Edition №13
The only Talk Talk I owned, from college until this year, was a 12-inch remix of "It's My Life." I knew the music long before that. When I was a teenager in north Dallas a group of us went to a teen club called Jams that played music videos, all of us too young to drive. We maximized the whole thing of “my parents could drop us off if your parents could pick us up”. "It's My Life" was in rotation the entire time we went. Every time I hear Mark Hollis's voice I stop to listen. I heard The Colour of Spring back then too, and I can't say why it didn't stick. What I heard in that era was a classic simplicity, and I never went further than hearing it. They are a band I wish I had paid more attention to while they were still making music.
The simplicity is what the method and music-making left standing.
Hollis said in 1986 that there was a conscious effort on the album to use cheap sounds, so as to sonically stress the playing. That is the part almost nobody writes about, and it runs deeper than the sounds. Hollis said he did not consider all the various players on it as “session musicians”. They were all working musician, some in other bands. They were allowed to come in and play freely, and he and Friese-Greene selected what they liked inside the booth. Hollis said he liked working with people because they add rather than take away.
So the record was cast in those sessions, and then it was filtered.
The album was cut 4 times in 1986, in 4 countries, and this edition ranks all 4 as equals. Each one sits one generation from the tape that caught all that playing, which is what decides how much of it you get. A half-speed pressing reached shops this month and does not say where its master source.
A free subscription opens the rest of this edition, including the verdict.