5. TelevisionMarquee Moon

I went to see Television [in 1977] at the late lamented Glasgow Apollo, which is gone now, which was a huge venue, when the support band was Blondie, although we didn’t know who they were. In those days, the lines of communication were a little thinner than they are now. In contrast to the Kate Bush album, this one is built from guitars, bass, drums and a bit of keyboards, but from that dry set of stuff they still created a whole other world, a mysterious world. And I still don’t know what they’re talking about – what the marquee moon was, what they’re doing going to a graveyard in a Cadillac at midnight, and so on – but all these stories are suggested by a guitar that’s not doing stuff that I thought guitars did. They’re far from the guitars of Earl Slick or Mick Ronson. They’re very dry, almost jazz-like, with these pure melodic lines that pull you into it. Just think of the title track, which is so odd, starting with two guitars calling to each other, in a fairly abstract sense. And then Tom Verlaine starts to sing over them, but these lines continue, and another line is added, and another, which pulls us into this mechanism for thrusting the song forward; it grows in momentum. Then it reaches this almost Mike Oldfield bit where it goes – BLING! BLING! BLING! BLING! – then it collapses, and it goes back to the start. Yeah, so it’s fabulous and strange, and very compelling.