Reissued and Revisited: The Television Personalities on Fire Records
...And Don't the Kids Just Love It / Mummy Your Not Watching Me / They Could Have Been Bigger than the Beatles / The Painted Word
When one thinks of first-wave English post-punk, the sounds which come to mind are often jutty and angular (Gang of Four, Magazine, Wire), somber and moody (Joy Division, Siouxsie and the Banshees) or world-influenced and/or otherwise experimental (Public Image, the Pop Group). Of the early core acts, Television Personalities seems like an outlier. Playful, retrospective, and often charmingly amateur, the Television Personalities’ early work feels more like a precursor to Beat Happening, K Records, and the International Pop Underground scene that would crop up in the Northwest United States later in the decade than the heavily art school-influenced bands that more commonly define their era and locale.
The TVP’s central songwriter, Dan Treacy, idolized ousted Pink Floyd-er Syd Barrett – as evidenced by their best-known single, “I Know Where Syd Barrett Lives” – and his reverence for the bubblegum psych-pop of the mid-‘60s can be heard in the band’s debut full-length, ... And Don’t the Kids Just Love It. Many cuts from this 1980 classic feel like they could have been plucked right from a sunshine-y, flower power-era pop platter – one in a colorful sleeve, where good-looking hippie children sang prancing ditties about puffy stuff like hobbit gardens and schoolyard games – but there’s a self-awareness (not to mention occasional bitterness, in a track like “Diary of a Young Man”) that lifts Treacy’s tunes far and above all that vintage chaff. That, and a gift for crafting enduring hooks. It’s not particularly well-recorded or impressive from a technical standpoint, but that only adds to its homespun charm. Listening to the record now, you can understand how it bore significant responsibility for many of the jangle-centric artists who’d arisen later as part of C86.
As is the common side effect of simply playing your instruments continuously, the Television Personalities mounted a steady climb toward musical proficiency over their proceeding albums. The cheekily-tilted Mummy Your Not Watching Me and They Could Have Been Bigger than the Beatles arrived in ’81 and ’82, each a marked improvement in instrumental prowess, if not inspiration. (The latter is an odd compilation of re-envisioned, better-recorded tracks from their prior releases and covers of songs by O.G. psych group the Creation; it was intended, for a very short time, to be the unit’s last release.) Both are interesting, if not necessarily essential, lead-ups to 1984’s The Painted Word, which was almost the Television Personalities’ second masterpiece. Recorded by Treacy and an all-new lineup of musicians, this record seems to exist in a different sonic world from …And Don’t the Kids Just Love It. The Painted Word is acoustically ambitious and morose through-and-through; the crackling distortion and watery reverb place it in closer company to mid-run Velvet Underground or some of the acid fallout folksters of the early ‘70s. It’s chilling, to say the least. It’s Treacy’s most wholly-realized work, and if it weren’t for a coarse, screamy Vietnam protest song (a decade too late) that closes the record, it’d be their most perfect album.
Too often overlooked, Fire Records has admirably sought to rectify that situation by reissuing the TVP’s first four LPs on vinyl and CD. Treacy’s career arc over this quartet of releases is an enticing trip in and of itself: an artist making an incredibly compelling opening statement, then re-finding himself over the course of two strong records on the way to one more great one. They’re all an easy recommendation; if pressed, however, it’s probably best to start with the two most essential: …And the Kids and Painted World. If you love what you hear (and you probably will), you can proceed to connect the dots between them with the other two.
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