As the leader of the New York band Television, Tom Verlaine, who has died aged 73, was a key figure in the coterie of musicians – Blondie, Talking Heads, the Ramones, the Patti Smith Group – who made downtown Manhattan a laboratory of new sounds and new styles in the mid-1970s. Although each of those groups pursued a very different musical path, together their impact would shape what became known as the punk movement, while Television’s debut LP, Marquee Moon, released in 1977, would secure a place among the most admired and enduringly influential albums of its era.
In Smith’s recent publication, A Book of Days, she chooses a photograph from 1974 in which she and Verlaine, then lovers and occasional collaborators, are holding hands in a tableau of sweetly defiant thrift-store chic: a flimsy child-bride’s gown for her, a patchwork leather jerkin for him. But among the artfully distressed apparel, defiant haircuts and painfully skinny silhouettes of their milieu, none of those serving apprenticeships in CBGBs, Max’s Kansas City and other New York clubs showed more concern for the music itself than Verlaine.
