Peripheral Television

Television live at the Bataclan, about twenty years ago, a lifetime, yesterday. By then a nostalgia act for old New Wavers, the band emerged to muted applause from the non-capacity crowd, there out of curiosity, vague familiarity. My friends, the usual black-dressed and hard-to-impress Parisians, slouched at the back with cigarettes and flat beer. Hungry for the beat - free my soul - I went to the front, pushed a place at the edge of the stage. Tom Verlaine was in signature menstrual mode, scowling and fiddling irritably with his guitar. Nothing was right. The band wasn't taking any notice - business as usual. Static and feedback from Verlaine - could have been his guitar or just his foul mood. Then the rhythm section kicked in, the latently great Billy Ficca and Fred Smith, a guy whose playing is unnoticeable as his name. And Richard Lloyd chimed in, and finally Tom Miller, the Sunny Hills School escapee, the pretentious one of the group, the missed-the-bus beat poet whose existential heartburn made everything work and anything possible.

I doubt they were capable of a bad, or even ordinary gig. They delivered. At the end, I crawled onstage to get Richard Lloyd's setlist. He untaped it from the floor for me, the sweetheart.

Here's some peripheral transmissions from one of the great zen art dude bands. The Revolution was a France-only freebie - you get what you pay for. Neon Hell is pre-TV. Arrow is the legendary bootleg, Live At The Academy a limited release.