140. Television
Electric Brixton
12 June 2016
Look, I don’t want to start anything unnecessary, but let’s get one thing straight: Marquee Moon is the album your older friend claimed they discovered before it was cool, even though he was eleven at the time, and still doing unspeakable things to his He-Man duvet.
Despite being labelled as such, Television wasn’t punk, not really, not in that spitting, safety-pinning, Sid’s-got-no-stomach-lining kind of way. No, these were New York’s sallow-cheeked sonic architects: all bones, cigarettes and sideways glances. Art-school exorcists armed with guitars sharp enough to shave with and a rhythm section tighter than your nan’s jam lid.
Then there’s Tom Verlaine, the frontman who sang like Dylan if he’d done more amphetamines and fewer harmonicas. Marquee Moon wasn’t an album. It was a shimmering, wiry, nine-track rebuttal to every beige, bell-bottomed musical crime of 1977. Whilst the rest of punk was pogoing itself into a nosebleed, Television were out back doing surgical guitar duets and discussing Artaud. It was the sound of CBGBs sitting for finals.
“Prove It” slides in like a psychic telegram from a Velvet Underground séance. Then “Torn Curtain” hits, the kind of song that feels like a slow-motion curtain call at an off-Broadway production where all the actors have read too much Baudelaire. “Venus” pretends to be a love song, until you clock that it’s basically a haiku scrawled on a toilet wall. “I fell right into the arms of Venus de Milo”? Poetic, until you remember she hasn’t got any.
It is swiftly followed by “See No Evil”, the album’s opener, and the night’s high point. Guitar riffs hit like lit cigarettes flicked down a fire escape. Verlaine mumbles “I understand, destructive urges”, and it would all be quite the gothis-dark statement, if it wasn’t so, well, jangly.
Watching Television live is like witnessing a tug-of-war. Verlaine plays like a man trying to exorcise a minor demon from his fretboard, part virtuoso, part malfunctioning marionette. It’s thrilling. For a bit. And then, suddenly, it’s all got a bit up its own bum. Like they’ve remembered they’re that band; the one your ex’s cooler mate once told you had “literally changed her life” before dropping out of Goldsmiths. My gig buddies for that evening,concur: “more bloody noodling than Wagamama’s” is one succinct review.
Yes, Marquee Moon is the reason Johnny Marr owns 147 effect pedals. And sure, they only made two albums before fizzling out like a Gauloises in a puddle of vermouth. This album was indeed a landmark album that gave birth to a thousand indie bands. However, one cannot shake the feeling that it is all best listened to, whilst wearing black turtlenecks and pretending to understand French New Wave cinema.