A hugely gifted and original musician, Verlaine kept up the exacting standards in his solo career
In 1975, Malcolm McLaren returned to England from a sojourn in New York with a selection of posters and set lists he had collected in the city. Ostensibly managing the New York Dolls, he had become enamoured of another band, who appeared to be kickstarting a new movement in the city. Television had been formed from the ashes of the short-lived Neon Boys by two childhood friends, Tom Miller and Richard Meyers, who had relocated to New York and renamed themselves Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell. Both frontmen and songwriters, the two appeared to be completely at odds with each other. Verlaine was aloof, introspective and a hugely gifted and original musician, whose playing entwined so completely around that of the similarly gifted Richard Lloyd that it was unclear who was the lead guitarist and who was on rhythm. Bassist Hell was a heroin addict who threw himself around onstage, spiked his hair, ripped his clothes and held them together with safety pins: one of his homemade T-shirts bore the legend “PLEASE KILL ME”.
In search of a gig, they had approached a club called CBGBs, lying to the owner that their sound fitted with the genres in the acronym of its name: country, bluegrass and blues. Given a Sunday night residency, Television began attracting appearances by other artists who shared their general discontent with the state of mainstream rock in 1974 and played, as Hell put it, “really powerful, passionate, aggressive music that was also lyrical”, among them Verlaine’s sometime lover Patti Smith and the Ramones. McLaren had been particularly taken with Hell’s look and his song Blank Generation: on his return to the UK, he alerted the group of young musicians he was vaguely involved with to both, presenting them with the posters and set lists he had accumulated. In response to Blank Generation’s title, the Sex Pistols’ bassist Glen Matlock wrote Pretty Vacant.
