{"id":320,"date":"2010-07-16T14:02:06","date_gmt":"2010-07-16T14:02:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/pandora\/?p=320"},"modified":"2010-07-16T14:02:06","modified_gmt":"2010-07-16T14:02:06","slug":"lounge-debrief-2-television-personalities-in-the-cowshed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/pandora\/2010\/07\/16\/lounge-debrief-2-television-personalities-in-the-cowshed\/","title":{"rendered":"Lounge debrief #2: Television Personalities in the Cowshed"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>One of the more intriguing acts to appear at this year\u2019s Lounge on the Farm was the Television Personalities. Led by sole surviving original member Dan Treacy, the nearest the Television Personalities got to fame was the 1978 song \u2018Part Time Punks\u2019, which gently poked fun at the suburban and provincial punks who walked down the King\u2019s Road where they \u2018try and look trendy\u2019 but \u2018all look the same\u2019. The part time punks are funny because they get being cool wrong.<\/p>\n

They go to Rough Trade because \u2018They wanna buy the O-Level single\/ or \u201cRead About Seymour\u201d\u2019, but end up buying a Lurkers record instead because it\u2019s pressed in red vinyl. To translate, the O-Level were an obscure independent label punk band (which, amusingly enough, also featured Dan Treacy) and \u2018Read About Seymour\u2019 was a single by the then super-cool art-punk heroes Swell Maps \u2013 both of which were far cooler and more exclusive than the gumbie-punk band The Lurkers, who were kind of what The Ramones might have been like had they come from, er, Uxbridge.<\/p>\n

32 years later, the Television Personalities are playing the Cowshed, the biggest stage at Lounge on the Farm, in an unpopular afternoon slot. The name of the stage is quite literal \u2013 it\u2019s called \u2018the Cowshed\u2019 because it\u2019s in a cavernous cowshed, which could comfortably fit two or three thousand people in to the see the band. Sadly, no more than about thirty have turned up to see Dan Treacy\u2019s crew, including me, my wife, and my two sons. There\u2019s a thin crust of us lining up along the barrier at the front of the stage, most of us with fond memories of \u2018Part Time Punks\u2019, and a few random punters who hang back from the stage, watching the band out of idle curiosity.<\/p>\n

My wife Jacqui leaves after a few numbers, later describing it as \u2018a bit of a car crash\u2019, and takes our younger son, Tom, with her to find more suitable entertainment elsewhere. I stay to watch with our older one, Joe, who\u2019s 13. I suspect he\u2019s held more by loyalty to me than by the music.<\/p>\n

At least one of the two guitars has at least one string out of tune, but that\u2019s the least of the problems. Treacy looks simply bewildered on stage, confused but amused at being there. Wearing a faded shirt and a beanie hat, he gives the impression that he\u2019s been living rough for the last decade or so, although the current bands he references in his between-songs banter suggests he\u2019s at least been in a homeless shelter with internet access. It\u2019s not so much that his voice is out of tune, it\u2019s more that it\u2019s not aware that there was a tune there in the first place. In their one almost-famous song, \u2018Part Time Punks\u2019, he forgets the words in the third verse and repeats some lines from an earlier one.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s something curiously moving about hearing him sing a song based on an idea of cool that dates from a period of maybe two weeks in 1978. And there\u2019s something curiously entertaining about Treacy\u2019s bewilderment. He just seems to say whatever comes into his head. He notices one of the mechanised moving spotlights on the stage. \u2018What\u2019s that?\u2019 he asks, grinning. \u2018It looks like a monkey!\u2019 Later, he goes up to it and holds the microphone up to it, as if expecting it to sing.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>On closer inspection, the other three musicians in the band are extremely good, constantly watching him and timing what they do to accommodate his spontaneity and eccentricity. Treacy\u2019s definitely singing to<\/em> the desultory crowd semi-gathered in front of him. It\u2019s unnerving when he catches your eye, because you can see he\u2019s really looking at you with his hooded eyes, taking you in, and it\u2019s hard to tell whether it\u2019s real contempt that he\u2019s radiating with his stare. Like Billy Childish, he seems entirely unselfconscious about the experience of being on stage under the gaze of a bunch of strangers.<\/p>\n

Jacqui\u2019s right about it being a car crash, but I\u2019d modify her assessment and say it\u2019s an entertaining <\/em>car crash. At one point, Treacy breaks his plectrum, and throws it out for a lucky punter to keep as a memento. Fittingly, it falls short of the, for want of a better word, crowd, and lands behind the barrier. I wonder whether it\u2019s just my prior knowledge of the band that\u2019s making this entertaining, but at the end, Joe asks me to get the one bouncer assigned to the gig to retrieve the plectrum for his collection of special things, and when we get back from the festival he gets me to load \u2018Part Time Punks\u2019 onto his iPod.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the more intriguing acts to appear at this year\u2019s Lounge on the Farm was the Television Personalities. Led by sole surviving original member Dan Treacy, the nearest the Television Personalities got to fame was the 1978 song \u2018Part Time Punks\u2019, which gently poked fun at the suburban and provincial punks who walked down … Continue reading “Lounge debrief #2: Television Personalities in the Cowshed”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":263,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1252],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/pandora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/pandora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/pandora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/pandora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/263"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/pandora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=320"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/pandora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":325,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/pandora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320\/revisions\/325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/pandora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/pandora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/pandora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}