About

40th Anniversary Half-Speed Master with obi
Remastered at Metropolis Studios
Remastered by Matt Colton

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Talk Talk is a band whose reputation has grown exponentially over the past 30 years thanks in part to the genre-busting album Spirit Of Eden and the tragic death of main-man Mark Hollis in 2019.

Formed in 1981 as a synth-pop quartet in the style of Duran Duran, their first two albums (including It’s My Life) definitely fell into that kettle of fish. But by the time they got around to 1988’s Spirit Of Eden, they had abandoned those synth-pop stylings for something more sonically adventurous, incorporating elements of improv, jazz, classical, ambient and dub into something eventually called “post-rock”.

In-between, they released The Colour Of Spring in 1986, musically straddling synth-pop with post-rock and becoming the band’s most commercially successful record with hits like Life’s What You Make It, Living In Another World and Give It Up.

But this being 2024, it’s the 40th Anniversary of It’s My Life we are here to observe. Talk Talk drummer Lee Harris and Charlie Hollis, son of Mark, have overseen a new, half-speed master version of the album, cut by Matt Cotton at Metropolis Studios. The goal was for “greater depth” and less compression than was fashionable in the early-CD days of 1984. And that’s exactly what we get.

This new pressing sounds awesome. The music really pops and those cheesy synths now sound better than they have every right to.

Hollis himself decried the use of synths, but felt forced into using them due to financial restrictions, claiming that, “If they didn’t exist, I’d be delighted”.

I’m with him on that and I’d love to hear It’s My Life re-recorded using “real instruments”. Sadly, that’s not possible, but we do have this, vastly-improved version instead.

And here’s hoping Harris and Hollis will be motivated to perform the same aural magic on The Colour Of Spring and Spirit Of Eden…the next anniversary isn’t that far off. — (via 13th Floor)

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Talk Talk’s second LP, It’s My Life, marks the first palpable shift in their musical trajectory. While ultimately a conventional pop record, again prepared under the watchful eye of the label, it nonetheless represents a conscious expansion of their sound. But it’s a subtle progression rather than radical departure, brought about through the introduction of more acoustic instruments, sophisticated chord sequences, and arrangements allowing greater space for each part to breathe.

Keen to distance himself from the ubiquitous electro-pop, Hollis saw synths as a necessary evil, begrudgingly tolerating their presence as a proxy for the orchestral instruments he couldn’t yet afford. “I hate the instrument”, he protested (perhaps too much) to Oor magazine, “especially when it turns into that ‘squeaky bonk plinky fumble’.” Flippant or not, the claim appears particularly disingenuous when this album is laced with them. Therein lies the issue: certainly at this point, the rhetoric doesn’t match the reality.

Nevertheless, with their original synth player Simon Brenner jettisoned after touring the first record, this heralded a move away from the traditional four-piece set-up, towards a selective use of instrumentation, as befit each track. As Hollis biographer, Ben Wardle, puts it in A Perfect Silence, “Now that the band was whittled down to a core trio, Hollis could bring in musicians to add colour without having to deal with the politics of finding them something to do in every song.”

One of the earlier compositions here, Call In The Night Boy was originally developed as a stripped-back piano arrangement, between Hollis and Phil Ramocon. It was one of the first examples of Hollis’ modulating keys, and Ramocon’s playing on the demo brings a jazzy feel, showing a clear taste of the future. If only the powers that be had the guts to put this version out. Alas, clearly it was too much, and it languished as a B-side, only to resurface on 1998’s Asides Besides several years later. The ‘definitive’ version included here is a different thing entirely – an upbeat, amped-up rocker, complete with classic 80s drivetime guitar (or fuzzed-up synth?). Nonetheless, it retains some lovely, avant-garde piano and strange atonal tuned percussion parts that show flirtations with the jazz leanings that Hollis would rate so much. — (via Classic Pop Magazine)

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Label: Parlophone
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album, Reissue, Remastered, Stereo, 40th Anniversary
Reissued: 2024 / Originally Released: 1983
Genre: Rock, Pop

File under: Synthesiser
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