Television Personalities
They Could Have Been Bigger Than The Beatles (Velvel)
by Nik Rainey
If the ever-present jones for reinventing the past until we get it right isn’t enough for the inspiration-starved masses of all tomorrow’s yesterdays, the main by-product of the CD revolution, the digital repackaging of their analog antecedents, continues with no signs of abating. Due to the vagaries of the music business and of popular taste, the same source materials that once fetched downwards of twenty-five cents in the yard sales of the cultural elite have been plucked from their attic-scented cardboard homes, given complete makeovers (“That dark complexion of yours will never do. One application of this Sony shrinkage cream will give you a nice, smooth silvery cast, and the special remastering agents will bring you down from a bulky twelve inches to a nice, svelte five.”), and relocated to upscale neighborhoods lined with compact glass houses with higher rents. Sometimes these musical Jeffersons adapt well to their new digs, other times it’s obvious they should never have left the vinyl ghettoes. Let’s stroll around and take a gander at some of the new residents.
The re-release of the Television Personalities‘ They Could Have Been Bigger Than the Beatles, part of Velvel Records’ new deal with London-based Fire Records, is a prime example of an insidious trend sure to build like a multi-leveled snowball over the next few years. See if you can suss out what I mean – the band formed in 1978, at the height of the English punk era, but instead of using their inspired-amateur tools for slashing and trashing “boring hippie shit,” the philosophy that most of their kind paid pierced-lip service to at the time, they erected a charmingly chintzy psychedelic pshrine to it, filling their songs with ’60s references both lyrical (“The Boy in the Paisley Shirt” packs more swinging-London allusions into its first verse than Mike Myers did in Austin Powers‘ entire running time) and musical (two covers of Brit acid obscurities the Creation and a direct quote from “Eight Miles High” at the end of “King and Country”). So it’s a reissue of a nostalgia act, which makes it not merely retro but double-retro, alongside such examples as Weezer’s “Buddy Holly” video and the impending big-screen re-release of Grease, though TVP’s artless cockney vocals and shambling pop tunes are far more charming than either of those. All that’s missing is their most (in)famous song, “I Know Where Syd Barrett Lives,” which gave out the madcap’s street address and performed the valuable public service of pissing off Roger Waters.
