There are some aspects of parenthood which are a disappointment; it so happens that I married someone even worse than sport than I was, and so I have never had the pleasure of standing beside a windswept football/cricket/rugby/hockey etc pitch and shouted enthusiastically while one of my children scored a hat trick or a brisk half century before lunch. My how the tears would have flowed though.
Amidst the many other satisfying things however, my son likes Marquee Moon nearly as much as I do.
Marquee Moon is an LP released by the American band Television in the late 70s. In my view it is the greatest pop/rock record of the era. Perhaps any era. The only threat to its status is perhaps that it is neither pop or rock. Television emerged from the New York underground scene as post-Velvet Underground wannabees, and were embraced enthusiastically as New Wave kindred spirits when their debut LP reached these shores. I saw them play once, at the Manchester Apollo, in about 1977.
Television fulfilled the first and most obvious criteria for a rock band. They looked like a gang. On the front cover, nearly all black, they stand facing Robert Mapplethorpe's camera (yes, that Robert Mapplethorpe) in an uneven echelon, with leader Tom Verlaine looking out from under his centre-parted fringe, an amused Mona Lisa half smile on this face, appearing to proffer something to the viewer. On the inside sleeve they are rehearsing in what is no doubt some trendily bleak NY loft apartment, drummer Billy Ficca waiting patiently to be told what to do, bass player Fred Smith watching observantly while Verlaine chops something out on his Fender Jazzmaster and fellow guitarist Richard Lloyd, hunched over a scruffy Telecaster, tries to make sense of it. The lighting is low and monochrome. They look young, but not naive; they are not jocks, but neither are they nerds; they aren't punks, but they aren't prog rockers either. They are their own genre. Weirdos perhaps. And they belong together.
So much for the cover. The record itself consists of eight songs recorded with a simplicity that belies the laborious care taken to achieve the effect. Drummer Ficca is a million miles away from the four-to-the-floor simplicity of greats like Charlie Watts or Ringo; but he does just enough to keep the music interesting without ruining it by showing off. Bassist Smith is like a great referee - you never notice him. But it is the guitarists that are riveting and make Television's distinctive and much-copied sound (vide the Arctic Monkeys).
Playing Fender guitars through Fender amps gives Verlaine and Lloyd's work a distinctive clarity. And the songs are beautifully arranged, each guitarist playing the absolute minimum, so the sound is full of holes and spaces. And what sounds they produce. In particular Verlaine's Jazzmaster has a glassy chiming ring that is utterly distinctive; no other guitar I know of can make that sound. It has something of the glass harmonica about it. As a soloist, Lloyd is a decent technician, but again Verlaine has the touch of genius. Taking his cue from the nagging lines of Neil Young, his playing, sometimes minimalist, sometimes expansive, has a percussive and modal inflexion to it. He can thrash it, and he can make it sing.
As for the songs themselves, they are not quite as simple as they sound. See No Evil hurries rhythmically along for a few minutes, but most of the tunes are slow, or nearly slow. Prove It has only three or four chords, but is a cheeky subversion of early 60s bubblegum pop with a stop-start chorus. Torn Curtain wanders into strange harmonic by-ways. Elevation is perhaps characteristic of Verlaine's approach to lyric writing - "It's just a little bit back from the main road / where the silence spreads and the men dig holes", he sings, bleating like a disappointed goat. And, "I knew it must have been some kind of set up / All the action just would not let up". In the gaps between he plays some fills that take the breath away.
Who knows what the lyrics mean? "I remember how the darkness doubled / I remember lightning struck itself / I was listening, listening to the wind / I was hearing, hearing something else". Who cares? Verlaine seems to have calculated that if no-one could work out what the words meant it didn't much matter what they meant. "Docks, clocks / A whisper woke him up / the smell of water would resume".
The climax of the record is perhaps the title track, Marquee Moon, a nagging ostinato of three elements cutting across each other, and reaching in Verlaine's solo a tremendous climax in D major (from memory) where, for one of only a very few times on the record an instrument other than guitar, bass and drums appears - some whirling piano arpeggios which clarify that we have reached somewhere. The music subsides, and then restarts, chugging into life as patiently as in the opening.
When I saw Television live, Verlaine did all the singing, and most of the playing. Only on the encore of Satisfaction did Richard Lloyd get the chance to cut loose, which he did dazzlingly. This personal dynamic might have gone some way to explain why the band split shortly after their second LP. In reality there was no need to make another one. Marquee Moon is as close to perfect as you can get. For the young man of sensitive disposition (a category into which my eldest falls squarely) its gnomic cadences are as close to a satisfactory account of the world as you could wish for. Its light still burns brightly after thirty-five years.
