Birdhouse In Your Soul (Television Mix)

A lipsynced performance of "Birdhouse In Your Soul" featuring the mix on Top of the Pops, Mar. 1990

Trivia/Info

• This remix of the album recording was only known to have been used for lipsynced performances of the song on UK television. It features a louder guitar, bass synth parts and backing vocals from John Linnell. Also included are extra guitar parts in the verses, as well as the interpolated bridge of "Summer In The City" on guitar.
• According to John Flansburgh, the song had to be "re-recorded" for the band's lipsynced performance on Top of the Pops due to musician's union rules in the UK, which he would explain on Tumblr:

Decades before we were on the show, this weird union-protectionist aspect got baked into all appearances on the show where, while bands are not allowed to perform live on the show, you are expected to fully re-record your whole track for the show so foreign bands or bands recording in non-union studios or with non-union musicians would be brought into conforming with the fully unionized BBC. The problems began with the actual task of re-recording almost any hit song, which were originally very carefully crafted over weeks with all sorts of non-union workers.

So then when these crap quickie re-recording efforts hit the show and made bands appear shaggy and discombobulated, the tradition became pure protectionist theatre where you go into the show-sanctioned union-run studio, overdub some additional percussion or a vocal double, or something to make it not sound exactly the same, but kinda exactly the same. We did some form of this with both "Birdhouse" and "Istanbul" (which I don’t think aired because it wasn’t going up the charts fast enough) and it all felt very odd and pointless, and took way too much time.

Song Themes

Animals, Body Parts, Everything, Funny But Sad, Long, Long, Mental Illness, Money, Movies, Music, Not In Common Time, Oblique Cliches Or Idiom, Oxymorons, Paradoxes, And Contradictory Statements, Puns, Questions, Self-Reference, Sleep, Tableware, The Senses, Transportation, TV And Movie Themes

Videos

• Watch it on  - Lipsynced performance featuring the mix on The 8:15 From Manchester, Jun. 9, 1990