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Does Caroline Know?

“There are an awful lot of synthesizers on the second album, that’s true. But we use the synthesizer for organic sounds, not synthetic. I want to make that clear. In the string arrangements, we are guided by composers for the violin like Debussy. We can’t afford an orchestra, but we can use synthesizer in an economically responsible way, and move in that direction.”
Vogue Italy: July/August 1985

Does Caroline Know? kicks off with hand drums, burbling and skipping like water over rocks in a stream, and then the bassline enters, dancing and rumbling, a deep-voiced frog chorus; the synthesised strings sound like sunlight reflecting off the bubbling river of percussion, and then swoop and dip like birds diving for bugs off the surface, and to complete the bucolic picture the fade-out fills up with electronic tweets and chirps of insects and birds and other creatures inhabiting this vivid soundscape.

Floating above it all – because where else? – is the sad and dreamy vocal, made even more melancholy by its summery surrounds. ‘Every little accident takes time” drifts further into the ether on an angelic harmony worthy of the Beach Boys. You would expect a close-listener like Mark Hollis to know and appreciate the Beach Boys and particularly their magnum opus, Pet Sounds, home of Caroline, No. I guessed Hollis pilfered and edited that song title for himself, and was stoked when I finally found the quote where he said that he was a Beach Boys fan. Gotcha!

Does Caroline Know? wasn’t ever a single or a club favourite (despite being extremely danceable), but it’s a complex and glorious composition that was a live staple for as long as Talk Talk were a live act, where it was often extended, jammed out, truly wonderful – for sure one of their best album tracks.

Mark: “New wave. I like that, it’s just like being called contemporary. That’s fine, it dates you to a period rather than a type. ‘Pop band’ is such a horrible description. To me it means bland, disposable, instant, not very long lasting. We’re an albums band, I only worked it out today – it’s because we don’t release our best tracks as singles!” – Mark Hollis talking to Betty Page for Record Mirror 1984

 

Does Caroline Know?https://youtu.be/D78T-E7nXcc?si=e13X1IBOuPVcfs8d

 

Caroline, Nohttps://youtu.be/4OCja0WBWYA?si=78oG6nvr8JEMFCR7

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Another Word

In a song catalogue made up of tunes that feel like outliers, rarities and sidesteps, perhaps the greatest rarity of all is Another Word. Not because it is a particularly unusual piece of music or because it is a deep cut but because it is the only song in the entire Talk Talk catalogue not credited to a Hollis. Mark Hollis does sing it, of course, but they’re not his lyrics – they’re Paul Webb’s. With hindsight we can see how lucky – if not downright flukey – it was for Paul to get his tune, with its sole writing credit, onto the first album. I bet that, at the time, he was stoked but figured it would set the tone for contributions to following Talk Talk albums.

The Party’s Over was not any sort of template for what was to come.

Another Word may have remained just an album track, barely if ever in the live set, were it not for it being picked up (in 1984) to be used as the theme for the German TV show ‘Derrick’. Another Word was duly released as a single – just in Germany and, weirdly, the Philippines – with the also under-represented-on-stage Candy on the B-side.

The gift that Germany gave the world by choosing to release Another Word as a single are the pop show promotion performances, two of them surviving on You Tube for us to enjoy 40 odd years later

The WWF Club playback features not only a fan stage invasion – with flowers! – but also Mark Hollis deadpanning the lyrics direct to camera, slowly  hitting a huge tambourine. I say deadpanning but there’s a lot of smirking, especially when he sees Paul giving it beans on a – what is it, a xylophone? Lee is hiding behind his kit. For Formal Eins, no such luck – he and Paul share the xylophone this time, Paul singing and dancing – it’s his song! – Lee seems flummoxed: Mark can’t look at his bandmates without losing it, eventually giving into hysterics and failing to hide giggles behind his hand. Paul is all energy, working hard, resolutely not looking at Mark, who is the naughty kid in the back row, trying to put you off your game by laughing during Morning Talk.

Despite Mark Hollis’s best efforts to undermine the promotion, Another Word made it to 25 in the German singles charts. Congratulations Paul!

 

Another Word (Formel Eins)https://youtu.be/n_pPQMxmnmU?si=8NJaWkHpTRmzGWG9

 

Another Word (Cologne)https://youtu.be/lqQSqXjETz0?si=JUt1xuYqx88n1IOr

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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.

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Time It’s Time

“Lyric writing is very important. […] What matters to me is that I believe the lyrics I’ve written are good. Other people are a secondary consideration. I’ve no ambitions, I’m not trying to say anything to anyone.” Mark Hollis quoted in Electronics & Music Maker: March 1986

“Nobody knows how long
Rustling leaves unrhyme
Lullaby breeze unsung
Babel of dreams unwinds in memory”

The first time I saw the opening lines of Time It’s Time written down, in the deliberately illegible script which makes up the lyric sheet for The Colour of Spring, I thought to myself “damn that’s some poetic shit. I wonder if there’s any more?” There is. But this is my first and therefore my favourite of Mark Hollis’s musings about love death and the hereafter. That might sound pretty dark but I still find this song to be just so uplifting. I reckon that’s all down to that insistent, forever repeating musical motif that drifts slowly upwards in a kind of intensifying spiral, a seabird caught in a thermal.

After two albums of energetic new wave emoting Mark Hollis found his inside voice for The Colour of Spring. In particular he found it for the verses of Time It’s Time. Not only are the lyrics poetic as fuck, the delivery of them is compelling even though – or perhaps because – it is as fragile and iridescent as an insect wing.

Tim and Mark stopped just short of ripping out the kitchen sink to create the sound of Time It’s Time. Massed recorders, a choir that might have been nicked from Carl Orff, a variophon solo, Lee Harris channelling a premonition of trip hop, and all of it trailing off with a churchy organ that you might miss if you weren’t listening out for it. It seems it should be a hot mess like the scrawl on the lyric sheet, but miraculously it’s perfect. A perfect end to a perfect album.

“What’s your favorite last song on an album? : “Time It’s Time” by Talk Talk from The Colour of Spring. This is my favorite album by Talk Talk […]. “Time It’s Time” is such a remarkable example of melancholy and at the same time it’s full of optimism and the call to keep going. “- John Grant, April 2019, undertheradarmag.com

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Chameleon Day

“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.

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Have you heard the news?

“ People who impress you leave their tracks. I’m thinking of the Sixties, of The Small Faces and Steve Marriott, who used to sing in the highest registers of his voice. At the time I was thinking ‘God, his singing is fantastic. That’s what I want to do one day.” – Mark Hollis, as quoted in the book Happy Boys Happy! A Rock History of The Small Faces and Humble Pie

Thus the singer of The ReAction came to be. That young man singing “Have You Seen the News?” – well you recognise the song and you recognise the singer but that voice is just a bit higher than you’re used to, innit? And it’s surely no accident that those shaggy-haired paisley-shirted chaps in those first Talk Talk photos are giving more than just a vague Small Faces vibe. I mean, he’s not wrong about Steve Marriott. One of the greatest singers ever. And stylish too. Hard to not find him inspiring when you’re a music obsessed kid in 1960s England, one who had half a mind to be a singer one day himself.

Years later, when the punky Have You Seen The News had been repurposed as Have You Heard The News, that voice had dropped a bit but the angst and urgency was still there, especially live. Have a listen to the Florence 1984 performance. Go on. You know you want to. The tune has been transformed from guitar-punky to piano-spooky with that repeated keyboard line creeping, creeping, creeping up on you, until –

”it’s so hard to sleep at night”

It’s a cliche to say that every last drop of emotion was wrung out of that line that night on that tiny strobe-lit Italian stage. But I can’t think of any other way to say it. It think it might be one of their greatest tunes, with the keyboard stalking the singer and then that sneaky disco bassline dropping in behind it all – a song about a tragic accident has no business being so funky but there it is. Mark Hollis must have liked it too – he put it on his personally curated Natural Order compilation, the only song from the first album to make the cut. Not the only pre-Talk Talk, Marriott-voiced song to make it onto Natural Order, though.

But that is for another day.