
“Late May and early June 2020 was a twitchy and angry time for many of us,” says Tindersticks frontman Stuart Staples. “There was a growing agitation inside of me. I woke on a Saturday morning with no plans but just this Television Personalities song going round in my head, it pushed me into the studio. 4 or 5 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 e.p. 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.”