“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.