Television nearly completed a comeback album six years ago, it has been revealed.
The band recorded 16 songs at New York’s Stratosphere Sound recording studios between Christmas and New Year in 2007 with engineer Geoff Sanoff. The tracks, which have been sitting in the vaults ever since, still need mixing and vocals, Rolling Stone reports.
Recalling the recording sessions, Sanoff told the magazine: “As soon as I found out who it was, I was like, ‘Cancel everything, we’re doing this’. It sounded amazing. It was so clean and so crisp. As soon as you set them up playing, they just sounded like Television.”
Meanwhile, the band’s guitarist Jimmy Rip said he felt unable to compare the unheard 2007 album to any of Television’s previous LPs because Tom Verlaine had been keen to try something different. “Tom’s pretty adamant about making a real effort to make something new each time,” he explained. “It doesn’t make for super-fast work, but it’s definitely an admirable goal.”
Discussing whether the unheard album could get a release in the future, drummer Billy Ficca added: “It might happen before we all die, I don’t know. It’s sort of laying there.” The band’s most recent album, simply titled Television, came out in 1992 and was only their third studio effort following 1977’s Marquee Moon and 1978’s Adventure.
Meanwhile, Television have recently announced a brief UK headline tour to take place this November before they perform Marquee Moon in full as part of ATP’s ‘End Of An Era Part 1’ festival, which takes place at Pontins in Camber Sands, East Sussex from November 22-24.
Television will play:
Gateshead The Sage (November 15)
Manchester Academy (17)
London Roundhouse (19)
ATP End Of An Era Part 1, Camber Sands (22-24)