We’re excited to announce our new album ’Distractions’ out February 19th on City Slang Records,
A new album on its way, it’s called ‘Distractions’ and we are pretty excited by it. More details to follow but in the meantime here is the first song – A cover version of The Television Personalities‘ ‘You’ll have to scream louder’ from their classic album ‘The Painted Word’ “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 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, in 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 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.” ‘Hope you enjoy
“Man Alone” was always a journey but I wasn’t expecting it to be such a long one. We made a 6 minute version but it felt like it pulled off and stopped half way to its destination. This was the beginning of a long journey in itself, to find the route needed to complete itself – Probably the biggest challenge a song or piece of music has given us. It was delicate and slippery right up to the final mix – which lasted a week! The song has a strange connection for me to the drum machine, bass guitar and voice combination of ‘Indignant Desert Birds’ – mine and Neils first band when I was 17.
In the back of a London cab driving through the city at night is a very special space for me. It has a particular kind of aloneness. This fascination grew over hundreds of nights leaving the the studio exhausted at 1 am – Ladbroke Grove or St Johns wood, through the city and over the river to South East London in an almost dream state. Retracing that journey, this film became a way of touching the city and the feeling of being both a part of and apart from it. S.A.Staples
