Television Personalities
As a Chelsea teenager with a job at Led Zeppelin's Swansong
Records, Dan Treacy began Television Personalities in the mid-70's
with school friends Ed Ball and 'Slaughter' Joe Foster.
They were initially a successful exercise in no-budget
independence, but spent the rest of their career being critically
lauded and commercially ignored. But their story was never short
of drama . . .
Despite the upbeat, often cutesy, arrangements of their jangly
anthems, singer-songwriter Dan Treacy often used Television
Personalities as an outlet for his feelings of depression and
under-achievement.
He set out his stall in 1978 with Part-Time Punks,
a sniggering nursery rhyme satire from the Where's Bill
Grundy Now? EP, aimed at provincial kids on the Kings Road who
"come from silly places, come down for the day".
Crossing '60s pop and psychedelia with the amateurishness of
Jonathan Richman, the Television Personalities went on to
create seven LPs of snappy, idiosyncratic English pop, from
1981's And Don't The Kids Just Love It to 1995's I
Was A Mod Before You Was A Mod.
The band were fêted by everyone from Alan McGee
(founder of Creation Records) to Kurt Cobain, and recorded such
seminal works of greatness as I Know Where Syd Barrett
Lives.
Ball spent the majority of his time with other projects, most
notably The Teenage Filmstars, eventually leaving to form The
Times. Treacy, meanwhile, added bassist Mark Flunder and
organist Dave Musker in 1982, with Flunder soon replaced by former
Swell Maps and Slaughter Joe bassist Jowe Head.
Following 1985's The Painted Word, the Television
Personalities took several years off, regrouping in 1990 with
Treacy, Head, and ex-Slaughter Joe drummer Jeff Bloom.
Dan Treacy disappeared in the late 90's only to be rediscovered
seemingly abandoned, aboard the prison ship HMP The Weare in
Dorset. He had been in and out of jail four times for petty
offences related to his problems with alcohol, amphetamines and
heroin - and to his ongoing mental health issues (he was sectioned
briefly in the 80's).
Undeterred, he emerged from chokey to resume his career with
the 2006 album My Dark Places. Although the album was
clumsily executed, Treacy was reunited with sidekick Edward Ball
for the first time since 1982's psychedelic lollipop Mummy,
Your Not Watching Me.
The results (such as Sick Again and She Can
Stop Traffic) suggested that - despite concerted efforts -
Treacy hasn't squandered all of his talents just yet.
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