Month: October 2025

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Time It’s Time

“Lyric writing is very important. […] What matters to me is that I believe the lyrics I’ve written are good. Other people are a secondary consideration. I’ve no ambitions, I’m not trying to say anything to anyone.” Mark Hollis quoted in Electronics & Music Maker: March 1986

“Nobody knows how long
Rustling leaves unrhyme
Lullaby breeze unsung
Babel of dreams unwinds in memory”

The first time I saw the opening lines of Time It’s Time written down, in the deliberately illegible script which makes up the lyric sheet for The Colour of Spring, I thought to myself “damn that’s some poetic shit. I wonder if there’s any more?” There is. But this is my first and therefore my favourite of Mark Hollis’s musings about love death and the hereafter. That might sound pretty dark but I still find this song to be just so uplifting. I reckon that’s all down to that insistent, forever repeating musical motif that drifts slowly upwards in a kind of intensifying spiral, a seabird caught in a thermal.

After two albums of energetic new wave emoting Mark Hollis found his inside voice for The Colour of Spring. In particular he found it for the verses of Time It’s Time. Not only are the lyrics poetic as fuck, the delivery of them is compelling even though – or perhaps because – it is as fragile and iridescent as an insect wing.

Tim and Mark stopped just short of ripping out the kitchen sink to create the sound of Time It’s Time. Massed recorders, a choir that might have been nicked from Carl Orff, a variophon solo, Lee Harris channelling a premonition of trip hop, and all of it trailing off with a churchy organ that you might miss if you weren’t listening out for it. It seems it should be a hot mess like the scrawl on the lyric sheet, but miraculously it’s perfect. A perfect end to a perfect album.

“What’s your favorite last song on an album? : “Time It’s Time” by Talk Talk from The Colour of Spring. This is my favorite album by Talk Talk […]. “Time It’s Time” is such a remarkable example of melancholy and at the same time it’s full of optimism and the call to keep going. “- John Grant, April 2019, undertheradarmag.com

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Chameleon Day

“Why was ‘Life’s What You Make It’ chosen as the single?

‘For me, the only reason that track was chosen, is that apart from a two minute horn quartet, it’s the shortest thing on the album. That’s it, really.’”
– Record Mirror, February 1986

Quite often I listen to a playlist of the entire Talk Talk discography on shuffle. More than once, as Chameleon Day starts to whisper in my headphones and I’m not really paying attention, I’ve mistaken it for a track from Spirit of Eden. And then I’ll try to figure out which exact track and realise it’s from the album previous.

It may not be from Spirit of Eden but certainly foreshadows that sound. I love that Mark Hollis described it as “a two minute horn quartet”, as if Ravel and Miles Davis have gotten together for a jam in the afterlife. With Hollis’s bluesy and broken vocal garnishing their ghostly noodling, it peaks with a barely there chorus, where the harmony comes in before rather than after the lead vocal. Given its brevity and its seemingly tenuous connection to reality and structure, you might be forgiven for hearing Chameleon Day as merely a fragment, an incomplete idea, but you know Mark Hollis would never release anything incomplete. The fractured music simply underscores the fractured psyche in the lyrics.

Mark Hollis says his lyrics are not about him, but about a character that he inhabits while he sings. So, Chameleon Day isn’t about him, okay?

It’s so brave to write and then sing an intense lyric like “breathe on me, eclipse my mind, it’s in some kind of disarray” – even if it’s not about you, people are going to naturally assume that it is. And the more I learn about his personality as a working musician, the harder it gets to not recognise Mark Hollis as the chameleon in the title. The dictionary definition of chameleon is “a changeable or inconstant person”. But it’s not about him, okay?

I know I said I often listen to Chameleon Day as part of a Talk Talk shuffle, but I just can’t hear it without Time its Time immediately following. They are definitely two songs, but there’s a bridge between them – do you hear it? It’s the subtlest bridge ever. And now I know what I’ll write about next.

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Have you heard the news?

“ People who impress you leave their tracks. I’m thinking of the Sixties, of The Small Faces and Steve Marriott, who used to sing in the highest registers of his voice. At the time I was thinking ‘God, his singing is fantastic. That’s what I want to do one day.” – Mark Hollis, as quoted in the book Happy Boys Happy! A Rock History of The Small Faces and Humble Pie

Thus the singer of The ReAction came to be. That young man singing “Have You Seen the News?” – well you recognise the song and you recognise the singer but that voice is just a bit higher than you’re used to, innit? And it’s surely no accident that those shaggy-haired paisley-shirted chaps in those first Talk Talk photos are giving more than just a vague Small Faces vibe. I mean, he’s not wrong about Steve Marriott. One of the greatest singers ever. And stylish too. Hard to not find him inspiring when you’re a music obsessed kid in 1960s England, one who had half a mind to be a singer one day himself.

Years later, when the punky Have You Seen The News had been repurposed as Have You Heard The News, that voice had dropped a bit but the angst and urgency was still there, especially live. Have a listen to the Florence 1984 performance. Go on. You know you want to. The tune has been transformed from guitar-punky to piano-spooky with that repeated keyboard line creeping, creeping, creeping up on you, until –

”it’s so hard to sleep at night”

It’s a cliche to say that every last drop of emotion was wrung out of that line that night on that tiny strobe-lit Italian stage. But I can’t think of any other way to say it. It think it might be one of their greatest tunes, with the keyboard stalking the singer and then that sneaky disco bassline dropping in behind it all – a song about a tragic accident has no business being so funky but there it is. Mark Hollis must have liked it too – he put it on his personally curated Natural Order compilation, the only song from the first album to make the cut. Not the only pre-Talk Talk, Marriott-voiced song to make it onto Natural Order, though.

But that is for another day.

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Taphead

“When do you know you know you know you learn do you die in sin born again”

This is the opening lyric of Taphead.

I had no idea what the words were when I first heard them, I didn’t even recognise them as words. Not words in English anyway. Just sounds, sounds that seemed to come from a place impossibly far away, impossibly lonely, impossibly dark.

I believe the opening to Taphead is when the strange and shadowy heart of Laughing Stock first properly revealed itself to me. It’s when the penny dropped that this album was something much more than Spirit of Eden part 2. Those lyrics that are nothing, and maybe everything, not quite sung, just whispered really – murmured like a prayer, one review said.

Mark Hollis said he was impressed by the way Malcolm Mooney of Can could sing nonsense lyrics and it ‘didn’t sound stupid’. The beginning of Taphead is his Malcom Mooney moment. Voice as instrument.Yes, there are lyrics, not nonsense; no need to enunciate though. Just enunciate the feeling is all.

“In any case, my lyrics are written about a character who is not myself. He is the one who feels the feelings, who expresses them. And curiously, when I sing these lyrics, when I close my eyes, I feel exactly the same things that he does.” – Mark Hollis quoted in Les Inrockuptibles, September 1991

Taphead is also the name of my blog, hosted on a kiwi blog site called Blogtown, and if I should suddenly disappear from Social Media for the transgression of being a human who cares about other humans and dares to say so, that’s where you’ll find me.