Over the past 20-odd years, New York's Television have achieved the virtually impossible. They have maintained a level of critical respect and public credibility that has passed by most of their contemporaries. They achieved this by being smart and splitting up after a mere two studio albums (1978's Marquee Moon and 1979's Adventure); before the creative juices dried up and before they inevitably got sucked into the corporate rock lifestyle that eventually felled many of their colleagues.
But then they were different. Of all the New York class of 1975 and 1976 (Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads, Suicide, Patti Smith, The Heartbreakers, et al), Television were perhaps alone in having roots in the jazz music of John Coltrane and Albert Ayler. While their visual aesthetic was definitely punk rock, drummer Billy Ficca's style betrayed jazz leanings, Tom Verlaine, the band's lead singer/guitarist/songwriter, was into searching for a sound that synergetically combined 1960s' rock 'n' roll with free-jazz. "I got bored with those three-minute songs really quick and got more into the improvisational stuff," he told author Clinton Heylin in From the Velvets to the Voidoids. "It wasn't wanting to play longer songs, it was just being on-stage and wanting to create something. So I would play until something happened."
Something happened, all right, and its name was Marquee Moon, a song and album that proved Television to be light years ahead of their so-called peers in terms of technical prowess and agility. That fact might have generated an uneasy alliance between the band and your average CBGBs fan, but Television's music was that two pronged thing, a balance of quivering guitar solos and cerebral dramatics that distanced itself from power chords.
Tom Verlaine rarely, if at all, speaks about those nascent Television days. The keeper of the TV Tube Heart is Richard Lloyd, Verlaine's band-mate guitar foil. "We lasted six years the first time and two the second time," says Lloyd from New York. "How long are bands supposed to last, anyway? It's not like swans getting married for life.
The analogy I give is that of the jazz quartet, which might get together and make a record or two and they go on to do other things. Then, 20 years later, they get back together again. "That's good and causes some nice ripples in the jazz world, but no one thinks very much of it when they go their merry way again. In the rock arena, it's not like that. People put a great deal of emphasis on the name and the band, and they get all upset as if you're damaging their personal property when you take a hiatus."
Claiming that there is "a sense of bond even when we're not doing something", Lloyd is easy with the past. Verlaine, on the other hand, seems not to be, but Lloyd is nothing if not a loyal friend. "It's a difficult thing to be asked about something that took place a long time ago, and to have people to be hungry for you to go back there and to revisit it for them. Tom was not altogether on the scene even back then; he was not the kind of guy who would return to the bar when we weren't playing.
"Some of us were the kind of people who would join in the general sense of the party that was going on. I certainly don't hold it against him, the fact that he chooses not to talk about Television. Maybe it's a smart thing. To me it's OK to talk about it. What I think is important is that Tom isn't described as being aloof. It's not reticence, either; it's just a make-up that some artists are allowed." What about the legacy of Marquee Moon, an album that figures on every Top 50 Rock Records of All Time list? Is it an albatross or a lucky charm? "It's both! How can it be anything else? Mostly it's a lucky charm, because it's good. It's one of those records you put on that still makes you go `wow'. It's still got something real in it." A lot of great music can fall by the wayside. You can have people shouting from the rafters about a record only for it to go out of favour within months. Lloyd is happy that Marquee Moon still garners admiration and that it still sells to generation after generation. Almost 25 years after it was made, the music still contains a real energy that, says Lloyd, "was dying to get out and got out. It's in there".
He's right, too, of course. It's a rare rock record containing its own seed energy, somewhat like an acorn that has a whole tree in it. "Television is like a comet," says Lloyd, picking another suitable analogy. "We come around, and then we disappear. You think we're gone and the next time you look we're there again."
Television play Dublin's Vicar St on Easter Monday, April 16th
