Television Personalities
Those early platters (since collected on Yes Darling, but Is It Art?) showed enormous promise, and throughout their career the TVPs attracted earnest and powerful patrons. John Peel talked up a test pressing of “14th Floor” on the air, which helped Treacy persuade his parents to loan him the money for the single’s first proper run, and in 1991, during the post-Nevermind frenzy, Kurt Cobain invited the band to open for Nirvana in London. But Treacy has never become a star. He quit recording and touring in 1996, after seven LPs, and has spent most of the intervening years strung out on heroin, either living on the streets or serving time for petty thefts he committed to support his habit. He’s stayed off the narcotics since the end of his last prison term almost two years ago, but on his blog he admits he still can’t keep a room–he’s been in and out of hostels, periodically homeless, sometimes crashing with his sister–much less hang onto a girlfriend. But he has put the Television Personalities back together, with a lineup that includes original bassist Ed Ball and two newcomers, drummer Mathew Sawyer and singer Victoria Yeulet. Discounting live recordings and odds-and-sods collections, the new My Dark Places is the band’s first album in 11 years.
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Treacy likes the Velvets’ sound so much, in fact, that he nicked it for the album’s loveliest moment: the gorgeous viola-and-glockenspiel melody that winds through “No More I Hate You’s,” which recalls the poetic opening track from The Velvet Underground & Nico, “Sunday Morning.” That song paints a scenario of marveling at the world after an all-nighter, but Treacy has no doubt stayed up till dawn a few too many times to buy into its stoned, sleep-deprived optimism. Though his lyrics offer up a kind of hope that’s likewise born of exhaustion, there’s nothing romantic about his outlook. With levelheaded gratitude, he talks about what’s left of a relationship after both love and hate have died down–a quiet core of shared history and sheer presence. Yeulet’s reassuring coo shadows his rueful delivery of the lines “It’s all gone / You’re still there / I swear now there’s no more I hate yous.” But a sampled male voice weaves a strand of ugliness into the song, suggesting that what sounds like a final bottoming-out may just be the eye of the storm. “You asked me to make a record of me voice; well here it is,” it snarls. “What you want me to say is I love you. In truth I hate you, you little slut.”
