"Things Have Changed Since I Was a Girl"
On Television Personalities' 1981 debut LP, ...And Don't the Kids Just Love It
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January 1981 in London brought bitter cold and the indie label Rough Trade’s release of Television Personalities’ LP ...And Don’t the Kids Just Love It, a tiny jewel of literary-minded sad boy jangle pop. The TVPs’ debut came over two years before Rough Trade put out the Smiths’ debut single “Hand in Glove.” The Smiths would become Rough Trade’s most famous signee with literary-minded sad boy jangle pop of their own.
Morrissey gave the Smiths’ records titles like The World Won’t Listen due to his frustration with the band’s low charting, and he wrote lyrics based on Rough Trade’s Geoff Travis words to the singer, “You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet, Baby.” The young man talked about living on the dole, railed against Thatcher and the monarchy, and sang with a populist fervor. But today, Moz has turned farther and farther to the right. His net worth is estimated at $50 million, and he plays solo concerts with ticket prices starting at $115, on par with the exorbitant ticket prices charged by pop acts like Ed Sheeran, Taylor Swift, and U2. “The oppressed have become the oppressors,” reporter Carole Cadwalladr wrote in 2013 for The Guardian opinion piece entitled “Morrissey, you’re a fraud.” Moz splits his time between several lavish homes, one outside Manchester, and one in the Los Angeles neighborhood Lincoln Heights, where gentrification forces longtime Mexican-American residents to leave their longtime homes in droves. Morrissey came up climbing over his collaborators in the Smiths to gain fame and fortune, paying the Smiths’ rhythm section significantly less than he and guitarist Johnny Marr earned. Daniel Treacy, later in life, sang “I stick two fingers to fame.”
Television Personalities frontman Daniel Treacy, now in his late 50s (the same age as Moz), these days receives care in a nursing home following an intense 2011 surgery to treat a blood clot in his brain. This November, Television Personalities members spotlight a night called A Celebration of Daniel Treacy at London’s 100 Club, a venue famous for its history with punk music and Northern soul, and tickets cost £17.50. The TVPs were never strictly a punk band but they fit neatly into that canon, having made their early cult hit “Part-Time Punks,” a bitchy piece of messy DIY pop bliss.
In 1986, while the Smiths were taking over the world with The Queen Is Dead and “How Soon Is Now?”, Television Personalities played Queen’s College in London one October night and performed a take-down of Moz. “It's just another rainy day in Manchester,” Treacy sang, “It's always raining / And I'm so miserable / And I've never been laid / And we've just signed to EMI / ‘Cos we'll never get a number one on Rough Trade.”
I remain a waning Morrissey fan in 2018, and every time I think about it, well, “Heaven knows I’m miserable now.” His rising ticket prices (and my disgust at his racism and rape apologism) ensure that I’ll never again go see my once-favorite singer perform.
When my internet friend in London, Erik-James, who grew up very poor, couldn’t afford to see the TVPs as a teen, he contacted Dan Treacy through Facebook to say how sad he was to miss the show. Treacy put Erik on the list. It would be among the band’s last shows before Treacy’s failing health took him away from music for the foreseeable future. Jesus Jones keyboardist Iain Baker wrote in 2004, “There were times I was sure he was dead,” after it was found out that Treacy was serving a stint on a prison boat for stealing from a bandmate. "I had a bad time: mental illness, drug addiction, homelessness," Treacy told New York Times critic Douglas Wolk in 2006. "I gave up on music. I was in prison five times—it was all shoplifting to get money to buy drugs, basically." In fall 2009 Dan Treacy blogged on a TVPs fan site run on a Tripod server:
“the end
without making dramas i am quitting music may or may not do last show on october 16th..it will if i play be the last, nothing to show for anything constant sadness sorry thanks for everyones support, bye”
I feel so jealous of the chance my friend got during his teenage days to see the TVPs in their twilight. During Treacy’s own teenage years, Television Personalities self-released the single “14th Floor,” about living in government-subsidized council housing. The next year, Dan got some money from his parents to help make the Television Personalities’ EP Where’s Bill Grundy Now? The titular question asked about the Thames Television host who was sacked, as they say, from his show after having the Sex Pistols on and encouraging them to curse. In a terribly relatable turn of events, Treacy paid for the recording, mastering, and test pressings of the 7” before realizing that the process ate up all the money, leaving no budget to produce an actual run of the 45. He received two copies. He sent one to the iconic BBC Radio DJ John Peel, well-known for his crystalline tastes and his Peel Sessions with artists like Bowie, T. Rex, the Ramones, and the Buzzcocks. Peel must have recognized the band’s wit and neat pop sensibilities, featuring “Part-Time Punks” prominently on his Radio 1 show. Treacy said that his mum was bothering him to pay back the money.
“Part-Time Punks” and its inclusion by Peel broke the band, bringing them offers from indie labels to press and distribute. Treacy and his bandmate Ed Ball chose instead to release several TVPs singles under their DIY label Whaam! A cease-and-desist from George Michael’s representatives made them change their name to Dreamworld, but Michael’s people did pay them an undisclosed amount to avoid confusion with Michael’s mega-popular boy band Wham!
In 1980, with their first full-length on the horizon, Rough Trade put out a single called Smashing Time! The back of the black-and-white sleeve lists members like “Nicholas Parsons” and “Bamber Gascoine”—each literally being the names of British television personalities, lowercase—as band personnel instead of Treacy and Ball, respectively.
The text goes on to call Geoffrey Ingram, described here as an avant-garde filmmaker, the founder of the band TV Personalities. “I prefer to remain a mystery,” says a likely fabricated quote from Ingram. Geoffrey Ingram Taylor, later the namesake of a classic TVPs song off ...And Don’t the Kids, was a physicist and mathematician. A part of the Manhattan Project, Ingram helped to develop the “Fat Man” atomic bomb. A US Air Force B-29 plane dropped the yellow and black-colored 1000-pound device on the Japanese city in 1945 in the mass murder of up to 80,000 Nagasaki citizens, mostly civilians, to say nothing of the thousands who suffered from severe burns and radiation sickness during the nuclear fallout that followed for months.
Treacy took a strong anti-war stance throughout the TVPs’ many singles and albums, and Smashing Time! B-side “King And Country” was Treacy’s first to decry militarism. The second Cold War raged during the June 1980 release of the 7”, with Ronald Reagan’s violent and oppressive US presidency on the horizon. Margaret Thatcher was crowned Prime Minister of England the year before, and was quoted at one point as saying, “A world without nuclear weapons would be less stable and more dangerous for all of us.” I fucking hate it when people in power say shit like this, because it makes clear that humans like the victims of the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombings, the dead numbering over 200,000, are conveniently left out of the conversation about what benefits “all of us.”
Ever the collage artists, “King And Country” includes a ramshackle guitar solo cribbed from the Byrds’ 1966 single “Eight Miles High.” “King And Country,” tight and ferocious, spits venom on the character of a military veteran suffering from PTSD. Treacy wails: “It's hard for me to understand / The fascination of a gun for a man / Still you tell romantic stories about the war / You never explained what it's all for! / Do you wake up screaming in the middle of the night / When your mind recalls the firing line?” “King And Country” predicts TVPs songs like “How I Learned to Love the Bomb” and “A Sense of Belonging.”
The titular single on Smashing Time! contrasts the ferocity of its B-side with a sweet and unassuming song that begins, “Cousin Jill came down to London for a weekend break / And I promised that I’d show her ‘round the sights.”
20th century pop music, for its entire life, focused on love songs to the exclusion of nearly all other topics. While mediums like literature, film, theater, and painting explored a variety of ways of looking at the world, pop calcified. In 1967, an idolized domestic abuser, homophobe, and ableist trash musician crystallized the attitudes of modern pop by proclaiming “All You Need Is Love.” Really, John?
A song like “Smashing Time,” my very favorite TVPs song, stands out to me in the history of pop and punk due to its lighthearted narrative focusing on Treacy’s relationship with his cousin. Listening to most pop music, you’d think the writers of popular love songs lacked any relationships besides those with the people they were fucking, had fucked, might fuck. Family and friends, some of the most important stars in the constellations that are our relationships with others, seem to rarely enter the picture in pop songs.
“And then we walked in Hyde Park eating ice cream,” Treacy warbles innocently, “And she thought it was really good, and so did I.” Simple moments of connection punctuate “Smashing Time.” “We were scared in the London Dungeon, it’s silly I know / And we both felt slightly embarrassed in Soho [...] Jill thought the King’s Road was terrific and Carnaby Street was fab / The best weekend that she had ever had / Smashing time.”
Critic Nitsuh Abebe wrote for Pitchfork in 2010 about the deluxe reissue of the Cure’s Disintegration, describing how so many young people fell in love with the band. “It’s no wonder this was meaningful to a lot of teenagers,” Abebe says. “The trick, I think, is how well it serves as a soundtrack to that feeling that everything around you is meaningful, whether it’s beautiful or horrible or sublime: This is an album for capital-R Romantics [...]”
“Smashing Time” encapsulates that romanticism; the streets of London at night seem to glitter with the streetlights. The simple pleasures of the song grant a much-needed reprieve from the emotional horrors of “King And Country,” or the crushing depression of poverty and isolation present in “14th Floor.” Like many ambitious young artists, Treacy seemed dedicated to capture the full spectrum of his experiences, all the little joys and pains that make up a life.
While Rough Trade released ...And Don’t the Kids Just Love It in January ‘81, the influential British magazine New Musical Express, the make-it-or-break-it Pitchfork of its day, put out a little blurb in February on the TVPs’ single “I Know Where Syd Barrett Lives.” “A gentle joke from the waggish TVP's,” the journalist writes. “Whether it's worth a pound or not depends on the state of your social set up. I mean, would you herd all your friends into your bedroom, put this on, and then all fall about laughing? It's only acoustic whimsey and bird noises. If that creases you then the great Who Watches Shelly? debate is over.” The 7” version of “I Know Where Syd Barrett Lives,” tense and claustrophobic compared to the acoustic version featured on ...And Don’t the Kids Just Love It, describes a modest friendship with the enigmatic and elusive original Pink Floyd frontman. “He was very famous once upon a time / Now no one knows even if he’s alive,” Treacy sings, concluding, “In a little hut at the edge of the world / He’s very sad.”
Paul Groovy, later of Paul Groovy & the Pop Art Experience, heard one day in April 1984 that the TVPs were scheduled to play the modest venue The Living Room, but when he arrived that evening he ran into Creation Records co-founder and fervent TVPs supporter Alan McGee. McGee told Groovy that Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour booked the TVPs on short notice to open for him on his premiere solo tour that night at the famous Hammersmith Odeon, having been touched by the tribute to his former bandmate. The TVPs opened with “David Hockney’s Diaries,” “Back to Vietnam,” and the song that brought them to that stage that night, along with a medley of a few Barrett-era Pink Floyd tunes like “See Emily Play.”
Treacy introduced “I Know Where Syd Barrett Lives” by saying, “Get your pen and paper ready, and you can write down the address.” He then proceeded to read out the private Barrett’s actual address, leading Gilmour to fire the TVPs off the tour after that one date. Treacy later said, “No one writes it down, no one believes it for a minute!” The TVPs, a little like their booze-soaked stateside contemporaries the Replacements, became infamous for their brash unpredictability and lively drug-fueled shows.
TVPs peer Roberto wrote in 2008 on the TVPs forums reminiscing about the concert: “My best memory of the night was [TVPs guitarist Jowe Head] throwing confetti up the air and being made to hoover it up afterwards by an irate stage manager, which he did—with considerable panache—in front of a full house of whistling fans [...] Gilmour’s lot treated us all (I was helping with transport and humping of gear) as if we weren't there. I am not sure any of them actually spoke to any of the band or entourage. There was a vague air of hostility from the start—begs the question of why they wanted the TVPs on in the first place. The sight of the band’s ramshackle gear alongside Dave Gilmour’s piles of stuff was quite a contrast. Not sure any other band has ever played Hammy Odeon (as was) using a Woolworth’s amp!”
“We didn’t stay for [Gilmour’s] set anyway,” Groovy writes, “It was back on the tube with Dan, Jowe & [TVPs member “Slaughter Joe” Foster] to The Living Room.” I love the details of this special night. Other bands, looking to top the charts, might have performed reverently and seriously at such a huge and potentially career-making date, but the TVPs preferred to throw confetti and trash one of their chances at mainstream success.
Over 20 years later, Treacy wrote a song called “Hard Luck Story Number 39” for the TVPs record Closer to God. You know how comic book heroes have origin stories? Treacy self-mythologized with this jewel-like little Bildungsroman. “I was too young,” he sang. He references the ...And Don’t the Kids Just Love It track “The Glittering Prizes,” reveling in the tiny pop universe he’d created with his collaborators. “I touched the glittering prizes / I had them in my hand / But when I turned it down / You didn't understand [...] Just to hear my song on the radio / Was all I ever hoped / Soon realised, I couldn't cope.” The aging punk reaches a crescendo, making his personal manifesto: “You can keep your hits / And your silver discs / I'll stick two fingers to fame / Don't cry for me / It's not a shame / It's not a hard luck story number 39.”