100 Best Albums Of All Time

01 See No Evil

02 Venus

03 Friction

04 Marquee Moon

05 Elevation

06 Guiding Light

07 Prove It

08 Torn Curtain

On ‘Marquee Moon’, the intoxicating, effortlessly epic title track from Television’s debut album, the otherworldly takes hold as if a dream has turned to reality. In the first two lines frontman Tom Verlaine remembers how ‘the darkness doubled’ and that ‘lightning struck itself’. ‘I was listening, listening to the rain/I was hearing, hearing something else,’ he adds, and that sense of unbelievable change unfolding before your eyes typified what Television would do to guitar rock. After Marquee Moon, a record of ecstatic repetition and grave guitar solos offset by spectral characters and theatrical asides, nothing else sounded the same.

School friends and aspiring poets Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell, guitarist and bassist respectively, had been searching for their entry point since late 1973. They formed the Neon Boys with drummer Billy Ficca and then added a second guitarist in Richard Lloyd to become Television. The New York scene was foundering at the time, and Television mainly rehearsed in a Chinatown loft before they fronted a bar owner on the Bowery and talked their way into a booking at the downtown venue that would soon gain a worldwide reputation as the American epicentre of punk and new wave – CBGB-OMFUG.

‘You are four cats with a passion,’ read the quote on the tiny ad for the show in Village Voice, provided by exiled 1950s Hollywood filmmaker Nicholas Ray (Rebel Without a Cause, In a Lonely Place), and he wasn’t wrong. But it was a bumpy early ride. Hell left Television in 1975, taking his nihilistic proto-punk anthems to the Voidoids and the Heartbreakers (he was replaced by Fred Smith), while not even demo sessions with Brian Eno could provide a satisfying outcome. The quartet were equal opportunity iconoclasts – the clarity and formal design of their songs were not only a rejoinder to prog rock’s portly self-regard, they also stood aside from the new wave’s furious and liberating loathing.

From the opening ‘See No Evil’ their distinct parameters are clear, with Smith’s warm basslines and Ficca’s stern playing forming the foundation for a pair of complementary guitarists and Verlaine’s edgy, upper atmosphere vocals. The elements on Marquee Moon are easily recognisable, but what was done with them was something hitherto unknown. Television were one of many bands that would draw inspiration from the Velvet Underground, but what they soaked up was John Cale’s conceptual clarity and Lou Reed’s guitar tone. On a song like ‘Friction’, rhythm parts would segue into brief solos that subtly remade the song again and again even as it strode into the chorus.

Television was quite probably the only credible band in 1977 notating the individual guitar solos (shared fairly evenly between Lloyd and Verlaine). This kind of activity was usually the domain of rampant egotists or prog rock posers, or both. But with Television ego wasn’t behind it. On ‘Marquee Moon’ the lyrical, sometimes ringing clusters of notes from the singer were drawn from the song’s architecture. Television were a model of efficiency and that was why the title track could run for 10 minutes and yet feel like it had barely begun. The song builds and abates, growing in intensity until a crescendo that feels final but instead returns to where it all began. It closes what would have been side one, and from then on Marquee Moon is untouchable.

‘Elevation’ has a sighing guitar refrain that informs the song’s melancholy, while ‘Guiding Light’ is a tremulous ballad that finds Verlaine dedicating himself with quiet ardour. ‘Prove It’ riffs on old cop show reruns – ‘just the facts,’ mock snarls Verlaine – as it leads into a spiralling, extended solo, before ‘Torn Curtain’ finds Verlaine and Lloyd’s guitars not-so-gently weeping. The song plays like a requiem for a tragedy, and the final minutes with their mournful chorus of ‘Tears, tears. Years, years’ sounds like an invocation from a funeral, which is the least likely but nonetheless fitting stop for an album that offered so much new life.