Thirty Days of Fifty # 16 Television

'The world was so thin. Between my bones and skin.'

For me, Television are still the band and Marquee Moon, still the record, thirty years after I bought it and almost forty since it was released. I put it on late last night, full of beer after an evening of watching and listening to great live jazz at a club round the corner from mine, my head in that space that you only get to in the twilight hours listening to music and going into a wakened dream. This is one of the very best night time albums ever made. Last night I put the record on initially to listen to the first couple of tracks but it immediately became clear that I was going to listen to the whole damn thing regardless of how late it was. Anything else would have been a disservice to it.

Venus is the track I return to most, even though I love each and every one of them. It speaks to me of being young and in my case now all these years later about trying to maintain that state. It's such a great statement of individuality, of difference. What I learned from Marquee Moon when I first got to get to know it, was that the world was not necessarily how you'd been told it would be and that you could genuinely be who you wanted to be and find your own space within it. I couldn't explain what I feel about it any more clearly than that. It's about sheer, vivid, urban experience. It's about the joy and strange unreality of being alive. Guitars have never sounded so crisp and clear. It spoke to me then and has been speaking to me ever since.