Over the course of his long and sometimes star-crossed career, Dan Treacy of Television Personalities has recorded enough captivating songs to keep you listening for weeks. The proponent of punk pathetique is all over the place—Television Personalities’ 11 studio LPs have included the delirious pop gem in the rough “She’s My Yoko,” the tres catchy “I Was a Mod Before You Was a Mod,” and an irony-free cover of “Seasons in the Sun.” And those are just a few of my personal favorites; yours might include the electrified pulsations of “You, Me & Lou Reed,” the classic and hilarious “Part-Time Punks,” the guitar histrionics that constitute “My New Tattoo,” or the unvarnished confessional “Now That I’m a Junkie.”
Treacy tends towards the art brut end of the rock spectrum, and his albums tend to have an appealingly shambolic, lo-fi feel to them. He comes across as lovably naïve, and you’d never know by listening to his wistful tunes that he spent approximately six years (1998-2004) on the HMS Prison ship Weare (which he called the Good Ship Lollipop) for the crime of shoplifting to feed a voracious drug habit. (I find the sentence astoundingly long for such a seemingly trivial charge—just what was he trying to sneak out under his overcoat, Elizabeth II?) He’s a sort of English Jonathan Richman except his is a broader palate, and he doesn’t share Richman’s self-consciousness, which practically screams, “I’m Peter Pan, now listen to this song I wrote for an ant!” Which isn’t to say Treacy doesn’t have his little idiosyncrasies, such as referring to himself in the third person, as in, “Well that’s me/That’s Daniel,” from “She’s My Yoko.”
Television Personalities recorded their first LP in 1981, and since them the band has included a revolving cast of characters with Treacy as the only permanent member. They’ve never achieved more than a cult status—they got the boot as the opening act for Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour when Treacy used the stage to give the audience Syd Barrett’s home address—and they’re likely to retain that cult status, as Treacy does as he likes and has never compromised in an attempt to be the Toppermost of the Poppermost.
When last heard from in 2011 Treacy was in ill-health, and I’ve been unable to get an update on his well-being. I only know he hasn’t released an LP since 2010’s A Memory Is Better Than Nothing, which I don’t find very encouraging. In any event, I more or less drew an album name from a top hat, and came up with 2007’s Are We Nearly There Yet, so that’s the LP I’ll be reviewing. And it was a lucky choice, what with its mad mix of genres and its wonderful covers of artists such as Bruce Springsteen and (yes) The Killers. Recorded in 2005, it included unreleased recordings from the period following Treacy’s release from prison.
The title track has Treacy sing-songing to a child-like melody, and whining all the while during a family outing just like I used to on long trips. The synthesizers are cool while Treacy says he’s tired, has to go to the bathroom, would rather have gone to the circus, and wants an ice cream. It’s a sweetly infantile offering, and leads straight into the strangeness of “The Peter Gabriel Song,” which boasts a lovely melody with keening synths and Treacy singing about how it’s all okay, because if things all go wrong Peter Gabriel will make things right again by writing a song. And it’s hard to know for certain but I’m reasonably sure he’s being sincere, as (I swear) the guy seems too innocent for irony.
He follows with the synth-dominated “The Eminem Song,” part of which has him pretending to be Eminem and part of which has him playing himself. “Am I being absurd?” he repeats, then says he wants his gravestone to read that he died in a hotel room with a rock and a hooker sucking his cock before singing, “That’s the way to go!/That’s the way to go!” And then cryptically shuts this very strange tune down by saying “We can’t all be Franz Ferdinand.” Next up is the great “I Get Scared When I Don’t Know Where You Are,” which features a great guitar and some swinging drums and pounds propulsively along, the bass giving really going at it, before the guitar descends into feedback and explodes, making a wonderful cacophony. I’ve never heard a solo quite like it, and it kills me when Treacy kills it by casually saying, “Full stop.”
“I See Dead People” is a mid-tempo instrumental that really doesn’t do too much, although I like the guitar tone. It sounds like the rough backing track to a cool song, and I have no idea why Treacy released it in its present state. Whereas LP closer “It’s All About the Girl” is also an instrumental, featuring a big blustering guitar blasting mucho feedback, but it feels finished in a lo-fi way, like something the Velvet Underground might have served up in their early days. Meanwhile, things just get weirder with “Coltrane’s Ghost,” which is a wonderfully jazzy evocation of the immortal saxophonist’s Giant Steps era. The piano dominates—whoever’s playing it knows his way around Coltrane’s 1060-era sound—but the bass is also great, and the saxophone wail made me go back and listen to 1960’s Giant Steps.
One of my album faves is Treacy’s cover of The Killers’ “Mr. Brightside.” Treacy throws himself into it heart and soul, shouting out the lyrics in a way that is simultaneously hilarious and oddly moving. “And it’s KILLING ME!” he sings, and I have to hand it to him; he somehow manages to turn a song I’ve always hated into a song I love. Such urgency! Such naked desperation! It’s the antithesis of The Killers’ cool, and he does it all with his wonderfully accented voice, which I adore. Television Personalities also cover Bruce Springsteen’s “If I Should Fall Behind,” and this time it’s just Treacy and an acoustic guitar. This one is lovely and straight from the heart, and you’d have to be a rock not to be moved by the way he sings “Should we lose each other in the shadow of the evening trees/I’ll wait for you/And should I fall behind/Wait for me.”
“All the Midnight Cowboys” features a female joining Treacy on vocals, but for the life of me I can’t discover who she is, except a music reviewer’s nightmare. To make things worse the song opens with a horn riff I can’t identify from some English synthpop hit. And just to rub salt in my wounds, they take turns singing, “Boys are boys and girls are joy,” which I would ALSO swear I’ve also heard before. In short I’m bound to ignorance and have nothing meaningful to say about this song, except that it’s lovely and that Treacy and his female accomplice make wonderful music together.
The same woman—or maybe not—sings the very catchy and deserving of mass appeal “If I Could Write Poetry.” A synth-driven love song, it has an infectious melody and is terribly self-deprecating, in so far as Treacy does write a poetry of sorts, and he writes it well. “All the King’s Horses” is a lovely and slow motion recounting of Treacy’s drug travails, in which he once again refers to himself in the third person, as in, “All the king’s horses/And all the king’s men/Couldn’t put Daniel back together again.” As for “You Are Loved,” it’s a slow and sparse (just Treacy and a piano) track in which Treacy recounts an old relationship, with the support of that damned unknown female vocalist. It’s a love song, obviously, but in it Treacy also provides a moving account of his efforts to stay the demons that nearly killed him. “Everybody knows what I’ve been through,” he sings, then adds, “But I’m finding it hard to get back on my feet/But God knows I’m trying/God knows I’m trying/God knows I’m trying.”
Are We Nearly There Yet? is a very good but not great album—Treacy’s ADD attention span seems to prevent him from recording albums that are focused enough to be masterpieces—but it’s always an adventure, following Treacy as he follows his errant muse from the ghost of John Coltrane to the Velvet Underground to the Mods to Peter Gabriel to God knows where he’ll go next. He’s a gadfly, a character, and a bit of a jester, but he’s a jester who’s been to Hell and hasn’t lost his sense of humor. And that’s what makes me love him. He’s not bitter. No, he carries himself with grace, and records his strange songs, and I hope wherever he is he’s okay, because the world needs, and will always need, the likes of Dan Treacy.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B+
