lost in tv
by david barnett

an unpublished interview from 2002

david: “lost in tv’s” probably my favourite song on the new album, can you tell me a bit about that one?

mat: it’s a work of untrammeled genius.

richard: mat’s retiring now everyone.

mat: it’s really old.

brett: the original demo’s from coming up isn’t it?

mat: yeah, i did a couple of things, one bit of music that turned into “europe is our playground” and around the same time as that was when we had that “lost in tv riff”. it was my brief creative week. and it’s something i did with richard.

brett: you wrote “europe is our playground” at the same time? anything else?

mat: i’ve got four albums worth from that time, i’m just going to bring them out one by one!

richard: it’s still quite old even the form it’s in now and it’s another one that hasn’t really changed much from when we first did it.

brett: all of these sessions for this album involved looking up old bits of music that i liked that didn’t have choruses or didn’t have verses or stuff like that. and “lost in tv” was a demo that mat had written and i was just playing around with it on the piano and it suggested something else so we used mat’s original idea and stuck a couple of other bits on it.

mat: if you play it on the piano you’ll find out that it only uses the white notes!

brett: i think texturally it’s really interesting. it’s the first song we’ve done where the backing vocals are as important as any other instrument. most backing vocals are something you stick on top once everything is done but the way we recorded it the backing vocals were one of the first things to go on it and it was a matter of sitting everything else around the backing vocals. lyrically . . . a lot of it is about ambition it’s a funny thing it’s kind of got two themes really. a lot of it is about ambition gone wrong and people wanting fame and celebrity but there’s a thing about living in a virtual world, people living their lives through the tv with virtual communities, virtual friends that kind of thing.

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