LIVE REVIEW : TELEVISION AT THE ROUNDHOUSE 19/11/2013

The Roundhouse seems to be the venue of choice for bands of the first punk era. After seeing The Damned play here last December, Blondie in July, here I was back in the same venue for Television. Contrary to the other bands, this gig was not a first as I'd seen the band in 2004 at Le Bataclan in Paris (serious contender for warmest music venue in the world). At the time the band still had Richard Lloyd as a member and even though I wasn't really familiar with all their songs, I had enjoyed the gig a lot. I was particularly impressed with the way Verlaine and Lloyd seemed to be able to discuss sound issues while still carrying out their famous guitar interplay.

Fast forward almost a decade and Richard Lloyd has disappeared (tired of the lack of progress on recording a new Television album) and has been replaced by a long time collaborator of Tom Verlaine in his solo work called Jimmy Rip. This gig at the Roundhouse was part of a small English tour centered around an appearance at the last ATP Festival in Camber Sands where the band was scheduled to play its landmark album Marquee Moon in its entirety. Despite numerous announcements that all the other gigs of the tour weren't "Marquee Moon" shows, we still got the whole album at The Roundhouse (albeit in random order with other songs interspersed). 

Jimmy Rip is a more than able replacement guitarist but he definitely sounds better when he's given free reigns to play in his own style rather than replicating Richard Lloyd's original parts. Best example of that was his solo on 1880 or So, completely different from what Richard Lloyd used to play but it still suited the song. Bass player Fred Smith was absolutely spotless playing just the right amount of notes while still adding some nice flourishes here and there. Good performance of Billy Ficca on drums too. Tom Verlaine seemed to be in a good mood (not a guarantee) and regularly thanked the audience and even said that he hoped the sound was good. The performance was much more focused than the Paris show with less tune-athlons between numbers. Two unreleased numbers were aired, a quite lengthy song called Persia that the band has been playing since their 2001 comeback and an unreleased song from 1974 called I'm Gonna Leave You. Persia was the best of the two but could use some editing. Verlaine's vocals were much better than what I was expecting (there's videos on you tube of a Brazilian gig in 2005-6 that are quite painful to watch). All in all a really good performance that did the band's best album justice.