Thom Yorke and Mark Pritchard's “Gangsters” runs on a toy Bee Gees synth

Mark Pritchard and Thom Yorke have released “Gangsters”, the third single from their album Tall Tales after “Back in the Game” and “This Conversation Is Missing Your Voice”. The label says it was first played this morning on Lauren Laverne's BBC Radio 6 Music show, and comes with a video by Jonathan Zawada in which puppet-like figures out of Bosch cavort on a plaza.

The 8-bit bass is a 1970s Mattel Bee Gees toy synthesiser, about an octave wide with three bass presets. Pritchard took one note of a bass preset and moved it up and down in Melodyne. He told Brian Hiatt of Rolling Stone in March that Kraftwerk used the same toy, at least live, for “Pocket Calculator”. I think Thom was almost shocked when I showed him what it was.⁸

Yorke added a percussive synth riff as well as his vocal. He enjoys playing synthesisers as much as singing, Pritchard says, and sometimes more.

Tall Tales is out on Warp on 9 May, as a limited black-vinyl double LP and a limited CD, each with a 36-page booklet of Zawada's images. Every track on it has a Zawada video, and together they make a feature film, which gets a one-night cinema screening on 8 May.

Pritchard had his doubts about “Gangsters” itself. When he did the video, then it actually finally made sense to me. There's a lot of that going on.⁸