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Call in the Night Boys (Piano Version)

“The opening notes of Call In The Night Boy(s) are in no key at all…you see what [Hollis] allowed me to do: the piano starts with atonal intervals; then I go into some tonal stuff in five, six, seven keys; then I hit the chord bang and then he’s in. If you want to know how good a musician he was; listen to that; nobody else I know could have followed what I played because I don’t stay in the same key, I go into all kinds of stuff and all kinds of tempos…”

Unlike the album version, the ‘Piano Version’ of ‘Call in the Night Boy’ has not dated at all. […] the stark Ramocon arrangement is timeless and glacial, contains no chorus, and allows the listener to roam around the space of the track in the same way Talk Talk’s later work would do. “ Phil Ramocon and Ben Wardle discussing Call in the Night Boys (Piano version) in Mark Hollis: A Perfect Silence.

To compose even just a few sentences about a Talk Talk song generally requires listening to it on repeat for a few days. I’m not complaining, it’s no trouble; in fact it is always a pleasure. The fing is tho, Nigel, the fing is…

…close and repeated listening to a different Talk Talk song every week does tend to lead me to a similar conclusion each time: “This is incredible! It could be the best song they ever recorded!”

And I find myself in that place again today, listening to what is certainly the best thing they ever recorded before TFG arrived on the scene.

Fight me.

Call in the Night Boys – the “Piano Version” of Call in the Night Boy, released as the B side to My Foolish Friend – is simply an exceptional piece of music. Hidden away on the flip side of a between-albums-non-hit single. Did anyone even hear it, in the day? Truely a lost classic. I just can’t recall another ‘pop’ act releasing anything like this in 1983. Maybe Japan, if they still existed in 1983, which they didn’t. Maybe Kate Bush, although she seemed to be taking a bit of a Gap Year at that point.

Only Phil and Mark could have pulled this astonishingly singular and timeless track out of Hackney breakfasts, raw talent, and a bin bag of cassettes. I could listen to it over and over. I HAVE listened to it over and over. I may never stop.

Call in the Night Boys (Piano Version)

https://youtu.be/m2iBetfqoBo?si=G05Ityr60iaCZyX7

Indent: Cecil Taylor

https://youtu.be/TQ_UYNRKvBQ?si=MoJ1BBPRUpvO9YF1

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Piano

“Softly spoken, with his broad Tottenham accent sounding as fruitily at odds with the rarefied nature of his music as it ever has, he describes sitting at a piano hitting a single key for days on end, listening intently to the special cadences of the sound draining from a dying string. He will also enthuse about dissonance and Miles Davis and Ravel and Can and John Cage and Ornette Coleman and fail to mention a single other “pop” artist at any stage of our discussion.“ Mark Roland talking to Mark Hollis for Melody Maker, January 1998

‘Piano’ was (deliberately) the last piece of music I ever heard in stereo, that is, with two working ears. Seven years ago now.

What does the world sound like in mono? Non-spatial, directionless; all sounds come from everywhere and nowhere and who-knows-where. This does make a stereo recording mostly redundant. But not in the case of Piano by John Cope for Allinson Brown. A room, Mark Hollis, a piano, and Phill Brown in charge of mic placement. The space is there, all of it, even in mono,  even the air in that room, made audible by the slow fading notes.

Why are those notes so slow? Has Hollis taken his whole ‘silence’ trip too far? Not at all. This was originally recorded for a series of art installations, with Piano being played on a loop in the exhibition space. See, it all makes sense now, doesn’t it? One day soon I will find a gallery to sit in and listen to Piano, just for the vibe.

For now the parks and pathways of my neighbourhood are the visual accompaniment to Piano. Birdsong, summer cicadas and the kids at the school at the end of the street bleed through, filling those long silences with the sounds of life. It’s no accident Hollis mentioned John Cage to Melody Maker.

“There’s no such thing as silence. What they thought was silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds. You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering the roof, and during the third the people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.”
John Cage, speaking about the premiere of 4’33”

Piano – Youtube

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=niUH0MfeGZY&si=Wbi22nbDh5pvtCni

Piano – Bandcamp

https://av1music.bandcamp.com/track/piano-2

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The Daily Planet

 

“Hollis was the singer of Talk Talk, and the only solo album he did was a masterpiece. It was pitched at such a low level you had to bend in to hear it, the same way you had to with Terry back at the Savoy. Hollis was equally seductive.

A band backed Hollis, but barely, like a phantom band, with a series of soft jazz chords, while Hollis sang in a quivering croon. He sounded a bit upset, disconsolate, like he was singing himself to sleep after a particularly trying day. I liked his tone of resignation. I liked the fact that the music was so withdrawn, that it had an inverse power beyond the average rocker. His album was concrete evidence to me that my fresh way of working was right, that quietness could be just as effective as bashing. Quietness was like a person stealing into your room.” – Shayne Carter ‘Dead People I Have Known’

The Daily Planet begins like a person stealing into your room. Atonal random scattered woodwind notes. After what seems like longer than you might expect, the woodwind is joined by the rest of the ‘phantom band’ playing a tuneless melange that eventually coalesces into a complex and delightful composition, almost a dubby waltz if you can believe it. I say ‘dubby’ because down low there is a bassoon refrain- is it a bassoon? I am just guessing, what would I know? – whatever it is, I hear Augustus Pablo in that maybe-bassoon, and once I hear that I can’t unhear it, I don’t want to. I also hear the germ of ARB Section 1 in its wandering start, and its lyrical theme has the vibe of an old ReAction tune. The Daily Planet – stolen from Clark Kent or Arthur Lee? I guess Arthur Lee stole it from Clark Kent. Whichever, Mark Hollis still doesn’t like to read the news.

The lyrics are otherwise as obtuse as ever and include difficult words like rape and pain, but Mark Hollis swallows them into silence or turns them into delicate notes, blurring hardness into soft sound. Another instrument in the phantom band. The Daily Planet is a high point in an already stellar songbook – legitimately a masterpiece. It – and the album – being deleted by the record company after 3 months is just so insulting. No wonder Mr Hollis gave the industry the finger.

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=X9fiNS8tKHk&si=Ye8uG-1ku4wbjh3q

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Candy

“Mark has a classic English voice, reminiscent of early Spencer Davis. It’s perfect for the slow numbers like ‘Carolyn’ and ‘Candy’ the latter of which will be the band’s debut single. It’s a sad song that broods and dreams splendidly.” – Vicky Jolly reviewing a very early Talk Talk gig in Sounds, 1982.

Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I consider the counterfactual where Talk Talk’s first single was the epic Candy rather than the DOA Mirror Man. I was bummed out when I first read the review above and discovered that they had actually considered Candy as a debut single. I think it would have been great.

By 1982, both songs had been around for a while – in Mark Hollis’s musical world anyway. They were remnants of the ReAction setlist, Mirror Man mostly remade by the new band, Candy much the same as it was when performed by The ReAction. Both songs were recorded for Talk Talk’s first set of demos. The vocal on that demo version of Candy is spectacular – or, should I say, vocals. The harmonies OMG. Who is that? Simon? Paul? Hollis double-tracked? It’s hard to say but it sounds dreamy. In fact, it broods and dreams splendidly.

So why wasn’t it their first single? My guess is that it just fell out of favour. Maybe they (and by ‘they’ I probably mean Mark Hollis, who always appeared to have the last word) didn’t like the production, maybe they were just sick of it, in the way they never seemed to get sick of Talk Talk, the second single. Talk Talk was seemingly played at every gig ever, whereas Candy dropped out of the setlist almost immediately.

Poor Candy. Not only left by the wayside, but unfortunately numbered amongst the songs in the TT catalogue rumoured to be about heroin. Why was this such a recurring theme? Was it an eighties thing? A post punk thing? Why did it attach itself to four handsome young men in white suits? I mean, I hate to even mention it, honestly, because I have no wish to revive that speculation; from this distance I am dumbfounded by it. Maybe it was just the obtuseness of the Hollis lyrics and his vocal tone – ‘What’s that about, then? Sounds sad, maybe drugs? Yeah that works.”

Candy, forever a mystery. But a beautiful mystery.

Candy (demo)https://youtu.be/eEBCAtvKbAk?si=kimq7i1ZsWxjFPFP

Candy – The ReActionhttps://youtu.be/uoPUeEl0lJE?si=9NEMOaRU_0GBOhkT

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New Grass

“A few days after this experience, I was listening to [New Grass] and something sounded familiar. Harris was playing that exact same rhythm on his ride cymbal and snare. But instead of being sonically surrounded by energetic poly-rhythms and call-and-response vocals, his rhythm was inhabiting its own space among languid melodies, a bed of organ tones, and patient vocals. A closer listen revealed that his kick drum was, at times, percolating in syncopation with the ride rhythm and then countering it, much like the way the various rhythms of the African ensemble pull and release against each other. Harris seemed to be doing this in order to divide up the insistent 3/4 time, to reinforce the downbeat of the snare drum. Pushing and pulling the rhythm like this gives the song it’s forward motion but also props up the back beat.

I’m not sure if he was cognisant of the parallels between what he was doing and the ancient rhythms of the Ewe tribe, but it doesn’t matter – what he did was too creatively genuine to be guilty of “exoticism”. It’s completely brilliant, and, in my opinion, one of the best drum performances in rock history. “ – Mike Weis, “Spirit of Talk Talk”, 2012.

I thought I loved the paintings of Roy Lichtenstein but I had only ever seen them reproduced page size so how could I even know? Until last week, when I found myself in a room for the first time ever with an actual Roy Lichtenstein painting. Now I definitely love the paintings of Roy Lichtenstein. It is the scale that makes them make sense. Small, in a book, his paintings appear mechanical, machine made, a screen of dots. But at their true size you can lean in close and see that every single dot is hand painted.

New Grass is a song that wants to keep us at a distance, admiring its incredible beauty, unable to bring the dots into focus. It doesn’t want us to see the brush marks. But do lean in closer for a bit, like Mike Weis did when he noticed the brush marks made by Lee Harris.

New Grass is hard to focus on, isn’t it? Like the faintest stars, the ones you can’t see if you look straight at them. It’s a mirage, a chimera; go now and listen intently to every moment of New Grass. Bet you can’t.

New Grass fan videohttps://youtu.be/BI_c7hflLhY?si=D9EK9PVgYmbkBdVg

Roy Lichtenstein https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/features/roy-lichtenstein-learning-resource

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My Foolish Friend

“Could there exist a Totally Random Man? Could a single human so develop his capabilities that he might vary his soul from hour to hour at whim?” – The Dice Man, Luke Rhinehart

When Talk Talk started chatting to the music press about their second album, the title of that album was The Chameleon Hour. It was 1983 and Boy George loudly and persistently claimed the word Chameleon for himself, and so The Chameleon Hour necessarily became It’s My Life.

I don’t know if My Foolish Friend, released in the year between The Party’s Over and the (then) Chameleon Hour, was ever expected to be included on that second album. If it was, it never made it. I think of it as their John the Baptist single, because of the B-Side (that’s something for another day) and these lines:

“My foolish friend, don’t tell me if I’m right…when my chameleon hour…has already started”

If interviews at the time are to be believed (and TT interviews with the English music press should always be taken with a grain of salt), the Chameleon Hour is a concept Mark Hollis extrapolated from the book The Dice Man, a big influence on the general theme of It’s My Life (and most obviously Such A Shame). In an early version of My Foolish Friend, recorded for the BBC, after the line about the chameleon hour there’s another lyrical Easter egg: “Say the word! It’s not too late! Tomorrow’s started!”

By the time the single was produced, that line was gone, replaced by what sounds like a bugle sounding “Charge!” ahead of the last chorus. It’s a highlight of the song, which Talk Talk never seem to have bothered to try to reproduce live.

Despite that, My Foolish Friend, a Hollis/Brenner co-write, often featured in the live shows, right up until that last ever gig in Salamanca. The fact that Mark Hollis kept Simon’s song in the setlist – earning Simon performance credits – gives me heart that he wasn’t entirely mean-spirited towards his former band-mate. Or perhaps it’s just that Simon wrote an excellent song that they all enjoyed playing til the very last.

the official video:

https://youtu.be/nta13TQKDhI?si=qKBw0Mg9o0x3b8PU

the Salamanca 1986 performance

https://youtu.be/RqODsmEz0gM?si=ofJY7-Yfjjb6VAaA

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I Don’t Believe in You

“Despite having been involved from the early compositional stage, Curnow’s contributions only ended up on two tracks: ‘Give It Up’ and ‘I Don’t Believe in You’. “My main contributions on that album were playing recorder in the ensemble, some of the more major synth riffs … and most of what sounds like the guitar solos, which were played on a Jupiter-8 through guitar amps. I think Mark liked the irony of this, as well as it making for a particularly different kind of solo.”

As designated guitarist on the album, McIntosh would feel the pain of this: “One of the banes of my life has been ‘I love the solo you do on “I Don’t Believe in You”, which is, of course, a synthesizer! It’s Ian Curnow with a [Jupiter 8] and a fuzz pedal.“ – From ‘Mark Hollis – A Perfect Silence’

Robbie McIntosh shouldn’t feel too bad, really. The (acoustic) guitar that he does actually play on that track is extremely pretty. The ‘solo’ he is praised for is also wonderful. I am not at all a Pink Floyd fan, however, like every other kiwi teenager in the last 50 years, I spent a fair amount of my high school years listening to Dark Side of the Moon. Ian Curnow’s solo in “I Don’t Believe in You” sounds very Floyd-esque to me. I bet Mark Hollis just loved that.

Me, I just love this video.

https://youtu.be/R-W2m0bYTT4?si=CI7QRvq2oA0vZQPY

The first time I saw it I was struck by how timeless it is. Talk Talk, with their low-key denim-and-shaggy-hair styles look like for all the world like an early nineties indie band. I would even say they sound like an early nineties indie band. I Don’t Believe in You, even with a ‘synth solo’, doesn’t sound like any other pop tune released in 1986. It’s extraordinarily mellow, matching the somnambulant pace of its nearly-namesake, I Believe in You. Outside of the title, the two tracks mirror each other in other ways – they could be written to the same person, at different stages of an addiction. I Don’t Believe in You – never trust a junkie. In both there is that signature churchy organ, and guess-the-instrument trickery – the guitar is a synth, the synth is a choir. Allegedly Mark Hollis put Ian Curnow through all kinds of hell to get the synth sounds he wanted on TCOS, and it was worth it, Ian, so, thank you. 

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Pictures of Bernadette (dance mix)

Bernadette!
Bernadette!

(We shall overcome

We shall overcome

We shall overcome )

How can I accept
I’ve given everything I had and still you left

Change
I’m no closer
How can I reproach her?

Recollection sees the sun upon your hair
How I feel it, love we used to share

Recollection sees the sun upon your hair
How I feel it, love we used to share

Bernadette!

Bernadette!
Pictures of Bernadette
Pictures of Bernadette
Pictures of Bernadette
I’ve got a message from you to say you’ve left

Bernadette!
Pictures of Bernadette
I’ve got a message from you to say you’ve left

Pictures of Bernadette
I’ve got a message from you to say you’ve left

I’ve got a message from you to say you’ve left

Bernadette!
Bernadette!

Mark Hollis was probably a fan of B sides. The flipside of a single; either it was spare-album-track filler or it was an otherwise unavailable hidden gem, something you’d put on a mixtape to impress your mates. There is such a gem on the B side of a Love single, it’s called Laughing Stock, and that is pretty much all I am basing the above Hollis assumption on. Let’s just say it’s an educated guess tho. Talk Talk did love an exclusive B side. They certainly recorded a bunch of ‘em.

Pictures of Bernadette (the name Bernadette most likely nicked from mod faves The Four Tops) was first released as the B side of Give it Up. Unusually, it’s a B side with a dance mix. Who goes to the trouble of making a club mix of a B side?! TFG is who. Go on now and listen to it!

You’ll hear the sound of children playing, creepily distorted vocal samples, an irresistible afrobeat, and Hollis shouting “Bernadette!” like a voodoo priest casting spells (or like a member of the Four Tops). It is an absolute banger and it is mental. Between the bubbling percussion and the screeching guitars, it sounds like Fela Kuti dancing with Lou Reed. Or Tom Verlaine. Heck. I can’t really say who the (multiple) unhinged guitar breaks on the dance mix sound like, because they don’t sound like anyone. Then again, they may just sound like someone who might eventually record a one note solo on a malfunctioning Variophon and then realise that that solo is the end of the band.

The FourTops: Bernadette

https://youtu.be/G9KEycAFI3M?si=gGdRTvczFM4X7mwg

Pictures of Bernadette dance mix

https://youtu.be/taOaluUdyLU?si=SPp2T-Kx7dsS1w4x

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Mirror Man

“Mark always very resistant to any idea that he would dress up, especially clothes that he didn’t really feel comfortable in. He was still a mod at heart; he used to look like Paul Weller – it was the slip-ons with a tassle, tight jeans and a shirt, that’s what he dressed in.” – from Mark Hollis:A Perfect Silence

Out in the street today
We’re parading around
We’re the height of the fashion
And she laughs ‘cos we look the same
And follow all of the rules

Before Google, what did people do when they wanted to know about something? They went to the library, got a book out. When I was 15 I got a life-changing book out from my local library. It was about Modernists (Mods) and I was instantly hooked. Mod dressing wasn’t just about style, it was about detail. Really obsessive detail that only other Mods would notice. How many buttons on your cuff? Side vents or centre? (Side is the correct answer, btw). What fabric is that shirt? I love that line in The Sea and The Sand (from Quadrophenia) about a “touch of seersucker”. So Mod. And I love the line in Mirror Man about following all of the rules. Also, so Mod. Mark Hollis was down with Mod. His general detail-obsessed vibe was Mod, and his shaggy hair tidy shirt tight jeans and loafers uniform was legitimately Mod.

The ReAction, who were lumped in with the whole “Mod Revival” thing, (and maybe the singers ‘look’ had a bit to do with that) had a tune called Out On The Streets Today, which, as you can probably tell from the title, was an embryonic version of Mirror Man. Lyrically, at least. Not to be confused with the Police-y version you may have heard that is often credited to The ReAction but turns out to be from that between-bands period where Mark Hollis was writing songs and making demos. So, by the time this was (rather oddly) chosen as Talk Talk’s (barely promoted, not even a video) debut single in 1982 he’d been singing that line about being the height of the fashion for four years already – and he was still singing it at his last live gigs in 1986, chambray shirt untucked, hair shaggier than ever, looking more like Kurt Cobain than Steve Marriott, but still a Mod underneath it all, I am quite certain.

 

The Who – The Sea and the Sand https://youtu.be/rObg-I4IWYA?si=_hPgSz6YTrptgnuc

Mirror Man https://youtu.be/BVz1w2qy3_M?si=03GfZue7wwMXDk96

 

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Caroline

“What made this bridge crossing even more memorable was when the driver of the limousine (courtesy of EMI records) asked us if we had visited New York before. Mark Hollis told him we hadn’t; the driver glanced into his rear view mirror at us and with a broad grin said, ‘It’s Like a Jungle sometimes’. Lee Harris and myself instinctively started punching the air and like two over excited rappers shouted back at him ‘It makes me wonder how I keep from going under’. “ – RustinMan, November 2019

You might think that the most synth-y, most time-locked music Talk Talk recorded is to be found on The Party’s Over, but you would be wrong. It’s not there. No, the most 1980’s-sounding thing they committed to tape (that we know of) is the demo track (rather confusingly) titled Caroline.

It bleeps and blinks and plinkity plonks for nearly six minutes, Mark Hollis intoning proto-lyrics that would eventually morph into Living in Another World, over the top of the minimal synth backing. I say intoning because the delivery is intense but not as melodic as you’d expect, he’s just about shouting in places. Those very particular synths and drum sounds put me in mind of the electro groove of The Message by Grandmaster Flash, released just a year previous to the recording of this demo. We know (from the above RustinMan post) that the Talk Talk rhythm section were big Flash fans, so was the Caroline demo inspired by New York hip-hop and is Mark Hollis rapping? Hah, of course not, but it is amusing to consider.

‘Caroline’ was released into the wild via YouTube upload in 2020. I remember what it felt like, hearing it for the first time at the end of that unusual year. I was listening through headphones, walking to work, and it literally stopped me in my tracks. I may have made a noise. Something like wow or omg. Or wtf. I didn’t believe I was listening to Talk Talk, and then the vocals kicked in and there was no doubt who it was. Five and three quarter minutes later it was my new favourite song. I think I even made a ‘best of the year’ list just so I could put ‘Caroline’ at number one. It was like some sort of Christmas Miracle. What will the 2025 Christmas Miracle be?

Caroline (demo 1983)https://youtu.be/snhNcd1GTfU?si=Ybrzoe8u4UV5J0ZL

The Message https://youtu.be/gYMkEMCHtJ4?si=mAe4SPa8tOJ39UnV Continue reading “Caroline”