A Spirit in Eden

Like any great love of your life, this one for me had an inauspicious start. In fact, I'm pretty sure that influenza played a huge part in the music that changed my life.

I'm fairly sure that I remember seeing Talk Talk perform either Today or their eponymous first hit on Top of the Pops. I'm also fairly sure that I was not moved to go and buy whatever one it was. The reason I believe this is because when I went to Milton Keynes Bowl in 1982 to see Six of the Best (Genesis and Peter Gabriel raising money for the failed WOMAD festival), I had heard of this woefully misplaced bunch of young men, even if I really can't tell you anything about their set; apart from the fact they didn't complete it and I was one of the people booing.

37 years later, I still feel as though some of the most important gigs I've been to I've missed essential things. Talk Talk stopped doing live gigs after they toured The Colour of Spring and I didn't get to see them on that tour, so my only experience wasn't a good one.

Talk Talk existed and I was largely unaware of them. However, a measure of how important this band have been to me is the fact I can tell you, in great detail, what I was doing, where I was and who I was with when I had the penny drop moment and realised they were something special.

I had influenza. So did my housemate Rob. Proper flu not man-flu. I'd been going out with my then girlfriend (who would become my wife) for about three months and she offered to cook us dinner because neither of us were in a fit enough state to do much but crash out on the sofas. She made spaghetti bolognaise, based on my recipe, and it was utterly horrid and only the third thing she had ever cooked me from scratch in 36 years.

The house had recently had the new 'cable TV' fitted and we now had a dozen or so extra channels to get bored with. One of these stations was called Music Box, a Dutch produced MTV copy with VeeJays and about 60 videos. While we struggled to eat an unpalatable mess, Talk Talk's Such a Shame came on and it freaked us both out. It was a decidedly weird video, using all kinds of then modern trickery and I would later discover that the song was loosely based on Luke Reinhart's The Dice Man, which I'd read just a few months earlier and had been impressed by.

I didn't know if I liked the song. It was weird and didn't really sound like your average pop song, but I wanted to see the video again; there was something really 'wrong' about it. Over the space of a week, I saw it again about six times and by the time I was well again I'd gone down to my local WH Smith's and bought the 12" single. This alone was something of a revelation as I thought the B-side (Again, A Game, Again) was also astounding.

As a serious collector in the 1980s, I immediately bought everything by Talk Talk as humanly possible. Both albums, umpteen singles, back catalogue stuff from record fairs or mail order. I already knew that I'd found my band. Not a band or artist that I'd been influenced into liking by peers, family or popularity; this was something I heard, I liked and I obsessed about.

It's My Life, the second album, was on constant rotation. It was an unusual album in that while it was full of commercial records, the band's sound made them almost feel as though they were by alternative dimension. Lead singer Mark Hollis had a distinctive, velvet voice, unlike anything since the crooners of the 1940s and 1950s but with a contemporary edge and distinctively uncommercial. Of course, back then I had no idea that what I was listening to was the embryonic first footsteps of the invention of a rock genre and the metamorphosis of a pop band into something uncategorisable by the time their final album was released. This bunch of Essex lads who came into music for a laugh were about to have a profound effect on some of the greatest musicians of the last 30 years...

The Colour of Spring was preceded by Life's What You Make It - the single that was more anticipated by music fans than it was by pop fans. The respect the band was developing was clear to see when almost every DJ in the country spun a song that didn't even make the top 10 and while it was clearly Talk Talk it felt like a departure from the wall-of-sound Euro-pop jauntiness of the first album or the off-beat quirkiness of the second. This felt like a song performed by three men who had just been awakened.

People bang on about The Spirit of Eden, but it was prefaced by The Colour of Spring; an album with some pop songs that weren't poppy and some other songs that had already begun to confuse, astound and puzzle. Spring is a tale of two halves - the end of one era and the beginning of another; you could almost rearrange the running order into two distinct periods, separated by vinyl and flow. If an example was needed from the album it's Time, It's Time, a song which lays the foundations of what was to come by flushing away the pop in a track that must have had prog rock fans scratching their heads, but tapping their feet. It wasn't the real indicators - April 5th, Chameleon Day and B-sides of singles suggested - forewarned - fans what to expect in the future. No one noticed.

The Spirit of Eden was something profound, yet it took me considerably more time to get than I expected. I bought it the day it came out, rushed home, put it on and sat in silence for two sides. What had I just listened to? Where were the tunes? What was it all about? But, you see, Talk Talk had become the most important band to me. I had already declared that Such a Shame was my favourite single of all time and that the video - directed by Tim Pope - was the best video I'd ever seen. It's My Life was vying for favourite album; they could do no wrong.

I persevered with it; playing it three more times before putting it away and wondering what I was going to do. The next day, I played Spring again and then Spirit and for the second time the penny dropped. I got it. I really really got it. It was about texture and movement; it was about fluidity of music and word; it was something extraordinary for its time and the people who got it realised that almost immediately. People talk about important albums; this was pretty much one of them and largely because of what people remembered them for as a pop band and not for the album tracks that hid the future so beautifully.

I'm probably wrong, but I can't remember a bad review for it. I do remember a lot of bewilderment and even some people who weren't even sure it was Talk Talk, but it also largely disappeared.

This was pre-internet days and a time when the music press was still your main source of news. A friend who worked in a record shop told me about Laughing Stock coming out and this time I approached it expecting it to be like Spirit and not like what went before; and this didn't bother me because Spirit was still something otherworldly and emotional.

I remember laughing after I played it. Oh it was most definitely Talk Talk but where Spirit of Eden felt as though it was a puzzle you needed to crack to reveal its hidden beauty, Laughing Stock felt like an impenetrable anti-record (and it was now well known that Hollis had massive problems with the record company and pretty much did the album as a complete opposite of what they requested). Yet, it wasn't at all. It was the next layer down in Hollis and Friese-Greene's journey into the heart of a musician's soul. Essentially 19 hours of improvised jazz-infused post rock, edited down into what essentially is a single piece, it's the kind of thing you can imagine people in 200 years pouring over like music historians do something by Mozart or Beethoven.

Laughing Stock is a dark, disturbing album littered with moments of hope. It infuriated the record company, confounded the critics and like the album before it would have won more awards than it could hold in a big bag had it been released in the 21st century. And that, my friends, is the thing. The Colour of Spring only feels dated because of the production, but large parts of it wouldn't feel out of place in 2019; the same but more so has to be said of The Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock - they're not timeless in that classic sense; they're timeless in that if you played someone who had never heard of Talk Talk either album and told them it was a new release they would never question you or think you were lying. In many ways it is impossible that a band could release two amazingly unsuccessful and uncommercial albums which are now regarded as two of the greatest albums of the 20th century.

In 1998, Mark Hollis released a solo album. It was minimalist again. It felt less produced than the last two Talk Talk albums and there was a sense of maturity about him. It seems it may well have been a contractual obligation album, but even so it exudes everything that changed Talk Talk fans into Talk Talk fans (and only Talk Talk fans can really understand that). In many ways it feels like a sad throwaway album, which is both lovely to listen to but of little substance. Even if Hollis wanted to do the album, maybe it was the fact he knew himself that he couldn't regain the heights he achieved in the late 1980s.

I play most of the albums at least once a year now; sometimes I'll have a binge on Spirit and Laughing Stock with some of the extra tracks thrown in and then the next time I might do the period that started it for me.

A few years ago, a piano piece Hollis wrote was used in the closing sequence of a Kelsey Grammar series called Boss, it was pretty much the first sighting of Hollis in the 21st century and started a flurry of rumours, which as usual proved to be wishful thinking and hope; but the wonder if Hollis would ever do anything again was never too far away from the surface.

Then the news of his death broke and I have felt the way you do when you find out a childhood friend, who you haven't seen for 30 odd years, has died and you're transported back to the days when you were the friends. That nostalgic melancholy that sinks in sometimes and hurts because while you've always known you can never go back there again, you kind of wish you can.

I can't think of a single musician's death that has effected me as much as Mark Hollis. He belonged to me. I got it. I got it a long time before anyone else did. They were a special band and he was a very special front man; a rare thing in music, a man of his word with integrity and determination. He wasn't a trained musician, he picked it up as he went along; that makes him even better in my eyes and he was always the best anyhow.

You never knew me but I was your friend x