Personality crisis

ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT British punk misfit Dan Treacy rediscovered his muse while he was in prison.

Dan Treacy answers the phone in the London hostel where he has been staying intermittently since he was evicted from his flat weeks earlier, and immediately begins playing a programmed synthesizer beat. “I just wrote a new song,” he announces by way of introduction. “Good, isn’t it? It came to me in an Alice in Wonder-land moment. If you were in Alice in Wonderland, which character would you be?”

Forty-five exasperating albeit highly amusing minutes later, the interview draws to a close: “Fuck off!” the musician sneers. “I don’t have all day to talk to Americans! Listen—call me anytime.” The frontman of Television Personalities has developed some rude habits. He burps into telephone receivers. He contradicts himself within a single sentence (“Don’t ask me about drugs and prison, unless you want to”) and is generous with insults (“Some of these journalists are such stupid idiots”). Most maddening, each time his interviewer says “um,” he sings, “ummmm” and plays a harmonizing piano chord.

Yet the chronically troubled musician is worth the aggravation. Behind the beery slurs and crabbiness lurks an improbably sweet, funny man whose gentleness has long been conveyed best through his songs—most recently on TVPs’ new album, My Dark Places.

Treacy, 45, found rock & roll early: His mother ran a laundry service in London that was employed by oft-soiled musical figures, from Led Zeppelin to the Sex Pistols. Television Personalities arose in the fervor of ’77 punk, inhabiting an unaggressive subdivision of the music marked by childlike innocence. Early recordings like “Part Time Punks” and “Silly Girl” are master-pieces of lo-fi amateurism, presaging the indie rock of decades to come. Kurt Cobain championed the band; Belle and Sebastian quotes TVPs on its new album.

It all sounds very impressive, but for the fact that Treacy disappeared off the face of the earth sometime in the mid-’90s. He was said to be on heroin, homeless, even deceased, but in 2004 the singer turned up in a British prison, where he was serving his fifth and longest sentence. (“I would shoplift records and sell them to buy drugs,” Treacy explains.) His artistic rehabilitation began when members of an online group devoted to TVPs discovered the musician’s whereabouts. One of these fans was Rob Keith of New York pop band the Baskervilles, who organized a benefit show in July 2004 at Sin-é to raise funds for Treacy. “We realized there were more honorable charities,” Keith says. “But he deserved a second chance—and we wanted to hear more music from him.”

Treacy’s NYC benefactors raised upwards of $1,500, sending the money directly to a recording studio so that he couldn’t squander it on drugs. In retrospect, that may not have been necessary. “Imagine how I felt, being in prison and getting contacted by these people!” Treacy exclaims. “I just couldn’t believe it. It got me thinking: There’s people that care. And if these people care, I’ll make an effort.” A prison nun gave the musician a guitar, and he began plotting new material; upon his release last year, Treacy reconnected with original bandmate Ed Ball and recorded My Dark Places, his first album in a dozen years. “Dan was falling-down drunk the whole time we recorded,” Ball says, “but he wrote these astonishing songs.” Unsurprisingly, the record is quite bleak, with savage tales of drugs, jerks and wasted love. Less anticipated is this freshly sprung singer’s enduring gift for crafting minimalist pop that’s at once heartrending and humorous, instantly familiar and vastly idiosyncratic.

“All I’m trying to do is document my life,” Treacy says. “Now ask me my favorite band!”

Who’s your favorite band?

“Coldplay,” the singer proudly proclaims. “When I was in prison for the fourth time, I had my own cell. Then they put in this big fucking enormous black guy—I’m just painting the picture. I thought, He’s gonna play rap. But no, Coldplay!”

Treacy assumes a reflective voice. “So expect the unexpected,” he says. “I’m in a fucking 20-pound-a-night hostel. But I’ve got beer, whiskey and my keyboard.” As if to illustrate all three points, Treacy pounds furiously on his keyboard. “I can do what I want. There’s no reason to be unhappy!”

My Dark Places is out on Domino.