Skip to content
News

Television Guitarist Departs, Preps Solo Album

Richard Lloyd, guitarist for ’70s art-punk outfit Television, will exit the band following one final performance June 16 at New York’s Central Park SummerStage “in order to concentrate my own magnetic force and supernatural powers on my own career,” he told Billboard.com. Lloyd, who is prepping Radiant Monkey, the latest effort of his prolific solo career tentatively dropping this fall, states the split was “amicable” and “I love all four of the guys… But I can’t ride two horses. I took a vow in ’73 to be invisible so that Tom (Verlaine) could be the leader so there’d be no challenge in public, and I’ve held to that. But the new record I have is too good to give a half-assed effort.”

And it seems Radiant Monkey, which Lloyd compares to the likes of Television’s landmark album Marquee Moon and Patti Smith’s Horses, will receive much more than a “half-assed” attempt. In addition to performing all instrumentation on the album — with the exception of drums — the guitarist has conjured a “really hot” marketing campaign for the record, but is hesitant to divulge further details. “I can’t tell you about it because that would spoil the surprise. And everyone likes surprises, don’t they?” He adds, “Maybe I’m overconfident… maybe I’m gonna become a social phenomenon, a household word.” He says. “We’ll just have to wait to see.”

On the Web:
RichardLloyd.com

Talk: Will Lloyd’s Radiant Monkey become a “household word”?