Nobody in Television signed off on The Blow Up. By 1982, when ROIR put it out on cassette, the band had been broken up for four years, and the tapes hadn't come from a vault. A fan had smuggled a recorder into New York shows in 1978, the results had circulated as a bootleg called Arrow, and the label bought it off him rather than build a live album from scratch.
Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell had started the band in New York in 1973, with Billy Ficca on drums and, from that March, Richard Lloyd on second guitar. Their manager, Terry Ork, talked CBGB's owner Hilly Kristal into giving them a regular slot, and by January 1975 the residency had turned the club into somewhere worth queuing for. Hell left later that year, tired of arguing over his own songs and his own stage manner, and Fred Smith, briefly of Blondie, took the bass.
Marquee Moon, released on Elektra in February 1977, is the record most people mean when they say Television. A ten-minute title track, two guitars that never once double each other, Verlaine's voice pitched somewhere between a sneer and a shrug: it's a band working out how much tension a song can hold before it has to resolve. Adventure followed within the year, quieter and less loved at the time.
The band didn't survive it.
Verlaine, Lloyd, Ficca and Smith split in July 1978, worn down by thin sales, diverging ideas about where the songs should go next, and Lloyd's drug use. There was no farewell tour and no live album planned to mark it.
What ROIR eventually assembled from that fan's tapes runs to thirteen tracks and eighty-four minutes: 'See No Evil' and 'Marquee Moon' itself, alongside 'Little Johnny Jewel,' a song that had only ever existed as a single, plus run-throughs of Bob Dylan's 'Knockin' on Heaven's Door' and the Rolling Stones' '(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction.' The sound quality argues with itself throughout, thin in places and thick in others, because none of it was meant to be heard this way.
That's what makes it worth returning to. Where Marquee Moon is a band composing under studio conditions, this is the same interplay between Verlaine and Lloyd caught with the safety net removed, proof that the tension in those songs was never a production trick. It was just how the band played when nobody involved thought anyone was listening.
