The Television song Richard Lloyd called a “mini-symphony”
In hindsight, it’s bizarre that Television were considered one of the first punk bands. The New York art-rock trio didn’t have any of the hallmarks of traditional punk groups – aggression and distortion were completely anathema to Television’s musical style. But one thing that the group did have in common with the best of their CBGB peers was a key sense of precision.
“People think we improv’d, that we had a lot of improvisation, but we worked our parts over,” guitarist Richard Lloyd insisted in an interview with SongFacts. “We would take a song apart and put it back together over a period of a year, a year and a half, to get it to a place where we were happy with it, and there is a good deal of structure that isn’t at all improvisation.”
“Then of course, we differentiate amidst what you may call lead work from solos,” Lloyd added. “Solos would be improvisation to a certain extent, but the lead, which I usually took because Tom had to play rhythm while he sang – he couldn’t play a lead while he sang, so I usually took the melodic structure of the song to another place – I don’t think people understand how organized it was.”
Perhaps some confusion came from the band’s signature track, ‘Marquee Moon’. The ten-minute centrepiece to the band’s debut album of the same name, ‘Marquee Moon’ is so skeletal and wandering in its composition that listeners had to assume some of it was made up on the spot. But Lloyd explained that the track’s complex structure was not only completely intentional but also fully fleshed out.
“It’s like a mini-symphony. Towards the end of the song, Tom gets a long solo, and he would often meander through parts of it, but we had it structured,” Lloyd explained. “I do the song on my own as well, and it’s really quite structured: There’s a part that’s loud and there’s a part that’s soft, and there’s a build-up, then there’s a climb – there’s actually three sets of climbs – then there’s what we call the ‘birdies,’ and then another section and then the verse comes back in.”
“So it was pretty well structured after that period of time of aching to look for proper parts for it,” he added. “And there’s a great deal of syncopation going on in it with the drums coming in sounding backwards and my part that trills off the one. It’s not easy to learn.”
Check out ‘Marquee Moon’ down below.
