"I'm not a big fan of sixties films"
from Ambrosia (Caff Corporation ‘zine) - Summer 1990

With the first four TV Personalities LPs set for re-issue on Fire Records this Autumn, "Ambrosia" had a cheery chinwag and a cuppa with teen guru Dan Treacy. Apart from discovering he’s very good at Countdown (especially the numbers game) and his new flat in Acton is much nicer than his old one in Clapham, we checked out a few myths and mysteries that have baffled experts for over a decade.

A: Did your Mum pay to put out "14th Floor"?
DT: Haha! No she didn’t! It only cost £14.50! No, hang on… £17.50. I was exaggerating a bit there. 3 hours in the studio, £ for the tape. For "Part Time Punks" we went up in the world, that cost £28.

A: Who played on those singles?
DT: "14th Floor" was me and Ed Ball and two sort of friends from school. Ed had a band called O’ Level which was him and the two Bennett brothers. When we did "14th Floor" Ed was a bit cheeky, I thought it was just going to be me and him, but he brought the other two in his band in sneakily, just so they could get the hang of the studio cos they were doing a single there the next week. But it worked out all right. "Part Time Punks" was just me and Ed.

A: Was the production on "And Don’t The Kids Just Love it" deliberately muffled?
DT: No, no! It was a 4 truck studio. It was only my third time in a studio and I had no idea how it worked, really. When we did "Part Time Punks" I didn’t know that if you did it wrong the first time you could do it again. At least on the LP there was two takes of everything. I just left it in the hands of the engineer, I didn’t think yoou were allowed to interfere. It was just naivety, it wasn’t deliberately muffled.

A: What are the funny noises as the start of some songs?
DT: Oh, there’s loads of really good noises, that was the reverb machine, the engineer kept leaving it on. There’s four explosions on that LP. So when we cut it the bloke went "Oh my Gawd, what’s all these noises?". He wanted to cut them all off but I said leave them on there.

A: Did you see the Smash Hits review of that LP? ("They should grow up and stop pretending to be ickle 12 year olds")
DT: Oh God yeah… Ian Cranna wrote it.

A: He later confessed he hadn’t played it.
DT: That’s right, cos we knew a photographer who wrote for Smash Hits and he went in and said "This review’s really unfair" and Ian Cranna admitted he hadn’t even listened to the record. It’s funny cos he always gave us good reviews after that.

A: Didn’t he slag "King and Country" as well?
DT: Yeah well, every indie single got a bad review in Smash Hits in those days.

A: Unless it was Swell Maps.
DT: Unless it was Swell Maps!

A: What were the other reviews like?
DT: They were brilliant. In NME, Andy Gill said something like "the most important independent record yet". A bit over the top… But apart from Smash Hits I can only remember one slag off a TVPs record, it’s really weird, it’s just been luck. The only other person who slagged us was X Moore in NME, he said most of our tracks were like early Jam and after that it’s a psychedelic dirge. Still, it was a funny review.

A: Was "Mummy Your Not Watching Me" done in lots of different sessions?
DT: Yeah. We did the first LP in three nights, "Mummy" was spread over 8 months. It started off as three songs and we wrote the rest in the studio – since the first LP we’ve never gone into a studio thinking let’s do an LP.

A: What about "Bigger Than The Beatles"?
DT: Well, that was going to be a new LP. And then… well, I went off my tree a bit, put it that way! The rest was stuff left off the first two LPs, mostly off of "Mummy". There was only two or three sessions over about 8 months and it ended up as a compilation. Calling it "They Could Have Been Bigger Than The Beatles" I thought it sounded like a retrospective so I put it out as one and made up a story that we’d split up. Just as a joke, really. We had a gig coming up, the first Alan McGee did in Camden. I wrote into the papers saying we’d split up, not thinking they’d give a damn. And they all did massive stories – last gig on Sunday, Channel 4 will be there. Complete bullshit. So a really big crowd turned up at McGee’s place. The money he made that night probably funded Creation. The reviews were like obituaries, saying "We always liked them all along". I thought, you sods! Then about a year later we made our first comeback gig and it was packed again. Then we split up at Bay 63 playing with Red Crayola… for about 2 years every gig was our last ever or our comeback gig.

A: Was "The Painted Word" recorded, scrapped and redone?
DT: We did four songs in one session as a proper band – "The Dream Inspires" (which ended up on the Whaam compilation "All For Art"), "Sense of Belonging", "You’ll Have To Scream Louder" and "Happy All The Time". Then I went in with (puts on a moany voice), Dave who played keyboards, Joe Foster, and his girlfriend Ingrid. Basically I’d said to Joe I’d go into the studio and do the songs on a guitar, then stick everything else afterwards. I didn’t want any drums. So of course Joe turns up with Dave and Ingrid and about 6 other people I’ve never met in my life. Basically they commandeered the session. But somehow it ended up sounding like I wanted it to sound.

A: I know a couple of people who think it’s one of the best records ever made.
DT: It probably is, but I can’t listen to the damn thing. It was like a total mental breakdown for me. I went into the studio to get it out of my system, but being in the studio made it ten times worse. I just lost control of it. I let too many people stick their noses in. They just thought of it like a band, "Let’s make an album", but the TVPs was always me as far I was concerned. It’s a really mad record. I like it, but for all the wrong reasons.

A: How many songs have you written since the "Painted Wold"?
DT: I’ve written millions but they’re just in my head, there’s no songbook in my flat or anything, no proof they exist. Which is probably why some people whose initials are JF claim to have written them all. The way I do it is I get a title and then write the song. Get a tune and play it live. Jowe and Jeff just stare at me until eventually they get the hang of it. I make the words up as I go along, it means we have to try and concentrate a bit harder. Usually, after we’ve done them 3 or 4 times I have enough to finish the song.

A: I remember a gig at the Polytechnic of Central London where you sang the same lines in 3 or 4 different songs.
DT: Oh yeah, I do that. There are characters that crop us as well: a girl called Jennifer Lee’s in about four songs!

A: And what about this cribbing all your titles from 60s films?
DT: I’m not a big fan of 60s films to be honest, there’s only about half a dozen really good ones… yeah, I used to do that but I wouldn’t dare to do it now.

A: "Privilege"! Your new LP is names after one.
DT: Well, apart from that!

And with that, we left Dan to contemplate the CD booklets he’s got to write for these re-issues. Suffice to say all the TVPs back catalogue is treasurable, with the exception of the lacklustre "Chocolate Art", a live German import containing nothing you can’t get elsewhere. I would print a checklist, but I’ll leave that to Record Collector.

All the material is (c) the author and / or the publisher.