100 favourite songs: #46: "Marquee Moon" - Television

To start from an unlikely starting point: playing ‘spot the influences’ with that band called Spoon is fun —the music they make lends itself to that particular game, and all sorts of possible predecessors get thrown up. I was just thinking, though, that in terms of the way their music makes me feel, the closest analogue is far and away Television — even though, by contrast to the punchiness of a typical Spoon number, “Marquee Moon”, say, clocks in at over 10 minutes in length. The similarity lies in the dynamic between a surface jitteriness and a rock-steady foundation beneath; anyway, however it works, it’s rock n roll!

“Marquee Moon” slips constantly from sense to nonsense and back again; endlessly quotable and endlessly gnomic (“listening to the rain, hearing something else…”), it teases with intimations of meaning while always deferring the moment at which understanding crystallises; and all the while Tom Verlaine sings/harangues in that fraught expressive voice of his and the guitars — and in many ways it’s all about the guitars — clatter and crash and stagger and chime in glorious noise, building structures into the distance from the most basic, immediately to hand materials…I suggested this before, and I’ll say it outright now: this is what rock music is all about.