Television Personalities

...And Don’t The Kids Just love it Mummy, Your Not Watching Me They Could Have Been Bigger Than The Beatles The painted Word (reissues, 1981, 1982, 1982, 1984)

Fire

9/10, 9/10, 7/10, 8/10

Creation myth: how the best band you’ve never heard of invented indie. 

“Syd’S mum played him the single,” dan Treacy said in 2010, spinning an interviewer a line about how the Pink Floyd’s lost leader got to hear the Television Personalities’ 1981 novelty single, “I Know Where Syd Barrett Lives”. “He liked the B-side, ‘Arthur The Gardener’. She said he liked that one because he loved gardening.”

Part fantasist, part cooler-than-thou nerd, Treacy – like many of the characters in his songs – had an ongoing problem with reality. Raised on the King’s Road, where the habitués of the launderette his mother ran included the likes of david Bowie, Charlie Watts, diana dors and Reginald Bosanquet, the music he pieced together with a rotating cast of London Oratory schoolmates, and fellow ’60s fetishists in his 1980s peak blurred authentic and fake, heartfelt and hokey. A glorious shambles that, along with Orange Juice, launched a thousand floppy fringes, the TVPs were playful, smart, and – not too far beneath the surface – vulnerable too.