“Big TV” opens White Lies’ third album and gave it its name. Harry McVeigh, Charles Cave and Jack Lawrence-Brown, all three credited as writers, recorded it with the producer Ed Buller at ICP Studios in Brussels, and Spike Stent mixed it. At five and a half minutes it is the longest song on Big TV, which Fiction released on 12 August 2013 and which entered the UK chart at No. 4.
The title started as a joke. On an American tour with Kings of Leon, Cave told Digital Spy, the band spent weeks teasing their keyboard player, Tommy Bowen, about wanting a massive TV in the dressing room. The album follows a girl who leaves the suburbs for a big city, and when the song reached its chorus Cave went looking for “the epitome of this vacuous, shallow desire for modern success”. He settled on the oversized televisions people keep in tiny flats: her new room downtown holds little more than a bed and the screen. He has said the story drew on friends of his who had moved away to start again.
We The Wild were starting again too. Ant West and Casey Roarty had played together in Tonight Is Goodbye and then in Futures, a Buckinghamshire band that broke up at the end of 2012, and as a London duo they turned to electronic alt-pop. Their remix of “Big TV” went up on their SoundCloud on 20 November 2013, the month their first EP, Vol. 1, came out. It runs 3:33, close to two minutes shorter than the album version. Universal Music Germany, pointing readers to it five days later, described the pair as a British DJ duo and wrote that their version had a much more driving feel than the original.
It was not the song’s last remix: in May 2014 the German duo Tube & Berger released two house versions on Kittball Records. We The Wild followed Vol. 1 with Vol. 2 in 2014, and by that September West, now Anthony Vander West, was putting out a song a month with Josephine Vander Gucht as Oh Wonder. White Lies reissued Big TV as a deluxe edition in June 2024, played it in full in Manchester and London that July, and released their seventh album, Night Light, in November 2025. The remix is still up on We The Wild’s SoundCloud, under the album’s astronaut cover.
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