“Take my hand
Colours seem so black inside your head”
Another terrific opening couplet from the king of them. There’s a whole story in those two lines. It’s not so far removed from “Lay your hands into my hands, I’ve been rude”, another two lines containing multitudes. .
Hands are a recurring feature in Pop-Era Hollis lyrics – in Such A Shame they are trembling, in Dum Dum Girl there are coins inside, and in Living in Another World the hand held may contain angels. Even later in the piece, in Post-Everything-Hollis era, there’s “Weighted my hand, get hard hit to sin, to sail” which also might be an incredible short story in a pair of lyrics or maybe it means nothing at all but it sounds right.
Again A Game …Again – maybe this too means nothing at all but just sounds right. You don’t have to read too many Talk Talk lyrics before you start to notice the homophones, or near-homophones – like the title of this song. Again a game with words, again.
Another Only-Ever-A-B-Side, this was even more exclusive in that it was Only-Ever-A-B-Side in Canada and America, on the flip of Its My Life. The rest of us got an album track on the back of that single – Does Caroline Know? Did we get ripped off? It’s hard to say. I like an exclusive B-Side generally, but compared to the bucolic and delightful Does Caroline Know, Again A Game…Again sounds like it could almost be a leftover from The Party’s Over. It’s very nearly a banger, synthy and upbeat, more 1982 than 1984. It probably sounded – at the time – like a song the American market expected to hear from a British ‘New Wave’ band. It’s almost like they wrote it specially.
It’s not generic tho, unless the genre is Talk Talk.
Those phonetically precise, downcast lyrics:
There are times I confess
I’m not easy to accept
The trumpety bass. Big Harris beats. It’s all so unmistakably Talk Talk.
And just to be reassure you that it’s really not a counterfeit, the master’s signature can be seen,or rather, heard, in the dying seconds of the song, where everything drops out, besides a plinkity plonk scrabble of slowly fragmenting piano notes, raindrops in a tin bucket. Yeah that’s a Hollis Song for sure.
Again A Game…Again https://youtu.be/lmgrxgHTNwI?si=ZXYLtHd8ZRiyaEzW