Television
 The
inaugural house band at CBGB's in
New York, and contemporaries of Patti
Smith and later Blondie, The
Ramones and Talking Heads,
Television figure large in American punk rock pre-history.
The band began in the early 70s as The Neon Boys. Although
they were never to play in public, they recorded a tape of a
couple of Verlaine/Hell compositions - That's All I Know
(Right Now) and Love Comes In Spurts - which, crude
and basic though they were, revealed Verlaine's distinctive and
imaginative guitar style.
Ficca left for Boston to join another band and The Neon Boys
split up. The drummer returned in 1973, however, to team up with
Verlaine and Hell once more.
A second guitarist, Richard Lloyd (who had been introduced to
Verlaine by mutual friend Terry Ork) was added to the line-up, and
on 2 March 1974, the band - now called Television - played their
first gig at the tiny 88-seat Townhouse Theatre and began to
build up an underground following.
Soon, their fan base was large enough that Verlaine was able to
persuade CBGB's to begin featuring live bands on a regular basis.
The club would become an important venue for punk and new wave
bands.
Richard Hell, the man who
famously patented the punk look years before Sid
and Johnny ripped it up in London, was the band's bassist
during 1973 and 1974 (he was ousted in 1975).
And frontman Tom Verlaine (hence "TV", hence
"Television") wrote poetry with (his then lover) Patti
Smith, and adored The Velvet
Underground as much as he admired the French symbolist poet
whose surname he swiped (he was born Tom Miller in New Jersey in
1950 and was raised in Wilmington, Delaware).
 Their credentials were perfect. Trouble was, Television didn't
play punk rock. With its angular
rhythms and fluid leads, Television's music always went in
unconventional directions, laying the ground work for many of the
guitar-based post-punk pop groups of the late '70s and '80s.
With Hell departing the band (his primitive bass-playing no
longer fitted Television's music, which was becoming increasingly
complex and intricate) Blondie's Fred
Smith was brought in to replace him.
Then, in August, Television's
first single, Little Johnny Jewel, was released on their
own label Ork (named after Terry Ork who subsequently took over
the label and released further local product).
Little Johnny Jewel became an underground hit,
attracting the attention of major record labels, and in 1976, the
band released a British EP on Stiff Records,
which also expanded their reputation. They then signed with
Elektra Records and began recording their debut album, Marquee
Moon.
Marquee Moon was an astonishing debut. Every song was
compulsive listening, from the buzzing, driving See No Evil,
through the sensuous Guiding Light and the chilling Torn
Curtain to the title track, with its loose, sinister
rhythms.
But the LP had more in common with the 60s West Coast than it
did the sound-alike punk rock bellowing out of London at the time,
and throughout 1977 Marquee Moon practically had the
field to itself. No other act straddled art rock and rebel rock so
successfully.
But America failed to understand Television, and while in
Britain they played to sell-out New Wave
crowds who posed and pogoed to every song, back home in the US the
band happily quit CBGB's and toured sit-down venues with Peter
Gabriel.
And after returning in April 1978 with the much anticipated
second album Adventure, the crowds were no longer
merely sedentary - they were sleeping. In Britain, meanwhile,
it became a Top Ten hit.
The album suffered from such terrible reviews in the US that
Television simply gave up for 14 years, embarking instead on
hopeless solo careers (with Fred Smith rejoining Blondie).
Verlaine's first solo album, Tom Verlaine (1979),
would have made an ideal third Television LP - much of Marquee
Moon's power and intensity was there - but subsequent efforts, Dreamtime (1981) and Words From The
Front (1982), were disappointing.
Guitarist Richard Lloyd was hospitalised in 1978 for an abscess
caused by injecting heroin. He used the time profitably by selling
cannabis to fellow patients.
Lloyd released a fine solo album
of Sixties-sounding power pop in Alchemy (1979), but
failed to follow it up.
Television re-formed in late 1991, recording a new album for
Capitol Records. The reunited band began their comeback with a
performance at the Glastonbury summer festival in 1992, releasing Television
a couple of months later.
The album received good reviews, as did
the tour that followed, yet the reunion was short-lived and the
group disbanded again in early 1993
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