Late TV “A Girl Like You”

The trials and tribulations of lovelorn romantics, shuffling their way through doomed liaisons have defined the themes of the last two Late TV singles: sexual and cultural politics unfolding over a greasy groove in ‘Night Tennis’ followed by emotional self-destruction in the stomping glam-funk of ‘Fools Fools Fools’.

Now the band slide into 2022 with a pumped-up reworking of Edwyn Collins’s legendary ‘A Girl Like You’, an impassioned song of sexual reverence and yearning. References to dirty hands and starlets from a bygone era fit perfectly into the nocturnal aesthetic set-up by Late TV’s recent output, and this bouncing, disco-esque, jazzed-up version is their gift to you on Valentines Day 2022.

Late TV have whipped up a cocktail of influences for their re-visioning of the track. Pouring in electro-funk synthesizers that Daft Punk would have happily sampled, jazz-rock guitar solos leaning dangerously into Santana territory, a dancing melodic funk bass line, and disco strings last heard emanating from the cassette deck of a Lamborghini Diablo winding around hills in Jamiroquai’s Cosmic Girl video.

“This is one of the first songs I remember liking as a kid,” explains vocalist Luke Novak. “I always wanted to sing it. Edwyn’s voice crooning those lyrics and the mood of the music is really lodged into my psyche. We initially learned it to play for a friend’s birthday party, and when we started recording last year it just seemed like it would slip nicely into our repertoire.”

Culling influences from jazz cats and art rockers, B-movies and trash television via Lynch and Tarentino, Late TV are the moonlighting house band for a surreal all-night dream club nestled amidst the cultural detritus of television’s after hours. Guitarist and vocalist Luke J Novak and drummer Richard ‘Beu’ Bowman left their hometown of Kidderminster and hooked-up with Chicago’s jazz obsessed bassist Ryan Szanyi and Parisian keyboard maestro Martin Coxall in London. Kick-started with the release of their brilliant Citizen single, the group then appeared at Standon Calling Festival in 2018 alongside Goldfrapp and spiritual forefather Bryan Ferry. In 2021 the singles ‘Night Tennis’ and ‘Fools Fools Fools’ both debuted on BBC Introducing.

A Girl Like You is the third single to be taken from the band’s forthcoming debut album, where the group explore the postmodern wastelands of pop as high-brow/low-brow mutant junk dwellers, collecting the shards of our fragmented culture and building something both irresistibly dangerous and dangerously irresistible.