Talk Talk (RIP Mark Hollis)

i loved that song. and i'm actually kind of ashamed to admit that and i am almost never ashamed to admit things like that.

and yes i have heard the entire Blue Zoo album.

"Surely there can't be just me that loves the first two Talk Talk albums? No!?"

i love it all. from first to last.

when you read about the record company wanting talk talk to be the next duran duran, you can kind of see where they were going when you hear blue zoo. except blue zoo weren't the next duran duran either, they were just the precursor to king

they used to play that song on the college radio station i grew up with. they played "Love & Pride" a lot too. also the first place i ever heard "talk talk".

they turned me on to so much. first place i ever heard "like dust" by passion puppets. still one of my favorite songs ever. AND the first place i ever heard "slang teacher". can't thank them enough for that. lifelong wide boy awake fan that i am.

so happy to see that there is FINALLY a HQ version of like dust on youtube. thanks, Stiff!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2E-yyvkQSwo

The video to 'Talk Talk' (the song) is very "early Duran" visually, but even at that stage Talk Talk seemed to have a musical sophistication that Duran Duran just didn't. This isn't to knock Duran Duran at all as I like the first two Duran Duran albums, but Talk Talk seemed to be far more skilled as instrumentalists, even then.

they used to play that song on the college radio station i grew up with. they played "Love & Pride" a lot too. also the first place i ever heard "talk talk".

needs some freur and kissing the pink for the flush

*comedy toilet sound*

i don't think i've heard passion puppets before, kind of like the new wave nephilim thing they do there

Doot-doot!

yeah they played doot doot a ton too. and they made me a lifelong fan of kissing the pink. they would play "the last film" all the time which was cool and not the obvious "love lasts forever". they got on the KTP bandwagon later.

Naked is totally canon for me. so weird that their NEXT album i never found until the 90's. it was like it never existed in the states. whereas, Naked was everywhere. and then obviously the KTP album. which was big here.

love the last film. i shamelessly love all this sort of stuff tbh

(i mean the second album was never released in the U.S. which basically explains its absence. but nobody i knew had it and they didn't play any of it on the station i listened to.)

blue zoo gets the shame because if i can't imagine playing it loudly around other people...then it gets the shame. playing it loudly now would be like cranking roman holiday singles in 2015.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWgwx8ZFVCI

^ would totally blast this in the car if i could be sure my wife wasn't carrying something that could be used as a weapon

look at those teeth! so shiny

had a weird moment last week when dâm-funk dropped a fashiøn tune into a mix i was listening to. they were pretty bad though

Oh god, yeah, Fashion were terrible - I think I got about three tracks into Fabrique when I checked that record out and that was more than enough.

did Duran rip Save A Prayer from this or was it the other way round? both excellent though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVc1soT3t7o

either way; people saying 'they sound NOTHING like Duran' upthread.. ey what.

Oh god, yeah, Fashion were terrible - I think I got about three tracks into Fabrique when I checked that record out and that was more than enough.

apparently the first album skews a bit more post-punk, but fabrique is the only one i ever see in the cheap bins

Talking about Freur, I can just picture the look on the faces of those that got into Underworld in the '90s going back and checking out Freur out of curiosity and thinking "what the fuck is this?"

Hmm. I can hear a touch of Duran Duran on the first Talk Talk album, but at the same time I think that there was enough about Talk Talk at that time to set them apart.

this is a more blue zoo vibe from the puppets:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFs6xk9aBFQ

i can't believe i've been waiting since 2007 for someone to post a decent copy of the like dust video. i'm insane. but i really have gone back and checked like every year since that first one was posted!

it looks great too. i would so buy all these 80's new wave videos on dvd with HQ video and HD sound.

is that ade edmondson as the vicar in that video?

without watching...yes.

3:15 - it definitely is

I just want to say how much I love Talk Talk's sleeve artwork - with the possible exception of the debut, every single album cover is just great to look at.

It's amazing how Talk Talk incurs a flurry of interest in 12 year intervals after the release of Laughing Stock.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLtsXcLuDMs

My personal top fifteen.

I bought 'Laughing Stock' when I pretty little assuming that it would sound like "It's My Life". I think nowadays I might have skipped over the thing given the short attention span nearly all of us having the era of instant access and disposal of music but at that point spending my lunch money on the thing was a BIG DEAL and I was determined to get my money's worth out of it. :P

Fell in love with a week later and opened new doors for me.

About a week ago I listened to the classic triptych again for the first time in a number of years. It was a Sunday night, I drank some booze, I thought about it. By that I mean life... and Talk Talk.

Laughing Stock was the Talk Talk record that initially hooked me, in October or November 2000 I think. As I was quite a stoned young man interested in free jazz, noise, and the indie and "post-" rock styles of the time, the abstractness of it was appealing. It provided a logical ancestor in a musical family tree that seemed to graft its own stems and branches onto the trunk in reverse order. Spirit of Eden, which I heard second, had a kind of... Steve Winwood-like character that I initially didn't like. (Effectively, I found bluesy harmonica objectionable.) The Colour of Spring, the last of the albums I was exposed to, failed to register at all. It had a big, expensive 80s sound that was very unfashionable at the time, although within a few years this public opinion would become somewhat inverted and so would mine. At the height of whatever iteration of the 80s revival was underway in 2005 or 2006, I came to consider The Colour of Spring my favourite of the three.

Listening again, and considering carefully how my opinion has changed since 2000 or 2001—rather than at some interval along the way—I find Laughing Stock so dry and slight as to be uninteresting. This was a record that initially sounded surprising and unlikely, and then became even more surprisingly and unlikely once we knew how much technology and editing was actually used (and how expensive and difficult it would have been at the time). I think, though, the seams are finally showing on this one. We're now finally so used to bits of flown-in guitar, looped drums, and stitched together song structures that the album's tides, currents, and pools of rising and falling intensity finally, finally, I think sound cold, non-organic, and lacking internal consistency. There's not much going on here, really.

The Colour of Spring, which I initially disliked, then favoured strongly during my fashionable 80s revival years, sounds excellent to me. Given that I now hardly listen to music anymore, never go to shows, and rarely read the music press or blogs, I was expecting this one to take a big nosedive in relation to how different I am as a person now, but it didn't. It's the most complete and well-executed of the three records. It certainly prefigures the remaining two records in terms of its ultimate lapse into the pastoral, but what it has that the other two don't appear to, is three things: a) deliberately executed and coherent songcraft throughout; b) apparently substantive before-the-fact structural contributions from other players and technical staff; c) excellent sequencing and exquisite pacing that goes so many places the other two records don't dare. Just now, putting on "Living in Another World," I'm again struck by how excellent the backing vocals are, how the chorus climbs, somewhat orthogonally, to something that's a great big, dumb effective 1980s showboat, and then, moments later, "Chameleon Day." Wow.

Ultimately, and even though I feel The Colour of Spring is the most complete and well-executed of the three, I feel today that Spirit of Eden is the record that has risen the most in my estimation and is at this moment my personal favourite of the three. It's simply luxurious, for one thing. It has all the reported studio artifice of Laughing Stock but the seams don't show as badly, and as such there are expanses of time where suspension of disbelief is not only possible but hard to avoid...

As I get older, though, I suppose I no longer look for the blockbuster—what's the image I'm searching for?—Ray-Ban sunglasses tonal palette of The Colour of Spring. But, at the same time, I actively and coldly decline the moments of intellectualism and abstraction offered by Laughing Stock. Is it that Spirit of Eden reflects the measured, tempered, balanced mindset that comes with age?

I don't think so, I think Spirit of Eden is something a bit darker. Even as it reflects and rewards wisdom, maturity, and nuance, it is probably the most wry and sinister of the three records. Although it's clearly meant to sound cathartic, it's not exculpatory in the slightest. The misdeeds, transgressions and failures are on full display and the joke is probably hiding in plain sight: it's the spirit of Eden, but not Eden itself. It's Eden's ghost, or perhaps Eden's stunt double, a laughing, winking, cautionary simulacrum. Trying to see a linear progression from The Colour of Spring—"Happiness is Easy," right?—through the subsequent records all the way to the solo Mark Hollis LP might be missing the mark. Is there something here, at roughly the midpoint between "It's My Life" and the solo LP, which represents a path already set in motion that could not be stopped, but that never arrived at its intended destination? In my estimation, since Laughing Stock is in no ways a better, clearer, or more refined record, and the solo LP is so cold, unforgiving, almost alien, was this really the progression towards tranquility and peace we hoped it was? Was this the point where Mark Hollis was looking over his shoulder? Was this his "wait a second, wtf" moment? I'm not sure, but I think Spirit of Eden is definitely the closest Mark Hollis might have come to displaying a sense of humour. Five stars.

I think, though, the seams are finally showing on this one. We're now finally so used to bits of flown-in guitar, looped drums, and stitched together song structures that the album's tides, currents, and pools of rising and falling intensity finally, finally, I think sound cold, non-organic, and lacking internal consistency. There's not much going on here, really.

lets fucking fight right now, dude

jkjk i mean you're wrong but theres no need to box over it

I think Laughing Stock exposes the seams of everything that's been recorded since, pretty much.

Don't get me wrong, I used to LOVE Laughing Stock. I guess my point is really what can happen in fifteen years and how that affects what you think about an album and trying to understand why. I did not think Spirit of Eden would come out the winner, I thought Colour of Spring would be reigning champ.

i prefer spirit of eden, too! but i have been listening to laughing stock semi-regularly for about 13 years myself and the bloom has never fallen off the rose (hence why i wished you violence earlier)

that was really great to read, salmon, thanks

i didn't agree with it all either but it's well argued

yeah it is, isnt it! i was so bent on violently protecting the honor of laughing stock i forgot to mention that, too

man I used to jam to "Today" really hard back in high school, I had completely forgotten about it, but this revive got me thinking "what was that one synth pop-era Talk Talk song I really loved?"

Excellent, salmon

comma doing a lot of work there

btw this revive influenced me to listen to colour of spring for the first time in ages which was long overdue <33333333

Colour of Spring and Live at Montreux are my favorite Talk Talk things to listen to.