TV Priest: "Not everyone will listen to me fucking drivel on incessantly"

"Who the hell wants to listen to this, another group of dudes again?" Two minutes into our chat with TV Priest frontman Charlie Drinkwater, and he's the one asking the difficult questions. The London band might be the latest arrival into an increasingly crowded post-punk field, and yes, they are another group of white dudes, but one listen to their debut album 'Uppers' marks them out as something to still get excited about. A very 2020 record packed with political angst, despair and uncomfortable questions (no party bangers here, folks), it has leapfrogged them into must-see status when live music eventually returns from its hibernation - even more so when you consider the band has played one, yes one, gig. Ever.

So who on earth are TV Priest, then? It's highly likely you know Charlie's work already from his 'other' job - having designed the artwork for Sports Team's debut record, as well as the latest from Fontaines DC. Life had taken him, and his childhood friends, Alex Sprogis (guitar), Nic Smith (bass) and Ed Kellan (drums) in different directions but there was an inevitability about them crashing back into each other's orbits. That re-union eventually led to the formation of the band and that one solitary live performance in an industrial freezer in Hackney Wick right before lockdown froze everything all by itself.

It sounds like the kind of apocryphal story that the music industry is fuelled by, but it turns out to be an entirely real situation, as Charlie picks up the story. "Man, it was fun. It wasn't like some kind of fucking Manchester Free Trade Hall gig or anything though, it was just our mates." (MFTH was the host to a legendary Sex Pistols gig back in Ye Olde Days that saw many famous bands of the future in attendance. Ask your Grandad). "A friend of a friend knew someone who had a venue, but when we got there, it was fucked," he remembers with a laugh. "There was a deep fat fryer on the stage! But it was really fun, nerve-wracking but I loved it."

Like everyone, the pandemic put paid to any more follow-up performances, but the band had plenty more to say as their early singles 'House Of York' and 'Runner-Up' soon showed. Those first tracks felt like discovering a secret time capsule of a band that had been lost to the past before you could get the chance to see them. You could be forgiven for expecting TV Priest to bide their time then, rather than following them up with a debut record this quickly.