Transmission Reboot

Television singer-songwriter-guitar player Tom Verlaine doesn't listen to a lot of new music: “Only what people send me,” he says, “and then half of the time I don't even get halfway through it.” But recently he was surprised by a YouTube link sent to him by Television bass player Fred Smith. The footage featured a band of teenagers covering Television's title track from the 1977 album Marquee Moon. “What's incredible is that it's the best version I've ever heard anybody play,” Verlaine continues. “The bass player loses it a bit but the two guitar players, for being that young, play it really good. The singer is a girl, which is really strange; I don't know what to make of the girl's voice. But I thought, 'Geez, these two guitar guys really got this thing down'.”

The song is a behemoth: ten-plus minutes of duelling guitar parts and sparse lyrics cutting through clean instrumentation. In '77, the album arrived in the midst of what would later be looked back on as the punk explosion; incongruous in its considered arrangements and clean tones.

The cover art of the record features a Robert Mapplethorpe photograph of four spotty young men standing against a flat backdrop. The colour levels are way out of whack and this renders their faces off-white with red blotches – they look unhealthy, the four of them. “It's 'cause of the Xerox effect,” says Verlaine, “it makes all our faces look pock-marked and criminal too. We got the photo back and we picked the best one, and we thought, it looks a little too clean, you know? Colour Xerox machines had just become available so I took it to the copy shop and stuck it in the Xerox machine and changed the colour settings on it, which I thought, 'Yeah, this is more striking'. It wasn't more flattering, that's for sure, but we never actually thought about that.”

Verlaine's been playing many of the Marquee Moon songs over the years in the various emergences of Television and as a solo artist, so, he says, the prospect of their Release The Bats performance of the album start-to-finish is no big deal. “As the band and as a solo artist I've played half of these songs since the record came out so it's not a bunch of new stuff,” he says. “A couple of them we have to rehearse a bit more because we haven't played them, I haven't actually sung them, in so long – I don't think I've sung Torn Curtain in 30 years. But, you know, once I figured out some of the chords it's not a big deal... I sometimes play chords that I don't know the names for, there were a couple that I could not find the fingerings for but I've got all but one figured out.”

With Marquee Moon they set out to capture the energy of the band performing live. They achieved exactly this; the verve of the album ensures it still sounds fresh, and the prospect of the eight numbers in order is electrifying. While Verlaine is coy about whether he believes the songs stack up to his standards today, he's gratified that there's still demand to see them performed live and says, despite having written the lyrics 30-something years ago, he wouldn't change much if he were given the opportunity to do so. “It's not dated in any way because it's not a generic rock record based on blues changes, or rockabilly changes, or Beatles imitations or something like that,” he says. “I think that's why it's still a little fresh... I don't think I'd rewrite any of them... There are songs on our records where I've thought, 'That verse could've been better, or certain verbs could have been better' – little things that could have been better, but not a whole lot.”

The solos are individually credited on the back sleeve of Marquee Moon – an almost even split between Verlaine and Richard Lloyd. Much has been made of the double-lead guitar interplay genius of Verlaine and Lloyd, who left the band in 2007, but Verlaine plays down the guitar-playing relationship insisting that he and Jimmy Rip's 15 years of 'solo' shows more than qualify the 'newcomer' for filling Lloyd's spot. Verlaine puts the quality of the guitar work on the record down to careful consideration and arrangement more than any special connection between he and Lloyd – it was no happy accident or blind luck.

“So much of what's written about the band is total baloney,” Verlaine says of the guitarists' famed chemistry. “Lloyd himself has often said that [I] showed [him] a lot of what to play, maybe as much as 80 per cent or more. I would never show him solos, but I would show him a part. And generally I would go to rehearsal, because I don't like to rehearse a lot, with parts made up, even in the '70s, and I would say, 'Let's try this', and it would go from there. Sometimes the parts would be instantly good, sometimes we would change things and sometimes we would forget about them. So things are not so spontaneous as people seem to think.

“It's very, very simple arrangements for two instruments. A lot of the stuff I played on piano, the left-hand part became Richard and the right-hand part became me, then we would tweak it – change it, take notes out of it, change rhythms... There was very much a sense of arrangement. It's not like walking into a rehearsal room and having some magical song appear because the two guitars gelled so instantly. It was very, very arranged, you might say – it was thoughtful.”