In 1975, Malcolm McLaren returned to England from a sojourn in New York with a selection of posters and set lists he had collected in the city. Ostensibly managing the New York Dolls, he had become enamoured of another band, who appeared to be kickstarting a new movement in the city. Television had been formed from the ashes of the short-lived Neon Boys by two childhood friends, Tom Miller and Richard Meyers, who had relocated to New York and renamed themselves Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell. Both frontmen and songwriters, the two appeared to be completely at odds with each other. Verlaine was aloof, introspective and a hugely gifted and original musician, whose playing entwined so completely around that of the similarly gifted Richard Lloyd that it was unclear who was the lead guitarist and who was on rhythm. Bassist Hell was a heroin addict who threw himself around onstage, spiked his hair, ripped his clothes and held them together with safety pins: one of his homemade T-shirts bore the legend “PLEASE KILL ME”.
In search of a gig, they had approached a club called CBGBs, lying to the owner that their sound fitted with the genres in the acronym of its name: country, bluegrass and blues. Given a Sunday night residency, Television began attracting appearances by other artists who shared their general discontent with the state of mainstream rock in 1974 and played, as Hell put it, “really powerful, passionate, aggressive music that was also lyrical”, among them Verlaine’s sometime lover Patti Smith and the Ramones. McLaren had been particularly taken with Hell’s look and his song Blank Generation: on his return to the UK, he alerted the group of young musicians he was vaguely involved with to both, presenting them with the posters and set lists he had accumulated. In response to Blank Generation’s title, the Sex Pistols’ bassist Glen Matlock wrote Pretty Vacant.
The irony was that, by the time anyone outside New York had heard them, a band who had as much claim to have kickstarted punk rock as anyone sounded nothing like a punk rock band. Verlaine and Hell’s relationship, always combustible – onlookers at their CBGBs residency remember the two screaming at each other and fighting onstage – had broken down entirely, Verlaine increasingly refusing to play any of Hell’s songs, Blank Generation included. When Brian Eno and Richard Williams recorded a demo session with Television, potentially to get them a deal with Island Records, every song they taped was Verlaine’s: moreover, Verlaine’s musical perfectionism – his quest for what Hell subsequently called “crystal-clear crisp sweet guitar suites” – precluded Hell’s rudimentary bass playing, his lackadaisical attitude to rehearsal and his increasingly hedonistic approach to performing live. Hell left in 1975, taking his songs and his image with him, leaving Verlaine the band’s frontman and leader, apparently intent on piloting a course away from the scene that Television had helped start.
Later that year, Hell’s replacement, Fred Smith, appeared on Television’s debut single, Little Johnny Jewel. It was very much a DIY product – released on a label their manager, Terry Ork, had set up specifically to put it out, recorded in mono, pressed not on vinyl but the cheaper alternative styrene – but there its resemblance to anything we might think of as punk ends: it was a world away from the short, sharp shocks of the Ramones or indeed the nascent Sex Pistols. Little Johnny Jewel is long – onstage, it could stretch out to 15 minutes; even the seven-minute studio version had to split over both sides of the single. Its tempo is slow, its sound clean, undistorted and evidently the product of extremely skilled musicians: Billy Ficca’s drumming is fantastic; the guitars weave intricately around each other; three and a half minutes in, it slides into a haunting and very lyrical solo that takes up most of its second half. It was striking and intense, but, as the writer Robert Christgau noted, “its intensity wasn’t manic”: unimpressed, his fellow critic Lester Bangs compared Television to the Grateful Dead and Quicksilver Messenger Service, which wasn’t intended as a compliment. In fact, one of the most obvious influences on Verlaine’s playing was the decidedly un-punk figure of the British folk-rocker Richard Thompson: listen to Thompson’s double-tracked solo on Fairport Convention’s 1967 Joni Mitchell cover I Don’t Know Where I Stand and you could easily be listening to the pealing sound of Verlaine and Lloyd in full flight.
Verlaine and Television honed their approach to perfection on 1977’s Marquee Moon, which was one of the greatest debut albums of its era and also so set apart from the prevalent trends of its era that it hasn’t dated at all in the ensuing 45 years. Everything about it was, and is, utterly gripping: the songwriting, the taut, complex interplay not just of Verlaine and Lloyd’s guitars, but of all four musicians – listen to the bass and drums weaving around them on the title track or Friction – Robert Mappelthorpe’s stark cover photo. Verlaine’s voice is an insouciant, very New York sneer; his lyrics were haunting and elusive (“I remember how the darkness doubled, I recall lightning struck itself,” opens the title track) and occasionally dipped into detective fiction or Alfred Hitchcock films for inspiration, as on Prove It or the closing Torn Curtain. It was an album that perfectly conjured a fantasy version of nocturnal lower Manhattan, simultaneously threatening and inviting. For all the running time of some of its songs, Marquee Moon never felt indulgent, or outstayed its welcome. No matter how long the solos, everything that Verlaine and Lloyd played felt purposeful and integral to the song: they were never engaged in simply showing off their considerable chops.
It was, understandably, rapturously received. In Britain, the NME trailed its star writer’s 3,000-word review on its cover with the line “Nick Kent discovers genius”. But the critical acclaim couldn’t make it a big hit – it reached No 28 in the UK and failed to chart in the US at all – and may even have harmed its follow-up, 1978’s Adventure. Taken on its own merits, Adventure is a fantastic album, but packed with incredible songs – Glory, Foxhole, Days – and remarkable playing. In the immediate wake of Marquee Moon, however, its more reflective, understated mood couldn’t help but seem slightly anticlimactic. Three months after its release, Television split up.
Verlaine embarked on a solo career, releasing a string of albums that, more or less, kept up the exacting standards he had set in Television – 1981’s Dreamtime is particularly great – and received more or less the same response: critical acclaim and the respect of fellow musicians (David Bowie covered Kingdom Come, from Verlaine’s eponymous 1979 debut album, on the following year’s Scary Monsters and Super Creeps) that was never reflected in their chart position. None of them attained the subsequent reputation of Marquee Moon, despite the quality of the songs they contain: Breakin’ My Heart, Fragile, Postcard From Waterloo, the angular funk of 1984’s Travelling and Dissolve/Reveal, A Town Called Walker, Cry Mercy Judge.
By the time Television re-formed in 1992, the extent of the influence they wielded was obvious. Marquee Moon had long been a regular in music press best album of all time lists. The trebly brightness of Marquee Moon’s sound had hung over swathes of 80s British indie rock (one of said genre’s most lauded practitioners, Felt, took their name from the way Verlaine emphasised the word during Marquee Moon’s Venus; another, the Family Cat, paid homage with their debut single, Tom Verlaine), while, in the US, you could hear at least faint echoes in Sonic Youth’s twin guitar attack, REM’s oblique lyrics and the sound of Pavement.
Under the circumstances, it wasn’t surprising that Television reappeared: more startling was how great their eponymous third album was. While it was audibly the work of the same band that had made Marquee Moon and Adventure – the twisty two-guitar riff that fuelled Call Mr Lee was classic Television – its sound was noticeably different from its predecessors’: softer, sparer, more opaque. You could never have accused them of simply presenting the world with a facsimile of their former glories. Nor did Television approach their reformation with the cash-grab zeal common to legendary bands who regroup in their later years.
They never actually split up again, although they often toured so sporadically you could be forgiven for thinking they had, particularly when Verlaine restarted his solo career: he released an instrumental album, Alone, and the shruggingly titled Songs and Other Things in 2006, by which point another new wave of artists audibly indebted to Television had emerged, the Strokes and Interpol among them. Long silences would be punctuated by brief tours and festival appearances. In 2011, a mere 19 years after their third album, they announced they had nearly completed a follow-up. It has yet to appear. It was a strange way for a band to conduct themselves, but perhaps that was no surprise: Tom Verlaine and Television had been a law unto themselves all along.
