Talk Talk

I don’t think it’d be unreasonable to say that Talk Talk had one of the most genuinely unusual career trajectories in the history of popular music; after forming in London in 1981, they were initially most closely associated with the new wave, pop stylings of the early eighties, considering the likes of Duran Duran to be their contemporaries and finding success in the charts with hits like ‘Today’ and ‘Life’s What You Make It’. Perhaps they were keenly aware, though, of how quickly those particular trends were set to recede, because towards the end of the decade, they went on to make music that was critically lauded, but commercially performed modestly. In 1988, they released the now-iconic Spirit of Eden, an album that basically represented a self-fulfilling prophecy; it both seemed to predict the rise of post-rock in the nineties, and precipitated it by providing considerable influence to bands of that genre. Their last album, 1991’s Laughing Stock, only furthered that exploration, and for my money is their masterpiece. The live feel of those two records meant that they translated gorgeously to the stage, but by this point, frontman Mark Hollis was becoming more and more reclusive, and live appearances were rare; they split soon afterwards, and Hollis retired from the music industry in mysterious circumstances after releasing a single solo album in 1998.