Marquee Moon is the one Television album that every music fan needs. It has a very good claim to being the best guitar record ever made. It's certainly my favourite in that particular respect and will always be one of my five favourite albums ever recorded. But their second, Adventure, which came out a year later in 1978 has certainly got plenty going for it.
I wasn't aware of the band at the time this came out. I was only 12, hadn't started to form my own music tastes and Television certainly weren't high enough profile at the time for me to know who they were. I was taking most of my leads at the time from Top of the Pops and the singles charts. I was pushed towards buying Marquee Moon in round about 1983 when R.E.M. who arrived with Murmur that year started name-checking them relentlessly in music paper interviews and led me towards making that purchase. Spurred on from there. I bought Adventure a couple of years later at the end of my first term at university.
It's no Marquee Moon. Very few albums were or are, but it's certainly worth a listen for anyone who went for that. It has their trademark sound, developed into something else and apart from their debut. In many ways it sounds like their daytime album to Marquee Moon's nightime one.
It's certainly not a bad record although it must have been a disappointment to many of 'the legions of pale boys (who) sloped off en masse to purchase Moon...' (Barney Hoskyns), inspired by Nick Kent's astonishing page long review when it came out in The NME.
Time though has been kind to Adventure . There was obviously some disquiet in the camp at the time with the highly egocentric and slightly aloof Tom Verlaine trying increasingly to take over the band and growing apart from his main foil and fellow guitarist Richard Lloyd, while the other band members Billy Ficca and Fred Smith, who always took a backseat role, struggled to keep the peace.
That disquiet is evident listening to the record. There are parts of it that still don't work for me and sound rather out of focus. But I can certainly go wth 2/3 of the record and it has plenty of my favourite Television of all. First two tracks Glory and Days for sure.
Glory still sounds magnificent, even though in many ways it's a rewrite and less incendiary statement than the first track from Moon, See No Evil. But there's plenty of fire here, The guitars sound just great as you'd expect, plenty of Verlaine's triple entendre lyrics and singing like a goat that had had its throat slit, (Lloyd). It's a great start to any record.
Days is also fabulous and a slight departure for the band. Slowed down and spacious, Television were phenomenally influential, with the likes of Subway Sect, Magazine, the Bunnymen, U2, The Go Betweens, Triffids, That Petrol Emotion and plenty of others taking their lead from them. They laid down a number of paths for others to follow, on Adventure as well as on Marquee Moon. Days is another one of them.
I've never cared for Foxhole, the lone single from Adventure. Again, it sounds like a rewite of a song from Marquee Moon to me. This time of Friction without approaching that track's uptight perfection. It always sounds rather shrill to the point of pain to me.
Fourth track Careful, one of the band's earliest songs always comes as blessed relief. It's laid back Television to the point of being horizontal. Television by numbers perhaps but it always works for me.
Last track on Side One, Carried Away is another I've never greatly cared for. It sounds like Verlaine straining for a solo career. Neat guitar solo and some evocative lyrics but it still doesn't stick with me and certainly doesn't bear comparison with Guiding Light or Torn Curtain where the band were going for something similar.
Turn it over. Just three songs. It certainly sounds like a band winding down once and for all. The Fire again sounds almost like solo Verlaine. Some nice effects and plenty of mood and atmosphere and again good lyrics without ever landing the killer punch.
Ain't That Nothin' though is one of the best things the band ever did. Prime Time Television and possibly the stand out track on Adventure. Both Verlaine and Lloyd are operating at the peak of their powers, Ficca and Smith as always provide full back up support. It feels like something is about to combust and closer to The Stones somehow than anything the band ever recorded .It's one of the few tracks on here that wouldn't have sounded out of place on Marquee Moon though perhaps it fits better here.
On to last track The Dream's Dream another of my absolute Television favourites and in many ways the perfect sign off song from a truly great band. Long intro, the brief lyrical interlude and then on to what they did best and an area where they had very few equals, before, at the time, or since. The sound of guitars meshing and interlocking and jarring and expressing emotion to a greater and more compelling degree than words ever can. I always find it incredibly moving.
Television split shortly afterwards after sign off tours in the US and UK. They'd run their course and knew it. They got together in New York's Chinatown and agreed to go their separate ways apparently on a full moon, the same way as Moby Grape, one of their great Sixties guitar precedentts had. The original four got back together again in 1992 and made another good album, the eponymous third.
Since then they've toured occasionally but it seems Verlaine and Lloyd no longer get on well enough to work together. Verlaine has enlisted another great guitarist Jimmy Ripp, who plays his parts fine, (I saw them about ten years back and they were excellent), but seems to know that he is quite clearly and always will be Number 2. Television were at their best as a creative force when Verlaine and Lloyd effectively functioned as equals. They sparked off each other and both brought something quite irreplaceable to the mix.
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