Talk Talk Series, #15: Mark Hollis- S/T (1998) MP3 & FLAC

"Soar the bridges that I burnt before, one song among us all."

"Over the last couple of hours, it was a very loose, flexible affair [....] The whole point with the last albums was that, you know, it isn't this kind of band-thing where it's all like this tight thing that you're forced into. It was much looser; we could come together and play, but the thing with me and Tim [Friese-Greene], we had worked together over a long period and then we got to a point where we thought that there was really nowhere for us to go in terms of how we work and how we write." This is Mark Hollis' explanation for Talk Talk's demise shortly after the completion of their brilliant swan-song, Laughing Stock. Actually, there were plans for a sixth Talk Talk album, Mountains of the Moon, as their contract with Verve / Polydor required them to deliver a second album (the aforementioned Laughing Stock being the first) though there was no time-frame specified for doing so. It's unclear why Mountains of the Moon didn't materialize given the band had gone so far as to name the new project, but what is clear was Hollis' uncompromising refusal to repeat himself, which was the very thing that had driven Talk Talk's dramatic evolution over the course of its existence. Following the dissolution of the band, Hollis spent the better part of seven years expanding his musical knowledge by learning to read and write music notation and using these new skills to compose classical-style minimalist pieces for piano and woodwinds (one of which, "Piano," can be found on A V 1). This allowed him to explore the sonic minimalism that characterized the last two Talk Talk albums in ways even further afield of the pop tradition. So while it's tempting to think of Hollis' eponymous 1998 solo debut as the long delayed appearance of that aborted final Talk Talk album, in actuality, it represents a significant change in approach from the Laughing Stock sessions. As Hollis has revealed, "It was not intended to be different, but then it is totally obvious to me that it would be. Because given the things I wanted to do on this album, I didn't imagine it would have any relationship at all with modern music." For the recording of Mark Hollis, one key element of continuity with the final Talk Talk album was the continued presence of Phill Brown, who, this time out, served as sound engineer. Nevertheless, as Brown recalls, the approach to recording was quite different than what had been done for previous albums: "Unlike Spirit of Eden  or Laughing Stock, there were demos of almost all the songs; it was easy to know where we were heading and what was required. The previous albums had been recorded by chance, accident, and hours of trying every possible overdub idea [....] However on Mark's project, everything was scored and written down." While starting from a much more structured place than earlier recording sessions, Mark Hollis was still built, to a significant degree, on improvisation, but this time, a more Jazz-influenced approach was used for getting these performances on tape. Hollis: "The idea was to have carefully worked out structures, within which the musicians would have a lot of freedom. I'd just say to them, 'okay we're here, we want to get there- now let's play.'" Another departure from previous sessions was Hollis' insistence on exclusively employing both acoustic instrumentation and acoustic recording techniques, which helped lend Mark Hollis it's haunting sense of stillness: "I just love the sound of [acoustic] instruments hid that low down and the physical sounds that surround the instrument, whether it's creaking or whether it's the way air goes through or whatever. That is almost as important as the note. So just purely on a sound aspect, the reality of what an acoustic instrument is, is one reason for why the album is so quiet." In terms of the music itself, though certainly a sonic departure in some ways, it is a worthy follow-up to Talk Talk's inimitable mature work. On the opening track, "The Colour of Spring," with a title suggesting continuity with the past but a sound indicating anything but, Hollis goes it alone on piano and vocals, delivering a stark yet intensely gorgeous performance that uses the silences punctuating his minimalist piano melody to create a sense of space around his yearning vocals, which seem intent on pushing the impressionistic lyrics beyond their articulative limits. Alternatively, "The Gift" reveals a fuller arrangement with a bopping Jazz-influenced rhythm section beautifully running counterpoint to Hollis' wistful, very nearly insensible, though powerfully expressive vocals. Another minimalist gem is "Westward Bound," sounding more like a folk song, though without any sense of formal structure, it features some simple but lovely acoustic guitar parts and Hollis' voice barely needing to rise above a whisper to produce its devastating emotional impact. Mark Hollis is a work that manages to feel simultaneously profound and irretrievably distant, which means that one inevitable aspect of listening to it is to experience ambivalence, something Hollis would see as an opportunity to dig deeper: "It's like in a relationship. The more you focus on the music, the more you will hear from the music. The more that you give in terms of listening to what's happening on the album, the more things will reveal themselves within the album."

Talk Talk Series, #14: Allinson / Brown- A V I (1998) MP3 & FLAC

Before his legendary work on Talk Talk's two enduring masterpieces, Spirit of Eden  and Laughing Stock, as well as Mark Hollis' eponymous solo album, Phill Brown had enjoyed a long and storied career as a studio engineer and producer, working with the likes of The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Traffic, Bob Marley, and Roxy Music, to name but a few. While Brown's background suggested a fine rock-music pedigree, the nature of his work with Hollis was quite different. By the time of their first collaboration on Spirit of Eden, Talk Talk had relinquished any interest in traditional song structure, and Hollis' focus in particular had evolved from complex yet conventional sound layering methods to attempting a free association technique, which he described as "sound collage," where organically recorded sound fragments are woven, during the editing process, into a sonic whole-cloth.  This approach would eventually inform Paul Webb and Lee Harris' .O.Rang project as well as Phill Brown's post-Talk Talk collaboration with visual artist Dave Allinson on a brilliant piece of ambient minimalism called A V I. Half of this album's four tracks are devoted to a two-part composition bearing the album's title that was originally conceived as an accompaniment to a video installation . "A V I- Pt. I" is a nearly twenty-minute sound scape, which bears no trace of song structure or any recognizable pop elements and manages to capture much of the same ambiance that made Brown's work with Talk Talk so distinctive. Combining eerie atmospherics with a diversity of organic ambient sounds, the piece is a stunningly elegant journey into the beauty of sounds untethered to formal structure yet somehow still suggesting movement through a composed space. Quite jarringly at first, "A V I- Pt. II" is built around a sumptuously bass-driven rhythmic pattern that, while offering a more structured feel than Pt. I, is just as evocative of the beauty inherent in individual sounds themselves. Another memorable contribution is "Piano" written and performed by Mark Hollis (credited here as John Cope). The best way to describe this lovely, elegiac composition for solo piano is to quote the man himself: "Before you play two notes, learn how to play one note- and don't play one note unless you've got a reason to play it." While many discuss A V I  in terms of the fine line it walks between musicality and fragmented atonality, part of what makes the album so singular and worth revisiting regularly is the way it does manage to be consistently engaging in a musical sense. Fragile, a tad ephemeral, but never less than profound, A V I  is an obscure gem to be sure.

Talk Talk Series, #13: Talk Talk- After the Flood / New Grass / Ascension Day (1991) Limited Edition (3 Discs) MP3 & FLAC

"Thirsting, within without, sighted, weeded, how they run, slain in number."

Talk Talk consistently cultivated a strained relationship with the promotional side of the music business; from the early battles they fought with EMI over their increasingly unconventional (and sometimes downright iconoclastic) stance on the legitimacy of music videos  to their retirement as a live band after The Colour of Spring tour  to their initial refusal to release singles for their last two albums (they eventually acquiesced), Mark Hollis was always a believer in allowing the albums to speak for themselves. The band's original intention for the largely improvised masterpiece Spirit of Eden  was to do no promotion whatsoever, but a horrified EMI convinced Hollis (by way of assorted threats) to agree to release two singles, the first of which, "I Believe in You," included the production of a video. Hollis had this to say about the process: "It went okay, but the idea of doing a promo for that song didn't feel right. That song means so much to me that to sit there and mime to it just feels totally stupid. In retrospect, I would rather have not done it at all, but there you go. It just felt like I was being prostituted. Tim [Friese-Greene] felt exactly the same, 'cos he cares about that sort of thing." After bolting EMI to sign a four album deal with a smaller label (Verve/Polydor) that had promised them complete creative autonomy, Talk Talk set about recording their legendary swan-song, Laughing Stock. Ironically, though the album was even less single-friendly than its predecessor, three tracks were chosen by Verve and issued as collectible parts of an elaborately and beautifully designed Talk Talk Picture CD Box Set. Each of the singles, "After the Flood," "New Grass," and "Ascension Day" were issued separately in the UK, though only "After the Flood" was issued with the box. Each release contains an album track paired with an outtake or a previously unreleased track from the Laughing Stock recording sessions, the latter being instrumentals of varying degrees of interest. "5-09" can best be described as a sound collage of various key instrumental threads that occur on the album and "Stump" is an atonal experimental piece. While nowhere near as essential as the album itself, these singles remain an interesting chapter in Talk Talk's post-EMI career, as they offer a telling glimpse into Verve's strategy for promoting a band that was antithetical to the concept of promoting art.

Talk Talk Series, #12: Talk Talk- Laughing Stock (1991) MP3 & FLAC

"Stair by idle stair, faith one path and the second in fear."

Addressing Talk Talk's fearless approach to conceiving and recording their masterful penultimate album, Spirit of Eden, Creation Records founder Alan McGee once said that the band "was given the keys to the kingdom and return[ed] with art." What he was referring to is the unlimited budget and virtually open recording schedule Talk Talk was awarded by EMI on the heels of the commercial success of The Colour of Spring. The record company's expectation was an even more commercially viable follow-up, but what they received instead was a largely improvised piece of Jazz-inflected Art-Rock from a band that now made no pretense to having an interest in commercial success. The fall-out included a legal dispute over Talk Talk's desire to sign with another label, and after the dust had settled, the band signed with Polydor, specifically the small but venerated Jazz-imprint, Verve. In many ways, Verve made sense, not only because this allowed Talk Talk complete artistic control over the recording of Laughing Stock, but also because their recording process employed many of the same techniques that were used in recording some of the great Jazz albums of the fifties and sixties. The band, now minus bassist Paul Webb, spent seven months cloistered in Wessex studios in London in order to filter out all worldly concerns and distractions. As Mark Hollis has recounted about the approach to the sessions, "What we did on this album is what we call rehearsed spontaneity. There are no demos, no plans at all. I go in and put down a basic outline of something using my Country Gent guitar and then we fly other stuff in to build up the dynamics, the space. That's the key- space -it helps to build and resolve the tensions. Silence is the most powerful instrument I have." This emphasis on silence and space is clearly evident throughout Laughing Stock, for example, on "Taphead," a song very reminiscent of experimental Jazz recordings of the sixties, although this is more the case in terms of its arrangement than of its sound. Lushly minimalist (if such a description makes any sense), "Taphead" opens with the repetition of a desolate and slightly bent bass-note guitar melody sounding as if emanating hollowly from the other side of the studio until Hollis' nearly indecipherable vocals puncture the aural detachment with a sense of emotional immediacy. As the song progresses, the bleak mood never lets up, though additional sound textures swirl through the arrangement as if blown in by a cold wind. Following on the heels of this somber beauty is the even more stunning "New Grass," which functions as the closest thing there is to an emotional centerpiece on this insistently (and brilliantly) unstructured album.  In contrast to "Taphead," it favors a more hopeful, almost ethereal, feel with Hollis' vocals pushed down in the mix to the point where they simply share space with the various instruments rather than standing out front. "New Grass" also features some beautifully spacey guitar-work from Hollis and the haunting sound of a church organ, both of which lend the song its almost religious atmosphere. A true masterwork in an album full of masterworks top to bottom. Laughing Stock was fated to be Talk Talk's swan-song and a fitting one at that given that it feels like a sort of culmination of the long trek the band had made from major-label fodder to brilliant musical iconoclasts. However, for Hollis, it was always simply about attaining a purity of approach: "Really, it's just going back to one of a couple of things- either the jazz ethic or y'know, an album like Tago Mago  by Can where the drummer locked-in and off he went and people reacted at certain points along the way. It's arranged spontaneity- that's exactly what it is."

Talk Talk Series, #10: Talk Talk- Spirit of Eden (1988) MP3 & FLAC

"Tell me how I fear it, I buy prejudice for my health. Is it worth so much when you taste it?"

The Colour of Spring  and it's resulting world tour provided Talk Talk with their first significant taste of international success, and as a result, EMI, assuming the band was poised for an even more lucrative step into the mainstream, awarded them with an enormous budget and a generous deadline for the recording of their next album, Spirit of Eden. However, there were indications early on that Talk Talk were chasing a vastly different muse. During The Colour of Spring tour, Mark Hollis had become increasingly disillusioned and withdrawn (partly due to heroin addiction); then, following the tour, he moved to rural Suffolk, taking up a hermetic lifestyle that was to greatly influence the direction the band would take on their final two albums. For the recording of Spirit of Eden, the band reportedly occupied a former Church for eleven months, thus avoiding all contact with outsiders, a practice which included Hollis' refusal to provide any advanced tapes for their handlers at EMI. According to Producer Phil Brown, recording often took place in the dark and was comprised entirely of improvised overdubs (there were no band takes recorded). Hollis and Tim Friese-Greene then meticulously edited down the massive amount of recorded material into the suite of six songs comprising the finished album. The music itself is nothing less than an incandescent mix of Jazz, Blues, Classical, Ambient, and deconstructed pop, and from the opening measures of "The Rainbow" with its Miles meets DeBussy feel, it's hard not to imagine the reaction at EMI when they finally received the advanced tape of the completed album. While the arc of Talk Talk's artistic evolution had often been quite dramatic from album to album, it is clear, as the ambient prelude of "The Rainbow" is pierced-through with bluesy guitar and an over-amped harmonica and Hollis' meditative vocals glimmer-forth, that Spirit of Eden is both unprecedented and musically important. EMI's response was predictable: the album wasn't commercial enough, so Hollis was asked to re-record and replace some material, something he steadfastly refused to do, and while he was at it, he also notified EMI that there would be no single, video or tour to promote the album. Eventually, Hollis relented on the first two, and "I Believe in You" was chosen to be edited down for release as a single complete with promotional video. The fact that this song is Hollis' paean to losing himself while in the throes of heroin addiction adds just one more ironic layer to EMI's handling of the album. The song itself is a Jazz-inflected slow burner that grows darker by the measure, and contains an absolutely gorgeous and unforgettable vocal turn by Hollis. Simply put, Spirit of Eden inhabits the same visionary, transcendent, and artistically uncompromising sphere as Van Morrison's Astral Weeks. Albums like these are the rarest of gems because they are untethered from convention and expectation and unmediated by the interests of the marketplace. Hear this.

Talk Talk- "I Believe in You" (1988) Live on Countdown, Dutch TV

Reportedly Talk Talk's last TV appearance. At this point in their career, I'm amazed anyone could even get them to lip-sync

Talk Talk Series, #9: Talk Talk- Asides and Besides (1998) MP3 & FLAC

"How can I accept I've given everything that I had and still you left."

Talk Talk's (specifically Mark Hollis') struggles with EMI both before and after the band left to sign with Polydor, offers a unique and often candid glimpse into the dysfunction that can result from the age-old conflict between artistic integrity and commercial interests. Talk Talk's recording contract with EMI expired after the band released the artistically brilliant though drastically less mainstream Spirit of Eden, and though many at the time referred to the album as "career suicide" given its uncompromising, noncommercial  nature (e.g. it all but eschews traditional song structure), EMI reportedly still had plans for Talk Talk, but their foiled attempts at intervening in the recording of the album and their insistence on traditional forms of promotion (singles, videos, etc.) ultimately put an end to the often stormy relationship between band and label. Despite losing the band (whom they never really new what to do with anyway), EMI set about repackaging and re-issuing Talk Talk's older material, ostensibly to recoup their losses on Spirit of Eden. The first of these re-issues was Nautral History, a commercially successful "best of" compilation that was soon followed by the travesty known as History Revisited, a cynical attempt to cash in on Talk Talk's then-latest release, Laughing Stock, by throwing together a group of sub-par remixes of the band's best known songs. On the surface, the cleverly titled Asides and Besides appears to be just another one on EMI's commercially-calculated releases, as it appeared around the same time as Mark Hollis' eponymous solo album. Nevertheless, as such compilations go, Asides and Besides does a credible job of gathering all the loose ends of Talk Talk's EMI years into one place. Comprised of b-sides, demos, and extended 12" mixes ranging from The Party's Over  to Spirit of Eden, continuity (or even logical sequencing) is not the strong-suit of this collection; however, it contains more than its share of rarefied gems. For example, The Colour of Spring-era b-side "It's Getting Late in the Evening" is a gorgeous ballad, which just barely hangs on to a trace of song structure and "John Cope," another b-side, this time from the Spirit of Eden sessions, ranks with Talk Talk's best work. Yes, it was born out of crass commercial interests, but Asides and Besides collects the harder-to-find tracks of one of the most innovative bands of the eighties and nineties, which, if you think about it, makes it pretty damn essential.

Talk Talk Series, #6: Talk Talk- The Colour of Spring (1986) MP3 & FLAC

"Yesterday's faded, nothing can change it."

The Colour of Spring is often described as Talk Talk's "transitional" album; however, such a description is meaningless in the context of a discography comprised of nothing but transitional albums. More so than virtually any other band I can think of, Talk Talk traveled along a creative arc that never paused long enough to solidify into something to be transitioned from; rather, their sound and approach was in constant flux, seemingly evolving in a certain direction, but one quite unprecedented in pop music and one whose inevitable conclusion, for a host of reasons, was silence. After the relative commercial success of their previous album It's My Life, Talk Talk was awarded with a bigger budget and extended time to record The Colour of Spring, resources that they would take full advantage of in crafting more of a song-cycle than a mere collection of songs with a few singles mixed in. Mark Hollis has described the approach to recording the album as "arranged free-form," in which contributions from a number of musicians, including Steve Winwood (Hammond organ) and Danny Thompson (stand-up bass), were recorded and either integrated into the final arrangement or discarded depending on the synergy or lack thereof between the various elements within the song. In addition to this approach, which is more common to Jazz recordings, Talk Talk also began an exploration of more organic forms of instrumentation and the manipulation of aural space that would characterize their ground-breaking work later on. A perfect example of this new sonic approach is "Living in Another World." Gone are the synth-based textures that characterized previous albums; instead, the song opens with a crashing piano chord giving way to acoustic guitar, strings, and eventually Hammond organ. What's instantly recognizable as the song progresses is the care taken not only in integrating the various musical elements but also in sculpting the silences and sense of space surrounding the notes. The Colour of Spring marks the juncture in Talk Talk's artistic development where they began to move into what retrospectively would be termed "Post-Rock," meaning a move away from traditional song structure and towards a more organic, open-ended, perhaps even improvisational approach to song arrangement. Talk Talk would take this approach even further and to brilliant effect on their final two albums.

Talk Talk- "Living in Another World" Video (1986)

One of the things I like best about Talk Talk's videos is the subversive humor that often permeates them. It seems as though they are, on some level, always poking fun at the process of making promotional videos in the first place.

Talk Talk- "Life's What You Make It" Video (1986)

More greatness from Hollis & co.

Talk Talk Series, #4: Talk Talk- It's My Life (1984) MP3 & FLAC

"If I could buy my reasoning, I'd pay to lose."

After touring their debut album, The Party's Over, Talk Talk fell silent for more than a year except for the stand-alone single, "My Foolish Friend." During this time, Mark Hollis was busy laying the groundwork for the band's unprecedented journey into artistic iconoclasm, which would yield some of the most progressive music of the rock era and lead the band, ineluctably, toward its commercial demise. Hollis' first step was to dismiss keyboard player Simon Brenner (ostensibly to move away from synth-based pop of the first album) and bring in Tim Friese-Greene, who had an impressive engineering and production pedigree. Friese-Greene and Hollis quickly developed a writing partnership that would produce some of the best songs on It's My Life, including the title track and "Dum Dum Girl." Just as important, however, was Friese-Greene's influence on the band's studio sound; while ample use of synthesizers is made on It's My Life, acoustic instruments begin to play a much larger role, something that would only increase with each successive album. In addition, it is clear that Hollis learned a thing or two from Roxy Music's Avalon in the intervening time between albums, as his vocals have taken on a laconic Bryan Ferry-inspired croon in places. Perhaps Talk Talk's most distinctive sonic innovation during the It's My Life sessions is the subtle use of World Beat elements to give some of the songs a unique hybrid feel that makes them quite memorable. An obvious example of this is the title track, which, on the surface, is about a love affair gone bad, but the various synth-based sound-effects and Hollis' remarkable vocal performance give the song a far more universal connotation. While It's My Life is a transitional album through and through, it represents a significant step away from the thin new-romantic veneer that hampered the debut album and also sets the stage for an even bigger artistic leap forward on their next album, The Colour of Spring.

Talk Talk- "It's My Life" Video (1984) U.K. Version

Talk Talk and their record company, EMI, battled constantly over the music videos, the latter claiming the band's efforts were blatantly noncommercial. They even ordered a complete re-shoot of the "Such a Shame" video.  For the "It's My Life" video, which features wildlife footage interspersed with shots of Mark Hollis wandering around a zoo, the director, Tim Pope, and Hollis decided to blatantly resist the convention of lip-syncing in music videos. In the video, Hollis wears a dour, satirically tight-lipped facial expression. Yet again, EMI was not happy with the results and demanded a more conventional lip-synced version be produced for the U.S. market. Although the band acquiesced, the performance was highly exaggerated and managed to achieve the same satirical effect. Talk Talk: iconoclasts to the bitter end!

Talk Talk Series, #2: Talk Talk- The Party's Over (1982) MP3 & FLAC

"And I hope that I've kept you amused, to wipe that spit right off my shoes."

While The Party's Over is easily the most conventional of Talk Talk's five studio albums, it is, nevertheless, far more than a mere footnote to the band's small but legendary discography. In actuality, Talk Talk's debut bears many subtle signs of the greatness that was soon to follow on its heels. Primary among these is Mark Hollis' distinctive vocal-style; his uniquely emotional (and somewhat nasal) phrasings were heads and tails beyond what other vocalists in the New Wave/New Romantic genre were doing both in terms of originality and musicality. This allows a song such as the single "Talk Talk," which, on the surface, sounds a bit like a rehash of Duran Duran's "Planet Earth," to transcend its derivative origins. In addition, The Party's Over occasionally shows flashes of the band's unconventional melodic sense that would blossom to great affect on later albums. For example, on "Today," straightforward synth-pop elements are combined with Japan-esque bass and percussion to create a sonic landscape for Hollis to work his melancholy magic, but the haunting chorus, with its chants of "Today" takes the song in an unexpected and striking melodic direction.  Talk Talk's debut, while certainly not as groundbreaking as future albums, it well worth a listen, as it both prefigures the band's greater works and contains some pleasures all its own.

Talk Talk- "Such a Shame" Video (1984)

Talk Talk doing the pop thing and doing it exceedingly well...

Talk Talk Series, #1: Talk Talk- London 1986 (1999) / Live at Montreux 1986 (2008) MP3 & FLAC

"Better parted, I see people hiding. Speech gets harder, there's no sense in writing."

While the number of bands who have succumbed to the rock cliché of trading artistic integrity for a glimpse of commercial success is countless, only a few have traveled down the opposite path, and fewer still have attempted the kind of dramatic career reversal achieved by Talk Talk. Originally considered little more than derivative purveyors of New-Romantic dance-pop, with each succeeding album, Mark Hollis and co. moved further and further away from both the expectations of the marketplace and from the trappings of traditional pop-oriented song-craft. There were, of course, hints of this impending transformation on their early records, most notably, Mark Hollis' singularly expressive vocals, but it wasn't until Talk Talk's third album, The Colour of Spring, that their artistic restlessness began to explicitly assert itself. London 1986 and Live at Montreux 1986 document the resulting tour, which was to be the last the band would undertake. While The Colour of Spring is a transitional masterpiece, Talk Talk's flawless live performances during this period were simply sublime. Gone were the painfully exaggerated efforts to appear relaxed yet animated that were evident on earlier tours; now they carried themselves like a band who knew they were special. For those who have only heard Talk Talk's studio recordings, or those who may feel inclined to ignore the band's pre-1986 output, these live performances will be nothing less than a revelation.

Talk Talk- "I Believe in You" Video (1988)

Sad but true: Mark Hollis & co. were sued by their record company (EMI) for what amounts to willful uncommercialism (conspiracy to invent Post-Rock)