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. Th...