May 6th
Television-See No Evil-Marquee Moon
I should have
got Television back in 1978, rather than two or three years ago. I always wrote
them off as hippy/jazz remnants playing tricksy songs in difficult time
signatures just because they wanted to prove a point. This was not the done
thing in the white hot period of punk when less was more. Three chords were
more than sufficient to string a tune together and brevity was everything.
Being puritanical at the time, it was considered that any track that lasted
over 2 min 30 sec was dangerously straying close to prog rock territory. (I remember when Wire recorded a 15 minute
song “Crazy About Love”, for a Peel session track in 1983. Even though this was
at least 5 years after punk, Wire, being considered still by some to be a
“punk” band, were castigated as total sell-outs and traitors to the “cause”).
In our youthful naivety, we thought that all the punk bands were blazing a
fresh trail with a scorched-earth policy to everything, including musicianship.
That’s what we were all led to believe by the music press and the record
companies anyway. We all fell for it, hook, line and sinker. What we do know
now that virtually all the punk bands were old hippies themselves and had all
played in awful pub-rock bands for years.
“Marquee Moon”
(the single), seemed to go on forever and a day-and even now it’s got an
endless quality that, even though I’m well-used to 25 minute tracks from Godspeed
You! Black Emperor and their ilk, listening to it makes me wish Television
would just get on with it and bring the whole shebang to a close. Just when you
think it’s over, up it starts again for another 10 minutes (or so it can seem).
I actually do now like the track although I definitely think that you have to
be in the right mood for it. One of my friends had the single as a coloured
vinyl 12” single, and the simple fact that a) it wasn’t a 7” single and b) my
friend still wore flares on occasion, led me to write Television off as a bunch
of hippy New York chancers for a very long time. “Marquee Moon” kept cropping
up on various compilations of both punk and post-punk stuff. I couldn’t get
away from it. It was even on the first Rough Trade CD box compilation, “Twenty
Five Years of Rough Trade Shops”, and most of the time I skipped though it.
Although the
single kept cropping up on collections, I also kept reading how groundbreaking
the album was in “best of” lists in music magazines-i.e. best punk albums, best
post-punk albums, best guitar albums, best New York albums etc. I would not
have been surprised if it had shown up in Gramophone’s “best orchestral record
of the century” list or “best use of Tuba” in Brass Instruments Weekly. There
must have been something about it to gain such accolades. So, after over a
quarter of a century, I laid down my prejudices, braced myself and got hold of
the album. And it’s actually rather good. All the praise heaped on it is
totally justified.
“Marquee Moon”
though. Blimey, it’s still a bit of a trudge.
Get/see/read "Totally Shuffled" here
And now as paperback!
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