Alternative TV
The Image Has Cracked

London. March '77. 

Mark Perry, founder of the English fanzine Sniffin' Glue, put together Alternative TV, consisting of Alex Fergusson on guitar, Tyrone Thomas on bass, and Chris Bennett on drums. 

A punk band? Well, only in some respects.

Let's say that Perry, a decidedly restless-spirited guy, had made up his mind to carry out a revolution within the revolution.

Punk was already well on its way to becoming a sideshow tailored for faux-rebellious mohawked kids, so much so that the young man thought "To hell with the Pistols! To hell with Punk!" and in May of '78 came out with The Image Has Cracked, the debut album of ATV which included studio tracks, live tracks, and supposed experimental improvisations, preceded by the singles Love Lies Limp, How Much Longer, and Life After Life dated '77.

Not that there aren't echoes of typical and cheeky old-school punk on this album, mind you! There's certainly no shortage of the typically Rotten-like mocking and carefree voice, and to name a couple, the super engaging How Much Longer and You Bastard are part of the "frantic, nagging three-chord rides + deliberately provocative/sarcastic lyrics" stream and seem to be copied straight from the Damned and Buzzcocks, but overall TIHC is almost a precursor to what would later become Post Punk and Avant Jazz.

Leaving aside the exasperating opening track Alternatives, a live ten-minute piss-take where Perry rambles along with the audience supported by bass and drums, the group's peaks are many and notable, such as the menacing march of the riff of Still Live, Life After Life with the help of Jools Holland on keyboards, and the intense Splitting In Two, which concludes with 3 minutes of wild electric riff and powerful drums.

Among the more experimental episodes is Nasty Little Lonely, which, introduced by a very jazzy piano, turns into a heavy instrumental dominated by gloomy and clattering guitars.

Frequent incursions into Reggae are quite common, see Love Lies Limp and the aforementioned Life After Life.

The icing on the cake is the splendid cover of Zappa's Why Don't You Do Me Right.

From Vibing Up The Senil Man onwards, the band would delve deeper into the more Avant side of their music by introducing saxophones, developing a more Impro and abstract sound, and getting entangled in Psych paths, and would definitively set aside traditional Punk, but I think this album also demonstrates much of the band's capabilities.

In short, these little wannabe revolutionaries carried out their mini-rebellion quietly and for someone like Perry, who claims to have wrecked Sniffin' Glue because "it was becoming too important," perhaps it's just as well.

"For me, the only chains of Punk are the ones in the closed minds of the listeners. In short, Punk had become the new Rock music when it should have represented its end."

Cit. Perry