Talk Talk (RIP Mark Hollis)

I always found Grace by Jeff Buckley to be a particularly good record for getting women to shag me...

It's funny because it came in a double CD set with "It's My Life" and I had to turn it off after 2 or 3 songs because it had dated so badly. (Which is odd cause I can still listen to The Teardrop Explodes, even though that is just as dated to the 80s.)

i think the teardrop explodes will be one of the most name-dropped bands of 2004. believe.

Zing! :) Wow Scott, you ARE an uber-fan! Maybe playing Talk Talk loud has a different effect than playing them softly? I'll have to give it a try ... and hey, having more than one copy of "Spirit" is understandable -- on lp format, the James Marsh illustrations look much more beautiful. (People who don't even _like_ the band have been known to squirrel away copies of those lps, just so they can have huge, high-quality versions of the James Marsh illustrations).

--------

> It was really interesting to me to see where early Spiritualized nicked all their ideas from.

There's a theory about how "Velvet Underground only had 100 fans, but all those fans went out and formed bands" ... Well, I think the same is true of Talk Talk -- only in their case, it wasn't that people formed bands after hearing them, it was that already-existing bands altered their sound dramaically after hearing them!

---------

> Don't know any of the names of any of the songs, cause I was, ha-hem, too busy to look at the tracklisting.

After thousands of listens, I still can't correctly name most of the tracks! Partially because they flow into each other (so it's hard to tell one song from another) and partially because I listen to the album all the way through (so I've never needed to know which songs to skip) ... As for the erotic possibilities of Talk Talk albums *blush* well yes. It is catnip for sensitive shoegazer types (both sexes), as much, if not moreso than Cocteau Twins.

------

> It's funny because it came in a double CD set with "It's My Life" and I had to turn it off after 2 or 3 songs because it had dated so badly.

Errr, bad choice for accompanying cd! Much better would have been Colour of Spring. ("Life's What You Make It" hasn't dated so badly as "It's My Life"). Yeah, don't listen to both in the same sitting! Ironically, what dates the earlier albums so badly is often the wimpy-sounding drumming ... a contrast to the later albums, where Lee's drumming is so strong, so "right", so distinctive, and so timeless.

Glad to hear you like Talk Talk, Kate!

chris: my engineer friend has a copy of this (the spirit of eden one) on the coffee table in the studio -- my mistake was picking it up (i couldn't put it down!) it is quite simply one of the best magazine articles i've ever read. you'll never think of talk talk the same way.

Well, I think the same is true of Talk Talk -- only in their case, it wasn't that people formed bands after hearing them, it was that already-existing bands altered their sound dramaically after hearing them!

stripey: this is a great comment. the most interesting thing is that it continues to occur at relatively the same rate even (roughly) fifteen years after SoE.

Hey Scott, here's an excerpt from the interview Chris mentioned that relates well to what we've been talking about :

" ... We came up with the conclusion, in the end,that was either put on it, “Please play quietly” or, as I tried to point out to Mark, that you’ve got to leave people to their own resources ..."

:)

"I loathe the post-rocky cd with relaly long boring tracks, lead singer sounds as if he has longblonde hair and possibly should relocate to a Christian tinband?"

(luckily he likes the 'ardkore, skeptics, PiL & disco inferno I sent with it)

i've never heard 'laughing stock' and the two bits i've heard off 'spirit of eden' were the bits on the 'best of' that came out in 1990 (u know when 'its my life' was a hit again ?) that were bstrdzd edits just kind of stuck on at the end.
but... i didn't like the two bits i heard.

maybe i give the whole thing a listen in the dark when i'm a bi glum.
that's the idea is it ?

on the norman records update they mention Bed as a band that is an exact duplicate of laughing stock era tt. has anyone heard them? any thoughts?

I have indeed heard them thanks to Doug Watson -- there's a definite, obvious similarity, though I would ascribe it mostly to how the feller sings and the minimal arrangements rather than the exact sound. On that level, though, they work for me more than, say, Elbow.

What's the word that means being nostalgic for things you've never experienced? Thats what TT does for me.

(I picked up a vinyl re-issue of TCoS over the weekend. Beautiful pressing. Simply beautiful).

The reason why TCoS stands out for me is that it exhibits the genius of Talk Talk in a somewhat embryonic but no less impressive state. I betcha the same kind of people who like TCoS best are also the sort who prefer Isn't Anything.

the point

I'm reminded of something I said once, to fred maybe (on here?), about the beach boys and the way people from certain musical backgrounds engage with 'pretty' and 'highly spiritual' music. this is clearly pretty complicated, though, especially with people like melissa who have a much deeper engagement with that terrain.

made by josh apparently interested me then and interests me now because i really think that there are certain musical qualities--obv shifting ones over time, given the shifting contexts--that evoke "spiritual", "transcendent", etc. i suppose one could even set up a kind of experiment to determine the superlatives that people attach to certain music, but i suppose this would have to presume a large enough sample of people with exceedingly similar experiences with music.

i think its obvious that TT brings an enormous amount of talent and skill to their work, which is why i can say without reservation that i'm a fan, but i think it's a combination of this skill AND the particular metier...the particular nature of t he work...that produces the sort of (what seems to me) hyberbole or at least...peculiar range of superlatives. this can be illustrated better perhaps by responses to lesser bands with similar aims. maybe even with U2...i dunno.

teasing out what musical qualities track to these adjectives would be a worthwhile endeavor which i suppose few living rock critics (or whomever) would be prepared to undertake

there are albums and films i love despite their being adored in the laziest terms by all kinds of poseurs...

i think the battery of adjectives applied to their later albums actually does the band and its music a disservice

you can stretch this comment to include a good chunk of the sort of music thats covered in the wire etc

Maybe that's why the critical fawning doesn't bug me (although the gave-it-two-listens negative reviews are still funny after all these years).

(BTW, don't mind Matt and I - we're friends from way back.)

the mythology is that it was ignored completely and then rediscovered thanks to tastemakers like jim o'rourke etc in the mid 90s (not a long path to rediscovery mind, but still)

but is this actually true? certainly the emergence of post rock etc. gave the album a new home, a new sense of approachability etc., but i would think a symapthetic audience would have existed in 1991 as well, however small

Some contemporary reviews (scroll downward) It most certainly was not ignored completely -- Melody Maker, for one, ran a big interview with Hollis, a follow-up technical interview with Brown and Hollis and a review all within a couple of weeks of each other.