A User's Guide to the Television Personalities
Listening to the Television Personalities 'records is like watching someone hold a smile until it grows desperate, laughing at a joke until it turns dead serious, obsessing over an uneasy fantasy that turns into a terrible truth and ultimately emerges as a small but genuine victory. Dan Treacy, the band's voice for its three tenuous decades, and his initial creative foil Ed Ball met in London during the punk rock era; like everybody else, they started a band. They (and their initial rhythm section, the Bennett brothers, Gerard and John) could barely play instruments, and Treacy couldn't begin to sing on key, but that didn't matter: they released an enthusiastic single, "14th Floor," as the Television Personalities, and they got played on John Peel's BBC radio show, which pretty much fulfilled their wildest dreams at that point.
They followed it up with an even better EP, Part Time Punks, a hilarious little set of Treacy's broadsides about the way everybody was jumping on their cultural bandwagon; Ball started making his records on his own as O-Level (after the exams required of 16-year-old British students) and the Teenage Filmstars, writing sarcastic odes to Malcolm McLaren and John Peel. (The fabulous early singles by the Ball-fronted groups are compiled on A Day in the Life of Gilbert and George.) Everybody played on each other's recordings. It was a fine time.
The early TVPs singles are compiled on the first half of Yes Darling, But Is It Art? That's an appropriate title: Treacy was obsessed with fine art and Pop Art and the societal acceptance that went with them. He wrote songs called "David Hockney's Diaries," "Lichtenstein Painting," "Painting By Numbers," "Parties in Chelsea." His other great fascination was with the Mod moment, the outbreak of lonely adolescent aggression that built its own aesthetic in the '60s and latched on to Pop Art's skirts. The TVPs covered multiple songs by the Creation, the ultimate second-tier Mod band; Ball's group Teenage Filmstars recorded "I Helped Patrick McGoohan Escape," a tribute to the auteur behind the ultra-Mod TV show The Prisoner. (Ball's later band the Times re-recorded it repeatedly.) And, in 1981, the TVPs released their most enduring half-a-joke-half-not-a-joke: "I Know Where Syd Barrett Lives," a song about the fragile Pink Floyd frontman's retreat from the world, which also served as Treacy's jab at his own ingrained preciousness.
"Syd Barrett" also turned up on their first full-length album, the same year's And Don't the Kids Just Love It. The band was still ragged around the edges, and Treacy came off as a furious, trembling aesthete — the album opens with "This Angry Silence" and ends with "Look Back in Anger" — but he'd also matured as a songwriter, and "Geoffrey Ingram" and "A Picture of Dorian Gray" are tightly crafted enough to stand next to the Kinks and Who classics he obviously admires. 1982's Mummy Your Not Watching Me is more inconsistent and scattered, and its wind-tunnel psychedelic production does it no favors, but it includes a couple of TVPs classics: "Painting By Numbers," a neo-Mod anthem originally released as a single credited to the Gifted Children, and "If I Could Write Poetry."
Ed Ball left the band in early 1982 to concentrate on the Times. (The Here's to Old England compilation surveys his many bands, including the Times 'biggest hit, "Lundi Bleu," a Francophone cover of New Order's "Blue Monday.") The Television Personalities 'They Could Have Been Bigger Than the Beatles, an outtakes collection better than their two actual albums to date, was followed in 1984 by The Painted Word (named after Tom Wolfe's book about modern art), on which Treacy's songwriting seemed to fold in on itself. "A Sense of Belonging" was the most viscerally stinging song he'd written yet — it was the album's single, in fact — and the band's arrangements shiver and twitch, wincing away from Treacy's pained warble. Still, the album has passages of genuine, very dark beauty, especially "Someone to Share My Life With."
Thanks to record-label misadventures, the band didn't release another album until 1990. Some of the songs on Privilege had spent years in their live set by the time they were recorded; the group had also established its longest-lasting and most simpatico lineup, with drummer Jeffrey Bloom and former Swell Maps bassist Jowe Head. "Paradise Is for the Blessed" (rhymes with "not for the sex-obsessed") almost sounds like the Smiths, and their performances on Swinging London-style anthems like "The Man Who Paints the Rainbows" have a confidence and force that's a welcome complement to Treacy's songs.
The climax of the full-force Television Personalities 'career was 1992's Closer to God, a set of bracing rockers about Treacy's collapse into drugs and depression. It's twice as long as it needs to be, but it opens with a trio of magnificent, desperate songs, and the eleven-minute title track is cathartic and harrowing. At a music-industry conference the summer it came out, Treacy was standing in his label's booth, playing a little set to the goateed record-biz assholes sauntering past, and nearly screaming the words of "You Don't Know How Lucky You Are": "Would you like to see scars? My brand new needle marks?/ Wearing my sins like a new tattoo, I can't imagine why I don't envy you!"
Closer to God was followed by a few tours, a string of singles and EPs and miscellaneous tracks (some of them later compiled on The Boy Who Couldn't Stop Dreaming), and then an ominous silence. 1998's Don't Cry Baby… It's Only a Movie was scraped together from haphazard 1995 sessions (almost entirely Treacy solo) and a couple of radio recordings from '92; seven of its ten tracks are covers, and another is a re-recording. By then, Treacy had seemingly dropped off the face of the planet. The Mr. T Experience recorded a song called "I Don't Know Where Dan Treacy Lives."
Finally, in 2004, Treacy sent an email communiqué to a group of Television Personalities fans from the prison boat where he was incarcerated: having spent years in and out of stir, intermittently homeless and messed up on drugs, he'd been surprised to discover that anyone still remembered him. His first toe dipped back into music was 2005's And They All Lived Happily Ever After; as Treacy put it, it's "our Odds and Sods— Sods and Mods more like." It's a mess of solo live recordings from the mid-'90s, a couple of earlier compilation tracks and demos, and some barely functional new material.
Fortunately, he pulled it together somewhat more for 2006's My Dark Places, for which he reunited with Ed Ball — Gerard and John Bennett even put in cameo appearances. It's a terribly painful album to listen to, partly because Treacy's obviously hurting so badly he can't think straight most of the time: a lot of the songs are in-studio improvisations that get no further than a repeated line or two, and "Ex-Girlfriend Club" is effectively a sarcastic, rambling message to someone who's just dumped Treacy (it also keeps veering into lines from Althea & Donna's "Uptown Top Ranking"). But Treacy has never been shy about baring his wounds on record, and he's not about to stop now.
And, in fact, the TVPs have kept recording and touring. Oddly enough, the A-side of their most recent single, "The Good Anarchist," has no audible involvement from Treacy: It's a single verse, written and sung (very slowly, twice), by Treacy's current bandmate Johanna Lundstrom, about a super-fan who discovers that her favorite pop musician has lost his mind. It sounds a bit like a crushed version of "I Know Where Syd Barrett Lives," actually. In other words, it's a darker-than-dark joke about Treacy's own disappearance — comedy stolen from the mouth of despair, just the way he's always liked it.
