Television performs on stage at Hammersmith Odeon, London, 16 April 1978.
“Tom Verlaine was present at the creation of New York City punk. His band Television held a residency at CBGB in the club’s first years. But his music was never bound by what became punk’s ruling aesthetic of fast, loud and simplistic. Instead, Verlaine’s songs reveled in the open-ended: in improvisations that could spiral out toward free jazz and in verbal enigmas and paradoxes. Born Thomas Miller, Verlaine — who died on Saturday at 73 — renamed himself after a symbolist poet, Paul Verlaine, and he built his songs around guitar patterns that interlocked like cats’ cradles, intricate but never confining. His music looked back to the not-so-distant days of psychedelia and the Velvet Underground, but it was leaner, tauter, steelier. …”
NY Times (Video)
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