Tom Verlaine: The Life, Music And Legacy Of Television’s Visionary Guitarist

“I didn’t see anybody in New York back then who was doing anything,” Verlaine said dismissively in Please Kill Me, Legs McNeil’s oral history of punk rock. “It was all glamour – all visuals.”

Forming Television: “There was something very, very modern about them”

Having taught Hell to play bass, Verlaine also recruited drummer Billy Ficca and formed The Neon Boys, but his aspirations were soon stymied by the band’s lack of progress. They struggled to recruit a second guitarist (despite both Blondie’s Chris Stein and Dee Dee Ramone auditioning for the job), and they only began to move forward after they found Richard Lloyd and rebranded themselves as Television.

After becoming their manager, Terry Ork persuaded Hilly Kristal, the owner of CBGB, to give the fledgling band a regular gig at the club. However, while Television went on to play numerous shows at this legendary New York venue (and at its rival nightspot, Max’s Kansas City), Verlaine and company quickly stood apart from their NYC punk contemporaries such as Blondie, Ramones and Talking Heads.

“There was something very, very modern about Television,” filmmaker and Melody Maker journalist Mary Harron later noted. “Something very liberating about that negativity. It was so hard and cold.”

Verlaine, though, was still unhappy with his band’s sound. Frustrated by Hell’s rudimentary skills on the bass and feeling the strain of their volatile personal relationship, he forced his old friend out of the group. Hell responded by forming his own punk outfit, The Voidoids, by which point Television had replaced him with Fred Smith, who had previously been an early member of Blondie.

However, while Television’s classic line-up clicked with the arrival of Smith, a record deal remained elusive, and the band released their debut single, Little Johnny Jewel, on their manager’s self-financed Ork imprint during 1975. Though offering early glimpses of their formidable, twin guitar-driven magic, the song’s relatively lo-fi recording – and the fact that Verlaine decided to split the seven-minute track over the two sides of vinyl – polarised opinion within the group. And yet, Verlaine’s unorthodox approach paid dividends.

“That [record] actually got a lot of press, I think ’cos it was so weird,” Verlaine told US music writer Alan Light in an interview for Rhino’s 2007 reissue of Television’s debut album, Marquee Moon. “Penthouse magazine gave it a plug, which in those days was the best thing you could get because they had a circulation ten times the size of any music mag. We sold out 2,000 copies. I remember being in Terry Ork’s loft for hours, packing them and mailing them. Then stores started ordering them, which was much better – you could send a hundred here and a hundred there.”

‘Marquee Moon’: “An obvious, unabashed classic”

Television did, however, score a record deal in the wake of Little Johnny Jewel. With record labels enthusiastically sniffing around the burgeoning NYC punk scene, Elektra Records secured the group for their first two albums. Verlaine, for his part, was only too happy to sign with the legendary imprint.

“I had a fix on Elektra,” he told Alan Light. “Because of the 60s acts they had that always seemed so individual, like The Doors and Arthur Lee and Love.”

By the time Television signed with the label, they were firing on all cylinders. But while they were happy with the way Marquee Moon turned out, they weren’t prepared for the way it would be received – not least in the critical sense. The UK press, in particular, were close to unanimous in their belief that Marquee Moon was one of the best debut albums of all time. In Sounds, Vivien Goldman dubbed it “an obvious, unabashed, instant classic”, while NME put the band on their cover and devoted two pages to Nick Kent’s review, which said, “They are one band in a million, the songs are some of the greatest ever.”

For once, such hyperbole was bang on target; 50 years later, the album still sounds ahead of its time. Rich, deeply intriguing and never less than compelling, its most brilliant, enigmatic songs, such as the churning See No Evil, the dark, cinematic Torn Curtain and the shape-shifting, ten-minute title track sound like they’ve been beamed in fresh from the future.

Critics also pulled out the superlatives for Verlaine’s nervy vocals and elliptical lyrics and the intuitive nature of Ficca and Smith’s rhythmic meshing – yet most of the praise was reserved for Verlaine and Lloyd’s dazzling and otherworldly guitar interplay.

Instead of playing distinct “rhythm” and “lead” parts, the two guitarists crafted interlocking lines which largely made such terms redundant – and the fact their two styles were so different created something unique. Both were virtuosic, although, broadly speaking, Lloyd’s solos were more conventionally plotted out, whereas Verlaine’s, songs such as Venus, Friction and Marquee Moon, were more experimental and off the cuff.

As a result, Lloyd was able to double-track a number of his solos on Marquee Moon, yet while engineer Andy Johns suggested Verlaine do the same, it was often too difficult for the guitarist to remember exactly what he had played, due to his spontaneous approach. What is certain is that the end result was so singular that Marquee Moon was already mapping out the landscape for what would be called “post-punk”, even as punk was barely getting into its stride.

Adventure: “Lives up to its title”

Having sent the press into raptures, Marquee Moon fast became a touchstone for discerning listeners who would morph into the next generation of alt-rock stars. Writing in his first autobiography, Bunnyman: A Memoir, Echo And The Bunnymen guitarist Will Sergeant enthused, “Television’s melodic content shines high above all the [punk] dross. Marquee Moon contains a lot of the elements that put the final nail in the coffin of progressive rock. It can never in a million years be called prog. How did they pull this off?”

As to how Television “pulled off” their sound, Verlaine later told Guitar magazine it partly came about out of necessity. “I think it was financial,” he said. “In the 70s, when guitars were still cheap, nobody wanted a [Fender] Jazzmaster because they weren’t loud and didn’t stay in tune. In ’73, ’74, you could buy a Jazzmaster for $150 easily. So that’s why I started playing it, because we didn’t have a lot of money and they were cheap. And then I really got used to it, plus the vibrato arm on it is very nice.”

Despite its visionary sound, Marquee Moon failed to break Television in the mainstream. It went Top 30 in the UK (where spin-off single Prove It was also a minor hit), but it sold modestly in the US, and the band weren’t helped by embarking on a mismatched North American tour on which they supported Peter Gabriel. They did play a well-received UK tour with The Only Ones, but, after the towering Marquee Moon, their second album, April 1978’s Adventure, was received as an anti-climax.

In retrospect, that’s a harsh verdict. While Adventure isn’t as incendiary as its predecessor, it still contains plenty of fine material, such as the chiming Days, the angular anti-war paean Foxhole and the crepuscular The Dream’s Dream. It also attracted some very positive reviews, with The Village Voice’s notoriously hard-to-please Robert Christgau giving the record an A- and suggesting that, while it was “not as urgent, or as satisfying” as its predecessor, that was only because “Marquee Moon was a great album while Adventure is a very good one”. For their part, Rolling Stone noted that, “By daring to be different, Adventure lives up to its title.”

Although they’d expanded Television’s sonic palette with Adventure, both Lloyd and Verlaine had become disillusioned with the group. Following the album’s release and subsequent tour dates, the band decided to break up on Halloween in 1978, with Verlaine telling The New York Times, “Moby Grape broke up on a full moon, so we wanted to, too.”

Solo career: “Neater than television… but almost as visionary”

Verlaine wasn’t idle for long. He embarked on a fruitful solo career, which lasted for most of the 80s – a period during which he temporarily relocated to England due to the critical acclaim he continued to receive in his post-Television days.

Indeed, many of Verlaine’s solo offerings were widely praised, with The Village Voice declaring that his self-titled 1979 debut album was “neater than Television, as you might expect, but almost as visionary anyway, and a lot more confident and droll”. Record Collector, meanwhile, described 1981’s Dreamtime as “a showcase for Verlaine’s fretwork, the brittle, tense sound of early Television giving way to a much freer, resonant sound”. Along the way, Verlaine picked up some high-profile fans, with David Bowie recording an inimitable cover of his song Kingdom Come for 1980’s Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps).

Television reunion: “More about flickers than explosions”

While Verlaine never enjoyed superstar status, his influence continued to grow in stature throughout the rest of his career. Still receiving plaudits for Marquee Moon, Television returned in 1992, releasing a self-titled third album that the Los Angeles Times accurately described as “excellent… more about flickers than explosions”. The group also toured, exhibiting plenty of their original power and delighting a new generation of fans.

Elsewhere, Verlaine remained in demand on multiple fronts. In 1994, he branched out into film scores, composing the music for Love And A .45, an indie road movie featuring a young Renée Zellweger, before collaborating with Patti Smith on tracks from her 1996 album, Gone Again, and her Grammy-nominated 2000 outing, Gung Ho. He also worked on the other side of the studio glass, producing the demos for what would have been Jeff Buckley’s second album, My Sweetheart The Drunk, prior to Buckley’s untimely death in 1997.

The legacy: “He had a real sense of the [guitar] and its expressive powers”

In the new millennium, Verlaine played with alt-rock supergroup Million Dollar Bashers, which also featured longtime Television fans Lee Ranaldo and Steve Shelley, from Sonic Youth, Wilco guitarist Nels Cline, and Bob Dylan bassist Tony Garnier. He made no further studio albums with Television, but the band remained a hot live draw, performing Marquee Moon in its entirety during their 2010 tour, by which time Jimmy Rip had replaced Richard Lloyd as Verlaine’s guitar foil.

Verlaine issued his final solo albums, Songs And Other Things and Around, in 2006, and again took to the stage with Television, in 2014 and 2016. Billy Idol asked the band to support him on a European tour in the early 2020s, but by this time Verlaine’s health was too fragile to withstand another stint on the road. Having engaged in a lengthy battle with prostate cancer, he finally succumbed to the disease, passing away on 28 January 2023, at the age of 73.

Yet, while Tom Verlaine may no longer be with us, his influence on music remains as strong as ever. Television’s songs have been covered by artists ranging from Echo And The Bunnymen and Siouxsie And The Banshees through to Joe Jackson and Kronos Quartet, and Verlaine’s DNA is easily detectable in any number of thrilling guitar-based bands who have aggressively pushed the envelope themselves. As the Los Angeles Times noted in 2023, “the bridge to the stupendous ten-minute Marquee Moon anticipates much of Sonic Youth’s output, and R.E.M.’s first decade seemed to spring from the cascading arpeggios in Days, from Adventure.”

“Tom was capable of anything,” Lenny Kaye said, paying a heartfelt tribute to this singular figure. “He could move from chaotic soundscapes of free jazz to delicate filigree. It wasn’t covered up with distortion. He had a real sense of the [guitar] and its expressive powers.”

Check out the best Television songs.