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My experience with Talk Talk

It was 1986, late in the afternoon as I drove through the Adelaide Hills.I’d been driving for 15 hours from Sydney. I was fiddling with the tuning knob on my car radio, vainly searching for a radio station playing music I recognised. I found something I liked and settled back into the seat to while away the last section of the trip to Adelaide. The name of the radio station has long since been forgotten, but something they played that afternoon has stayed with me to this day and started me down a path that changed the way I viewed Music.

 

The program was called 5 at 5, 5 songs by the same artist at 5 in the afternoon. The group was an English band named “Talk Talk” and the 5 songs were from their new album “Colour of Spring”.

 

The 5 songs lit me up in a way that very few pieces of music had at the time and have till this day. I remember thinking “Wow”

 

On my return to Sydney, I rushed out and bought the LP. Remember those ?

 

Anyway, as life continued on, this album became one of my favourites and yet it didn’t stand head and shoulders above my many other favourites at that time.

 

The album went on to sell millions of copies worldwide, was being played in Dance Clubs and the bands record company, EMI Records, advanced them money to go and make another album.

 

And from 1987 for the next 14 months they did. Nobody thought it strange that they refused to preview any of their music to the record company. Nobody thought it strange that they locked themselves away in EMI’s Wessex Studios which was a cavernous converted church in North London.  Nobody thought it strange that they filled the studio with Candles , Incence , Oil Burners and projected images onto the wall of the studio. The scene was described as something of a Chinese Opium Den.

 

Stories abounded of them spending thousands of pounds to hire a Childrens Choir to sing for a day, recording the whole lot, then erasing the tapes in favour of 5 minutes of the Choir warming up.

 

So, in 1988, their lives, the record companies life and mine all took a strange turn.

 

For Talk Talk , it was the release of their 4^th album, titled “Spirit of Eden”.

 

For their record company, it was the reality of having a commercial disaster on their hands. An album so uncommercial that they couldn’t even find a single to release off the album. An album so created in a studio that Talk Talk were unable to perform any of the songs live.

 

And my strange turn ?  It was meeting a girl named Anna-Marie, the first girl I’d truly loved.

 

I remember how excited I was as I placed the LP on the turntable and sat down to listen. My god , was this the same band ? Did the record shop accidently put the wrong LP in the cover ? Why did the cover say there were 6 songs when the album only seemed to have 4 ? Was that a cat being strangled on Track 3 ?

 

I was so disappointed. I listened to it twice and then relegated it to that small section of the shelf that held the LP’s that would never be played again. I returned to listening to their previous album and life continued.

 

In 1990, life changed again. It was a time of personal upheaval for me. After 2 and a half years, after talking of marriage , children and buying a home, Anna Marie and I ended our relationship.

 

And late one night, in despair and misery, after way too much to drink, I found “Spirit of Eden” again, hiding away on the shelf where it had been relegated some 2 years before.  I decided to give it just one more listen. This time unlike previous attempts, one song caught my ear and this was the song that unlocked the album for me. That one song was enough to keep me going back to the album and listening to it. Because the first 3 songs of the album rolled into 1, and my favourite was the 3^rd, I had to play all 3 each time.

 

But still the whole album eluded me. The next piece in the puzzle was solved when I was given a set of headphones. Suddenly there were instruments appearing that I'd previously not heard. And at that point I was hooked.

 

The final piece to the puzzle was listening to the album at night, with headphones, laying down. Without distractions, totally relaxed and being completely absorbed in listening to this album it took on a new life.

 

It’s interesting to discover that this album, although ignored at the time , is now considered one of the great modern albums by Music Critics. Talk Talk are considered to have been the catalyst for the ‘Post Rock’ musical genre and many modern musicians cite this band as an influence on them.

 

EMI, who classed this as a commercial disaster in 1988, have remastered and re-released it in 1997, and last year released it as a Super Audio CD, a hi-resolution format CD. 2 out of the first 10 SACDs released by EMI are by Talk Talk so they must have done something right !

 

The interesting thing about this album for me is that it taught me some valuable life lessons.

 

That the best things don’t come easily.

That instant gratification doesn’t last

That the most enjoyable things in life are those you’ve had to work for

That the important things arrive when they’re most needed.

It is possible to love again.

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