Tom Verlaine, virtuoso guitarist with Television, luminaries of the 1970s New York scene – obituary

Tom Verlaine, who has died following a short illness aged 73, was a guitarist, singer and songwriter best known as the leader of the band Television, who were leading lights of the punk and new wave scene that sprang up around the CBGBs club in New York in the mid-1970s; but with a unique sound that revolved around the thrilling interplay of the two electric guitars they were a million miles from punk’s three-chord thrash.

He was born Thomas Miller into a Jewish family in Denville, New Jersey, on December 13 1949, moving with his family to Wilmington, Delaware, aged six. He began studying piano, then switched to saxophone, inspired by Stan Getz, before taking up the guitar after hearing the Rolling Stones’ 19th Nervous Breakdown.

From the beginning, he did not want to sound like anyone else, and he worked hard to develop his own intricate, exploratory, euphoric style. He was also developing a love of writing and poetry which he shared with Richard Meyers, his best friend at Sanford School, a private school in Delaware.

As soon as they could, the pair moved to New York – Meyers in 1967 and Tom Miller, as he was still known, a year later. They published poetry together as “Theresa Stern” and worked in bookshops, while Verlaine played acoustic sets in the West Village; by this time he had chosen his nom de plume, after the French Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine, while Meyers had plumped for “Richard Hell”.

In 1972, after they had seen the New York Dolls, Hell convinced Verlaine that he should form a band. He quickly taught Hell to play the bass, recruited Billy Ficca on drums and named the trio the Neon Boys, soon switching to Television.

Wanting a second guitarist, Verlaine auditioned – and rejected – Dee Dee Ramone (later of the Ramones) and Chris Stein (who would soon form Blondie). When Richard Lloyd, who in his teens had taken lessons from Jimi Hendrix, came aboard, Television were up and running.

Their manager Terry Ork persuaded Hilly Kristal, the owner of CBGBs in the Bowery district, to give them a regular spot, and in March 1975 they began a series of double bills with Patti Smith, with whom Verlaine had become romantically involved; he later played on her debut album Horses, and they would continue to collaborate over the years.

The New York scene was awash in drink and drugs, but Verlaine stood above it. “He was very priggish,” Ork recalled. “He didn’t smoke marijuana, inject heroin, and he didn’t even drink that much. I think he was scared of any derangement of the senses. Tom Verlaine was a very bright boy, very learned, but there was some tightness within him. He was just so tightly wound.”

Richard Hell presented a stark contrast. He remained defiantly amateur in his approach to his instrument – unlike Ficca and Lloyd – while his frenzied onstage presence began to annoy Verlaine, who would tell him to stop jumping around and would refuse to play his tour-de-force song Blank Generation. Hell soon departed to form Richard Hell and the Voidoids, taking Blank Generation with him, and Fred Smith was lured from the nascent Blondie to replace him.

Television released Marquee Moon, their debut album and magnum opus, in February 1977, and toured Britain that year supported by Blondie – whose considerably greater pop appeal would soon see them crack the market on both sides of the Atlantic.

But if Blondie ticked all the right commercial boxes, Television cleaned up with the critics, who adored Marquee Moon; Nick Kent of the New Musical Express described it as “an inspired work of pure genius, a record finely in tune and sublimely arranged with a whole new slant on dynamics”.

The album eschewed the power chords and buzzsaw riffs of many of their contemporaries in favour of a clean sound, instrumental complexity and hooks to die for. Lyrically, Verlaine was influenced by the French poetry he loved so much, exploring themes of transcendence and consistently referencing Lower Manhattan.

The album sold poorly in the US but reached the Top 30 in the UK, as did the two singles from it, the title track and Prove It. The follow-up, Adventure, released in 1978, did not excite the critics quite as much: the general feeling was that while Marquee Moon had been a masterpiece, Adventure was merely very good indeed.

But Television fell apart soon after: there were four strong characters in the band, and matters were complicated by Richard Lloyd’s heavy drug use. In 1979 Verlaine released the first of 10 well-received solo albums and moved for a while to Britain, where he was a bigger name than in his own country.

In 1992 he reformed Television, bringing Lloyd, Ficca and Smith back on board and releasing a self-titled third album. They played gigs from time to time, and in 2004 toured in a double bill with Patti Smith.

Tom Verlaine married the German artist Jutta Koether in 2000; they separated 12 years later but remained on amicable terms.

Tom Verlaine, born December 13 1949, died January 28 2023