Tag: Talk Talk

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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”

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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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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.