Richard Lloyd, 1951-2026: celebrated guitarist at the heart of the punk explosion

Often you couldn’t tell who was the flash and who was the thunder. Indeed, the dual and duelling guitar lines of Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd sparked off each other so vibrantly that, to paraphrase their seminal stand-off ‘Marquee Moon’, the lightning seemed to strike itself.

As one half of the guitar duo that crystallised the angular tensions of Television, Richard Lloyd – who died on November 7, aged 75 – was not only a key formative element in one of rock’s greatest guitar bands but in the punk explosion itself. Though their debut album ‘Marquee Moon’ wouldn’t emerge until 1977 – a year after their contemporaries, the Ramones, had become accepted as the spearhead of the punk movement in the US and the UK – Lloyd, Verlaine and Television were the true pioneers of New York’s CBGBs scene, effectively hijacking the nascent club from its intended country and blues direction and uniting the city’s compulsive new sounds with their regular shows alongside the Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads and Patti Smith. Likewise, while Blondie and Talking Heads rode the subsequent new wave scene to huge success, it was the critically feted but decidedly cult ‘Marquee Moon’ that was its bedrock.

There was something fated about Lloyd’s musical importance, and he knew it early. Originally born, like that other New York art icon Andy Warhol, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he found himself with connections to elevated rock’n’roll circles by his mid-teens at New York’s Stuyvesant High School, when a friend and fellow guitarist who was being taught by Jimi Hendrix would pass on what he’d learned to Lloyd. By 11th grade, he’d decided he’d be nothing except a celebrated guitarist; he even started bringing in a guitar instead of school books. He quit two high schools before graduation, believing a diploma useless to him in his journey to rock godhood.

Such dedication brought him into the orbit of Hendrix (who once, according to Lloyd, punched him three times because he hated compliments), Led Zeppelin, Buddy Guy and John Lee Hooker, with whom he made his first live appearance at a Boston jazz workshop in the early 1970s. During a stint in LA in 1971, he hit music industry parties with his Los Angeles Times music critic roommate Richard Cromelin and later, hearing a new East Coast rock scene was cohering around the New York Dolls, Suicide and the Modern Lovers in 1973, returned intent on galvanising it himself. In an off-Broadway club that year he saw Tom Verlaine play at an open-mic night, and immediately recognised his guitar foil. By the end of the summer they were Television, and the following year they found a regular Sunday night home at CBGBs, ramming the room with Patti Smith double bills and punk showcases and at the epicentre of the thriving new scene which soon outpaced them.

Describing himself as “a vagabond, but a pretty one,” Lloyd was something of an on-edge wild child of the scene. Depressive and hedonistic, he spent several spells in psychiatric institutions and received electric shock therapy, but also embraced the free-living possibilities of New York in the ‘70s. “I called myself a try-sexual at the time, because I would try anything a couple of times to see if I liked it,” he wrote in his 2018 memoir Everything Is Combustible. “For a while, I supported myself as a male prostitute, just like Dee Dee Ramone, around the corner of 53rd and 3rd.” But through the haze, he was uncompromising in his vision. He found Television’s first indie single, a 1975 take on ‘Little Johnny Jewel’, so lacklustre that he quit the band for three days.

When it eventually arrived two years later, Television’s album career was short-lived. The group disbanded after ‘Marquee Moon’’s follow-up, 1978’s ‘Adventure’, which failed to match their label Elektra’s hopes for them, and their own. But these were deeply influential recordings on the more leftfield new wave and art rock that followed, particularly thanks to Lloyd and Verlaine’s intricately meshed guitar work. Its spidery touch can be traced through Wire, Gang Of Four and The Cure to early R.E.M. and Sonic Youth en route to informing much of indie rock as we know it, and defining a certain New York sound. When The Strokes revived the NYC underground in 2001, it was by emulating Television’s edge and, 25 years later, Geese quote the band as a formative influence.

Television would sporadically reunite for brief comebacks (a 1991 reunion produced a third, self-titled album) and performances, but much of Lloyd’s post-Television work was solo. 1978’s ‘Alchemy’ was the first of seven solo albums released right up until 2018, between which Lloyd recorded sessions for the likes of Matthew Sweet and John Doe of the band X and produced New York acts including Rocket From The Tombs (with whom he also played) and Christopher Purdy. Having, by his own tally, “been clinically dead a couple of times,” he finally succumbed to bile duct cancer diagnosed this March, surviving Verlaine by three years. Their static, though, will never fade.