The first release on Whaam! records (a label headed by
the Television Personalities' Dan Treacy), Pop Goes Art! is basically a
Television Personalities album with Treacy and his longtime cohort Ed Ball trading roles: Ball is the singer and songwriter, and Treacy just plays guitar and bass. The amateurish cover (the original LP cover was a simple white jacket with a design silkscreened on the front and a small piece of paper glued on the back listing the song titles) and no-budget production can't hide the wit and inventiveness of Ball's take on Carnaby Street-era pop. Besides two immediate classics, "Miss London" and the brilliant "I Helped Patrick McGoohan Escape" (a song Ball would record several more times in the '80s), the album includes the B-side of
Times' first single, "Biff! Bang! Pow!" -- not the song by Ball's freakbeat heroes
the Creation, but an homage to that band using the same title -- and the eight-minute psychedelic closer "This Is Tomorrow," featuring the sort of droning plane-crash guitar that would figure into the next couple of
Television Personalities records. Pop Goes Art! is a completely ingenuous record with no agenda, other than the re-creation of one of Ball's favorite musical eras. [Artpop!'s 2008 edition included six bonus tracks.] ~ Stewart Mason