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.

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 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.

Stuart A. Stapes, November 2020