Steve Sutherland

Although ostensibly a band album, Television’s 1977 debut owes much to the vision of frontman Tom Verlaine. Steve Sutherland tunes in as the 180g reissue drops

There’s a quote attributed to Brian Eno that says: ‘The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band’. Television’s Marquee Moon is a bit like that. Very few people bought it and although it was such a complex curate’s egg that I doubt many bands formed because of it, the album is famous for being one of the most written-about, talked-about and lauded albums of all time.

Pop quiz! Which artist musically links Happy Mondays, Nick Drake, Sham 69, The Stooges, Patti Smith, Brian Eno, Jonathan Richman, Nico and Squeeze? Answer: Lou Reed. Only joking! It’s his old Velvet Underground buddy John Cale, of course, otherwise why would we be mentioning it here?

I’m not really what you’d call the campaigning type but in the days when I edited HFN we launched a couple nonetheless. The most famous was ‘Jarvis Is Innocent’, occasioned by the Pulp frontgeezer getting himself arrested for stagecrashing Michael Jackson at the 1996 BRIT Awards. Within a few hours we had t-shirts on sale in the street outside gig venues all around the country, the funds raised, as I recall, contributing to his legal aid. And, of course, much fun and many games were to be had by all.

Because Bruxelles – or Brussels if you prefer – is not on anyone’s list of the world’s most famous rock ’n’ roll capitals, chances are you won’t have heard of Belgium’s ICP Recording Studios. If truth be told, my only memories associating the land of chocolate and waffles to anything vaguely musical were the unfortunate fact that Scots hooligan rocker Alex Harvey died of a heart attack while waiting for a ferry in Zeebrugge back in 1982.