RTSBBK#2: Television Personalities - Part-time Punks

The TVPs – the indie band’s indie band. It’s incredible how such an influential group, whose first release was in 1978, and whose back catalogue is so extensive, are nonetheless, relatively, so obscure to this day. Name-checked by virtually everyone who had anything to do with the evolution of indie music in the UK as a post-punk genre in its own right, and worshipped by the likes of Stephen Pastel and Bobby Gillespie because of the integrity of their DIY ethic and superb song-craft, the band remain curiously and stubbornly inconspicuous, even within indie circles. It’s puzzling, but entirely appropriate, that a band who are the very essence of what it should mean to be a successful indie band remain, relatively, unsuccessful in commercial terms. But, that’s easy for me to say, of course…This song, on the band’s second release, the Where’s Bill Grundy Now? EP from 1978, is an indie anthem, a feel-good dance floor-filler, and was at the same time a seriously scathing attack on middle-class souls who viewed the punk phenomenon as a kind of opt-in/opt-out fashion choice, where image and the aesthetic, and not the music itself or the politics of it, were all-consumingly important. It’s a cracker.