It is frequently the lot of bass players to find themselves overlooked while lead guitarists and vocalists lap up all the acclaim, but there has never been a great band without a great bass player. The New York band Television was a case in point. Hailed by the Philadelphia Inquirer as “the best guitar band to come out of New York’s late-70s punk/new-wave scene”, the group became renowned for the otherworldly guitar interplay between Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd, heard to most stupefying effect on their debut album, Marquee Moon (1977).
However, Television could not have undertaken their intrepid musical adventures without Fred Smith, the band’s bass player, who has died of cancer aged 77. Their music frequently defied description, as Verlaine floated through experiments with tempo, tonality and atonality, hard-rock noise and almost-free-jazz expressionism, always testing the frontiers of what could be done with an electric guitar. Smith (in cahoots with the drummer Billy Ficca) lent unflagging support to this voyage into the unknown.
