With the album ‘Spirit of Eden’, the popular 80s band Talk Talk flopped for the first time in their career. No one understood the mesterværk, de selv mente, de havde lavet. Today, 35 years after the record’s release, it is considered to be one of the world’s best and most significant albums.
Rumor has it that the man at EMI started crying when he heard the finished version of Talk Talk’s album ‘Spirit of Eden’ for the first time. Not because of its immense beauty, but because he knew right away that it wouldn’t sell very well.
Possibly also because he and the rest of the record company had posted a considerable sum of English pounds in just that record. At the end of the 80’s, Talk Talk was a good stock on the way up: They were a popular band, and their new wave-inspired pop music had attracted a solid group of fans on the three previous albums. They weren’t like the other bands, but had hits, and the reviewers were happy.
When Talk Talk’s third record ‘The Color of Spring’ came out, they toured so fiercely that it nearly killed them. Still, in 1987 they found the energy to make perhaps their best album of them all, ‘Spirit of Eden’. An album that is a classic example of being ahead of its time.
The man inside the record company was scolded. The record sold almost nothing. There were six songs on, but not one was suitable as a single. Rolling Stone Magazine gave the record one out of five stars, and in general the reception was lukewarm among reviewers, who among other things criticized Talk Talk for becoming too self-congratulatory.
“Instead of getting better or worse, this band just got more pretentious every year,” as one wrote. Today, we only want to give him partial credit, because ‘Spirit of Eden’ is admittedly pretentious, but it’s also really good. In many eyes it is considered to be the first post-rock album ever and to be defining for a wave of alternative rock bands such as Radiohead, Mogwai and Low (here, a newer band like Lowly could be mentioned).
In terms of genre, ‘Spirit of Eden’ is most of all an experimental hybrid, which mixes pop, rock and jazz in a rare way, which ultimately emerges as ambient avant-garde. When you say something like that, there are probably many people who will be scared, but the truth is that both your mother and your skeptical friend will like this album.
There aren’t really any choruses, not any ordinary song structures, but mood-saturated progressions that move merrily forward and around like shoals of fish enveloped in an ocean of reverb, piano and muted trumpet. Much of the time there is no, or almost no, sound – and if you want to intellectualize about it, you would probably say that it is an artistic study of the interaction between the phenomena of silence and sound.
An illusion with 16 guests
The songwriter and lead singer of Talk Talk, Mark Hollis, is heroically famous for once saying that it is better to play one note well than to play two notes badly. He had the attitude that if you’re going to break the silence, you have to have a reason for it, and ‘Spirit of Eden’ is a full-fledged reflection of that – only surpassed by Mark Hollis’ self-titled solo album from 1998, which was so minimalist that one reviewer called it “possibly the most quiet and intimate album ever made.”
