Tindersticks preview new LP with cover of Television Personalities' "You'll have to scream louder"

"You'll have to scream louder" is the first outing from Tindersticks since their See My Girls EP landed in January.

Their cover of Television Personalities' original that appeared on their 1984 album The Painted Word arrives today (7 December) as a first taster of Tindersticks' new album Distractions.

Tindersticks vocalist Stuart A. Stapes says of the cover, "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."

Stapes continues, "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.

The Tindersticks singer adds, "To be young in the early 1980’s 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."

Distractions will follow last year's No Treasure But Hope album. Tindersticks will announce details of their forthcoming album in 2021.