For decades, the Angry Young Men shone a dingy light on British culture. Bottling working-class desperation, these playwrights and novelists originally addressed a 1950s society mired in social immobility and repressed angst. Their themes anchored the films of Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, and later Mike Leigh, and found global appeal in the music of the Who. For all its rip-it-up-and-start-again bluster, punk expressed a similar disillusionment: The Sex Pistols and their ilk just gave the angry young man a spikier hairdo and held his jacket together with safety pins.
Dan Treacy, the leader and sole constant member of Television Personalities, wrote about the same frustrated youths as his parents’ generation. He littered his songs with references to film and theater, including archetypical mid-century plays like John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger and Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey. He prodded borders between life, songwriting, and the culture at large, cheekily quoting both Jonathan Richman and “We Will Rock You” on an album that delves into his harrowing battle with drugs. Yet back in his teen years, class-conscious British realism was his model and lyrical inspiration. Take Television Personalities’ 1978 debut single “14th Floor,” whose narrator is trapped in a council estate tower because the lift is broken. Catchy hooks and schoolboy wit are in abundant supply—so are poverty, dysfunctional homes, and psychic pain.
Born in 1960, Treacy grew up blue collar in the increasingly posh area of Chelsea, London. His father did roadwork and his mother ran a laundrette. Through her shop, and around the hip thoroughfare of King’s Road, young Treacy met Bob Marley, Malcolm McLaren, and Jimmy Page, interning as an adolescent at Led Zeppelin’s Swan Song Records—his mom, who washed the clothes of the community’s ascendant bohemians, got him the gig. Kitchen-sink drama, swingin’ London: In his early music, Treacy flits between the two, dosing social realism with psychedelic distortion, jangly guitar, and rudimentary vocal accompaniments. Television Personalities were hardly the only punk-adjacent group taking notes from the ’60s. But they were also suspicious of the punk revolution, and with their paisley shirts and twee waistcoats, they were the rare band to wear this opinion on their sleeves.
The group’s second single, written when Treacy was still a teen, follows his speaker as he wanders around his childhood neighborhood, feeling different from everyone around him:
Walking Down King’s Road
I see so many faces,
They come from many places
They come down for the day
They walk around together
And try and look trendy
I think it’s a shame
That they all look the same