VIA PRESS RELEASE | Fire Records announce Television Personalities’ new release Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out – Radio Sessions 1980-1993 out 17th January 2025. This new collection of music brings together classic radio sessions from the masters of DIY post-punk and indie pop. Featuring two ’80s BBC sessions that aired on John Peel and Andy Kershaw along with a super rare 1992 WMBR set, this double LP features covers of Buzzcocks, The Raincoats, and Daniel Johnston with previously unreleased songs and a bonus download WFMU session from 1993.
The Television Personalities’ splendid DIY skills and loveable ramshackle persona led them on many a subversive trip both on record and playing live. But it was the radio that first introduced them to the world in a whirlwind of repeated spins. John Peel let outsiders everywhere tune in to their altered world. And, at the height of punk they parodied the new revolution, their single “Part Time Punks” becoming a Peel staple, and the clamour to hear more eventually resulting in a session in 1980. The 45s kept on coming but it would be six years before they’d be asked back for a session, during which time that slew of fantastical songs had elevated them to cult status.
In 1986, Andy Kershaw’s Radio 1 Show summoned them up north with the band in unplanned hiatus. In Stockport, as a recently reconstituted trio, they barely had time to unpack their instruments before the tape spooled out and the session ended—the traffic was terrible. Almost inevitably, they chose songs that weren’t even released, just because they could.
Through the ’80s, Daniel Treacy had matured into a gifted storyteller turned pop culture narrator who placed the modern world in his own hazy shade of focus. His songs were loveable, immediately identifiable, and pin prick sharp; they were tidily observational, and often magically acute. This was a gifted raconteur, an inspiration and an essential alternative to the hiss and flutter of “normal” radio, a medium that by the late ’80s had just about abandoned them.
Hailing from the other side of punk, Television Personalities were uncategorisable; they were mod before you were a mod; they traversed the dark passage to Syd Barrett’s psychosis, and along the way they were the spark for Alan McGee’s Creation Records, and a perfectly obtuse soundtrack to indie life. Admired by Kurt Cobain, Television Personalities were commentators on everything from the mundane to the surreal.
‘Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out’ captures this pilgrim’s progress to pop nirvana, a psychedelic wonderland shaded by dark and brooding memories, all played out through a crackling transistor radio secreted under the pillow so that these sketches of society remain perfectly personal, a direct line into Dan’s psyche.
