Beautiful Despair
by Calum Marsh
A lost album from the UK post-punk greats, recorded circa 1989, sheds light on the creative process of brilliant, troubled frontman Dan Treacy.
Featured Tracks:
"I Get Frightened Too" — Television PersonalitiesVia SoundCloud
In his prime, Television Personalities frontman Dan Treacy was perhaps the most unconventional figure in post-punk. Indeed, the usual procedures of writing, recording and performing music seemed to bore him so much he could hardly be bothered to try. In concert, Treacy refused to write setlists or announce titles, leaving his bandmates to identify each new mystery song as he launched into it; Television Personalities rehearsals, meanwhile, were virtually nonexistent. "I remember us rehearsing once in late 1983," Treacy's friend and collaborator Jowe Head recalled to The Brag in 2016. "We did another one five years later, and that was about it." So averse was Treacy to the obligatory drudgery of being a musician that it sometimes seemed as if he'd prefer to do anything else. "In fact music is probably not the right medium for me to express myself," he confessed in an interview in the mid-'80s. "I like films and books more."
But music was what he chose. Over more than 30 years and nearly a dozen celebrated albums, Treacy expressed his suffering with his music until the suffering overwhelmed him. (He expressed his joy and humor when he felt them, too, but the pain won out.) In the '90s, he vanished for more than half a decade, whereabouts unknown: it would later transpire he'd been serving time on a prison barge, convicted for shoplifting. Addiction tormented him. In 2011, after a short-lived mid-aughts comeback, he disappeared again—this time owing to a blood clot in the brain that required extensive surgery. Since then, reportedly, he has been recovering under professional care in a nursing home. With not much prospect now of new music, the arrival of a lost Television Personalities album would seem to be cause for celebration—we're getting more Dan Treacy just when we need him.
Beautiful Despair was recorded at Jowe Head's flat at Glading Terrace in Stoke Newington over a number of sessions in 1989 and 1990, after the release of the acclaimed Privilege and before the recording of the mid-career classic Closer to God—the latter of which contains so many of these songs in more complete form that it seems more accurate to describe Beautiful Despair as a first draft of Closer to God than a proper standalone LP. It is a true "lost album" in one literal sense: Head admitted recently that he had "mislaid the tapes" from these sessions and simply happened upon them while looking for something else. But it is not as though 48 minutes' worth of never-before-heard vintage Television Personalities material has been unearthed after all these years. Beautiful Despair is a rough sketch, and its worth extends only as far as one's interest in such a document.
If it's true of the best Television Personalities songs that, as NME said in a review of the band's 1981 debut, And Don't the Kids Just Love It, "their particular magic lies in their half-formed nature, their humble hesitancy," then Beautiful Despair has that virtue. Indeed, the familiar tracks here sound cruder and less refined than their finalized Closer to God counterparts, ramshackle in a manner that can be quite appealing. "Hard Luck Story Number 39" and "Razor Blades and Lemonade," two of Treacy's best songs from this period, have the pleasant dreaminess of bedroom pop—a stark change from their full-band rock arrangements and robust production on the better-known record. A simplified "I Hope You Have a Nice Day" seems in particular an improvement over the original: shorn of its brass and wall-of-noise guitar, it's revealed as a charming, breezy pop gem, precisely the sort of thing Treacy did well.
Beautiful Despair does boast a handful of bona-fide discoveries. The finest, a downtempo number called "If You Fly Too High," was recorded after a show at the Ecstasy Madhouse club in Berlin in 1989; the Television Personalities were playing with the Lemonheads, and the song was conceived as a parody of Evan Dando. (It includes such memorably Treacian witticisms as "Have I told you I know Alan McGee?") Another, "Love is a Four Letter Word," went on to become "Love is Better Than War," a b-side to a single from 1992. The song is a test case for the merit of much of this album. Probably it's good that "Love is a Four Letter Word" exists in this incarnation, as a matter of historical interest and a gift for dedicated fans. But is it significant? Frankly, no. It shares with most of Beautiful Despair the unfortunate condition of superfluousness.
"It just amuses me," Treacy told Scottish fanzine Slow Dazzle in 1984, asked how he felt when epithets like "art pop" and "psychedelic" were used to describe his style. "I can hardly be accused of jumping on the bandwagon though, can I? A couple of years ago people were saying, 'What the hell are they doing?'" It was an old story for him even then. His band always seemed out of harmony with fashion, either too early or too late for what was popular at the moment. In 1976, aged 17, he went to his first punk-rock show, but left because he found it too violent. So he made up his own genre, and ridiculed the punk kids with defiantly uncool cheer. The world would catch up with Treacy eventually: his witty, lo-fi pop influenced everyone from Pavement to the Jesus and Mary Chain. Only by then he'd moved on to something else that wasn't trendy—ever the prescient artist, never a man with much luck.