Words: Sam Geary
TV Priest have an excoriating new track for the ears with second release, ‘Runner Up’.
The biting post-punk follow up to recent debut ‘House Of York’, explains the London quartet's frontman with the Mark E. Smith-like approach, Charlie Drinkwater, "address(es) feelings and patterns of lived experience as a citizen of a globalised, late capitalist nation. It’s about white goods, Protestant work ethic, Catholic guilt, game shows, not dancing at the Christmas party, four-car garages, meal deals, spam folders, lotteries, carrots and sticks.
“The ‘perpetual motion’ of this economic model feeds a sense of the inadequate in the individual. It seeks to rob us of deeper human connections with people, places, and objects in the drive to generate vast incomes for a small percentage of the population. Despite getting that new shirt, new job, or new car it’s never quite enough, the 'true' object of you affection remains just out of reach, with the latest model upgraded before your very eyes.
“And yet the model forces us to be complicit and turn hypocrite. As we upload this song we directly, albeit incrementally, help the revenue streams of homogeneous multinational corporations who've no real interest in ‘connecting’ people beyond establishing data sets that help in predictive behaviour ‘markets’.
“This song was written as a response to that, a patchwork of observations on what it was to live and work in a pre-pandemic Britain. Perhaps a Britain that may no longer exist.”
All being well and current social distancing restrictions lifted, TV Priest will play their first headline show on October 28 at London’s Shacklewell Arms.
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