“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.