Month: November 2025

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It’s My Life

“It’s My Life, for all its synth hooks and seagull noises and Mark Hollis’s tremulous vocal, derives its force from the drive provided by Paul Webb’s fretless bass, the song’s restless heart. Without a guitar to compete with, the bass dominates the track completely. No Doubt’s flat cover, which replaced most of the keyboards with Tom Dumont’s guitars, only proved how good the original arrangement was. Credit, then, to the best rhythm section ever to come out of Southend, Essex.”
It’s My Life – Talk Talk | songs from so deep May 2005

Music charts used to mean something. They were a true (enough) measure of a real (enough) thing – this many sales, that much airplay, all of these dance floors filled. If charts used to mean something, the Dance/Disco Top 80 may have meant the most – how many people are dancing to this song? Not just buying it, not just listening to it, but actually physically reacting to it, interacting, dancing and happy.

The Dance/Disco Top 80. A clunky name for a chart. More recently it was Dance Club Songs but I like to think of it as the Music Happiness Index.

For a week in May of 1984, It’s My Life sat at the top of that US Dance/Disco Top 80. Number one. The most popular song in the clubs that week. It made a lot of people want to dance. It reckon it probably still does. That bassline is irresistible, is it not?

There are a ton of reasons to love the music of Talk Talk. That they made great dance tracks, music for nightclubs and discos, is a good reason. Mark Hollis might have railed against Talk Talk being categorised as ‘just’ dance music but dance music is important for humans! And Talk Talk were so good at it! How could they not be, with that rhythm section? And Hollis singing about his first love (music!) is adorable, emotional, melodic, and forever losing his toque on the playback. Because even he cannot resist that bassline.

“A Love Supreme is for me the ultimate album title. It says everything that music should be. It’s My Life, the title of our second album, came the closest to that ideology, without duplicating it. Because let’s face it, what more can you say about my music than: it’s my life?” -Oor, September 1984.

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Crying in the Rain

“And it feels like I’ve been crying in the rain.
And it looks like I’ve been crying in the rain.”

There is a famous Everly Brothers song called Crying in the Rain. The subject cries in the rain so that no one will see his tears. Boys don’t cry, right?

The Mark Hollis song of the same name, recorded in that apparently magic and creative time between the end of The ReAction and the start of Talk Talk, takes that premise and pulls it into a darker place. What does crying in the rain feel like? What does crying in the rain look like? Nothing. It doesn’t look like anything at all – just rain. Where the Everly Brothers are actually crying in the rain, in the Hollis song it is metaphorical. “It looks LIKE I’ve been crying in the rain” – I’m heartbroken and no one can see it; I might as well be crying in the rain, my pain is invisible to the world.

When this demo was rediscovered and shared with Talk Talk fans on the interwebs, Mark Hollis claimed copyright and had it taken down. But too late, it was in the world. You might speculate as to why he didn’t ever officially release it. Maybe he thought it was shit.

It’s not shit.

Just check out the comments sections on the many You Tube uploads. Hollis fans discover it and their minds are blown. What is this? When was it made? Why is it so beautiful? Why can’t I stop listening to it?

It goes like this: one minute you are marvelling that Mark Hollis wrote the saddest song ever written – I Believe in You – but then you find out that he wrote a tune that is somehow even more devastating. Ten years earlier. And he never recorded it beyond a demo, never released it, didn’t seem to want anyone to even hear it.

It’s the ultimate lost classic. I hear entire genres of downbeat slowcore miserable-ism kicking off with this tune. It’s slow – maybe even slower than Nick Cave’s version of By The Time I Get To Phoenix – with a fairy-dusting of keyboards and faraway harmonies backing Hollis’s lonesome voice, singing in a slightly higher key than usual but still somehow so, so, low. There are hints of Pink Floyd in the guitar break, so it’s no surprise when the algorithm offers Pink Floyd next.

But instead I hit ‘Replay’.

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The Party’s Over

“The Party’s Over” was of course the title of a famous Jules Styne song, first publicly sung by Judy Holliday in the 1956 musical The Bells Are Ringing, and later interpreted by Nat King Cole, Doris Day, Shirley Bassey, Dean Martin, Lesley Gore, and many others. It’s a staple of the resilience-through-melancholy genre, a not-quite-heartbroken torch song. “The candles flicker and dim… take off your make-up… it’s all over, my friend…” One can hypothesise about its appeal to Hollis.” – The Independent: October 8th 2012

It’s no stretch to figure that the original “The Party’s Over” played some part in inspiring the Talk Talk tune of the same name. Not only was Mark Hollis a serial song-title stealer (Caroline, No; The Gift; Laughing Stock; Talk Talk) but he was a big fan of old movie musicals – he once said he’d like to recreate the famous dance scene from Singing in the Rain. He was probably pulling our leg tho, huh? Or maybe not.

Whatever the inspiration for the title, the tune itself is truely epic – my favourite from the debut album. I love the live version captured in Florence in 1984. In the TV recording of this gig the lighting is so bad that Lee Harris is all but invisible and Mark Hollis spends much of the evening in the shadows destroying a tambourine.

Talk Talk began and ended their career playing in the dark, so I s’pose they prefer it.

Mark Hollis breathily introduces The Party’s Over: has he been dancing? Everybody is dancing. Jeep Hook is a dancing fool. But Mark Hollis dancing, surely that’s not a thing. Oh but it is. Earlier he’d introduced Dum Dum Girl with “this is a track I heard in a club last night”. This gig looks and sounds like he never left the club.

The Party’s Over, as played in Florence, is maybe half a beat faster than the album version and Hollis sings it with great gusto between enthusiastic head nods, like a Drinking Bird toy. You know the one. It’s not just his head that’s moving. He has a groove on. This song is for dancing, it’s so irresistible, even the singer can’t resist it. It’s a monster. It’s a banger. It’s all those things. Is it raining music? Mark Hollis and Talk Talk, just singin’, singin’ in the rain.

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Inheritance

“Talk Talk wrote great songs: this compilation is a splendid reminder of that fact. But they were also an extraordinary bunch of musicians who cannily surrounded themselves with further great players […]most of their releases after 1985 featured recordings where the songcraft and the performance were inseparable, inextricably intertwined, and the results were transcendent. Covering Talk Talk is therefore as fraught with the likelihood of failure as covering My Bloody Valentine – the originals contain a secret ingredient, so one’s only hope is to come up with an entirely new recipe that doesn’t even try to compete.” – The Independent, October 8th 2012, reviewing the Talk Talk covers compilation ’Spirit of Talk Talk’.

There are only two tracks I can bring myself to listen to from the above-mentioned compilation: the instrumental version of April 5th and the Recoil cover of Inheritance, partially voiced by the legendary and much-lauded Jamaican poet, Linton Kwesi Johnson. All of the other cover versions simply make me cringe and crave the originals.

Recoil’s version of Inheritance is – up to a point – so vastly different to the heavenly Talk Talk track that it may as well be another song entirely and LKJ’s whispered narration is the key to that difference.

I am a huge LKJ fan and have been since I first heard his fiercely political poetry as a teenager. I believe that this may be the only recorded instance of LKJ performing someone else’s words. I’m sure he wouldn’t have bothered if those words were anything less than spectacularly great poetry. If proof was ever needed that respect is due to Mark Hollis for the quality of his lyrics, look no further than LKJ reciting Inheritance, where that respect is surely given.

As for the rest of the track, the dubby backing is edgy and tripped-out, and Paul Marshall (Lone Wolf) chimes in with his best effort to channel Mark Hollis, but it’s still not a patch on the Talk Talk original, with its classical breakdowns, off-kilter piano, gossamer organ, grungy guitars and, well, the Hollis vocal, how to describe? Fragile but powerful, delicate but strong, angsty but never pitiful. Can’t be copied, don’t even try.

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A Life (1895-1915)

“The timescale referred to in the album’s incredible centrepiece, “A Life (1895-1915)”, spans the turn of the century 20 years in which the Victorian Age got trampled into the mud of the trenches. “The dates were taken from … it is the First World War and it’s just that at the time I read a few books about that period, like All Quiet On The Western Front, Testament of Youth; and I think those dates – I might be wrong, but I’ve got a feeling they were Vera Brittain’s boyfriend. It was more that idea that you’re only one year into it and then you’re topped.”

I haven’t read Testament of Youth but I did watch the movie ‘1917’ recently and I could not stop thinking about “A Life (1895-1915)”. If you haven’t seen it, ‘1917’ is a stunning piece of filmmaking about the First World War, and if you haven’t heard it, “ A Life” is a stunning piece of music about the First World War. It doesn’t seem right to call it a song. It is more than that. It’s the longest track on ‘Mark Hollis : Mark Hollis’, with the least lyrics. Like the rest of the album, it is beautiful, haunting and startling. I recall that on first listen I was surprised, maybe even taken aback, by the sound of a woman’s voice. Being so surprised by that made me realise what a singularly blokey musical world Talk Talk and Mark Hollis inhabit. It’s not that I think they don’t like women, but aside from the very occasional session musician and some female choristers, there just aren’t many chicks in the mix are there? Perhaps because Mark Hollis sings so extremely quietly across the entire album, even though the girly vocal is hushed it feels like a duet, two people murmuring at each other about the human tragedy of war. People wonder what she is saying, I’ve seen it described on lyric sites as “(woman speaking French)” but I’ve also seen Phill Brown say “it was sposed to sound like whispering” and he would know. Although, if she is whispering in French, that would certainly be in context.
“A Life” is such an evocative and desolate piece of music – you just know that if Mark Hollis’s score for Peacock (ARB Section 1 is a fragment of it) had ever been used it would have been absolutely devastating.