The four Peel session songs aren’t necessarily better than the album versions, which have the added weight of history behind them. And the same might be said of the four Andy Kershaw session songs from 1986, three of which would turn up years later on the band’s mid-period masterpiece Privilege. That record is the one Television Personalities album where the production got away from Treacy, with the drums exhibiting a shade of the 1980s mania for excessive tampering. It is a relief, if not a revelation, to hear “Paradise Is for the Blessed,” “My Conscience Tells Me No” (sic), and “Salvador Dali’s Garden Party” recorded with slightly less ceremony than on the album.
If the two BBC sessions sound like the work of a band that is, on some level, at least vaguely interested in playing the music industry game, the two U.S. recordings are incredibly loose and unfocused, the work of a group constantly on the verge of self destruction. They include songs from the band’s 1992 album Closer to God—the WMBR version of “Goodnight Mr. Spaceman” is absolutely barnstorming—along with 1980s classics, material that would never see the light of day elsewhere, a handful of numbers from the (then) lost album Beautiful Despair, and a selection of covers. Some of these make an odd kind of cosmic sense—Buzzcocks’ “Why Can’t I Touch It,” The Raincoats’ “No-One’s Little Girl,” Daniel Johnston’s “Honey I Sure Miss You”; all interesting, if none essential—while the band’s lumbering take on Crystal Waters’ “Gypsy Woman” seems such an unlikely choice it could only have been made with total sincerity.
Alongside this are gothically elongated versions of Privilege’s “All My Dreams Are Dead” and “My Very First Nervous Breakdown,” a song initially recorded for Beautiful Despair. In the WMBR session, “All My Dreams Are Dead” is stretched out with the agony of perspective, the everyday anguish of Treacy’s remarkable voice pushed to extremes of naive emotion. And the WMFU version of “My Very First Nervous Breakdown” is stunningly intense, nine minutes of edgy, unhinged, and manic psychedelic freakout, a bit like the late-’60s Pink Floyd live recordings when Syd Barrett was close to the exit. Both songs feel essential.
If all that sounds a little random—well, it is. Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out is by no means a logical introduction to Television Personalities, and some of the album—notably “Wandering Minds,” which was improvised live in the studio and sounds like it—is utterly inessential. But the session format works in the band’s favor, the rather basic sound of the recordings giving continuity to 13 years of work, in a way that more formal studio recordings might not. (Although the WFMU session sounds significantly more lo-fi than the other three.)
