CLASSIC ALBUM: Television – Marquee Moon

A classic from ’77, this time from New York’s most sophisticated proponents of punk rock, Television and their peerless debut album Marquee Moon. Over the years 1973-1977, Television gradually shunned the reductive primitive nature of common place punk rock and developed a strand of the genre that favoured expressionistic jazz and progressive rock influenced arrangements played with a garage rock attitude. The resulting album Marquee Moon is nothing short of magnificent, the intricate guitar interplay between singer/guitarist Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd is truly spectacular and elevates the tracks skyward as it frequently imbues the music with moments of sheer ecstasy.

In the same way that Lou Reed captured the gothic-psych cool of 1960s New York a decade earlier, Verlaine’s dreamy, hallucinated observations of a dangerous, run-down Lower East Side similarly portray New York as an attractive but treacherous prospect. Every track on the album is a stellar, singular component of a well-balanced, fizzing, simmering broth of perfectly contained tension and frantic energy. Of course, the star attraction here is Television’s signature track Marquee Moon, an audacious 10 and ½ minute punk phantasm that is dominated by vivid guitar exchanges between Verlaine and Lloyd that chime, jangle, crunch and scale as they thrillingly transcend punk, jazz, progressive and psych in search of rapture, with momentous guitar solos (yes, solo) taking the track to heavenly heights. A punk album like no other.