Fact #169839
When:
Short story:
Talk Talk release a new album, Spirit Of Eden, in the UK.
Full article:
David Gray (singer/songwriter) : I was aware of Talk Talk at the start of the 80s as more or less a pop band, because there was a bit of a vibe around Colour Of Spring and Life’s What You Make It, but they very quickly progressed from there into something much more remarkable.
Spirit Of Eden came out when I was sixteen, but I didn’t actually buy it until the mid-80s when I was 20, living in Liverpool, an ex-art student on the dole, but I didn’t really get into it then.
It wasn’t until 1994, we were on one of those Guinness-fuelled tours of Ireland in an old Mercedes van and I’d just played in the Warwick Hotel at the Galway Arts Festival on July 23. We were on our way back to Dublin and I remember we stopped in Abbeyleix, at Morrissey’s bar, a brilliant old-fashioned pub where they sell Corn Flakes and groceries behind the bar, and farmers roll up in horse-drawn carts.
So we had a few beers then set off again and it was in the van that my mate Donal Dineen played me a track from Spirit Of Eden, and this astonishing harmonica sound just blew me away, and I realised I’d completely missed the point of this album and I’d have to go back to it and listen properly.
Most of the albums I love, like Astral Weeks or Nebraska, come about as a result of a time and a place and a set of circumstances, so they’re performance records, but Spirit Of Eden is the result of a huge layering of sounds and endless hours of editing to create an astonishing soundscape.
I think I hadn’t got into it right away because Mark Hollis has a voice that isn’t instant, but the more I started listening, I realised he was using it like an instrument, like a trumpet. I have a lot of Miles Davis albums, and I could see similarities in the way Talk Talk were using the space between the notes as much as the notes themselves to create this astonishing amount of space and silence and structure.
From what I’ve read, they turned all the lights down in the studio during the recording sessions, and had strobe lights flashing while the musicians played, just to create this weird atmosphere which would disorientate them, to see what would happen. They’d thrown away all notions of traditional song structure, like verses-chorus-verse, and you couldn’t even make out what Mark Hollis was singing half the time, but it didn’t matter.
What definitely comes across is that the mood of the music is darkened by some sort of dark, personal experience that Mark Hollis must have been through. He’s an extraordinary character. I was told by an EMI executive who worked with him that he had long hair and a bob for ages, then suddenly showed up with a skinhead cut. Apparently he’d been in a pub where he noticed a sign saying, ‘No skinheads’ so he put down his pint, went to the nearest barber and had his hair cut off, then returned to the pub to finish his pint.
Apparently they recorded absolutely everything, including mistakes and fumbles, and then they’d place all these elements into the mix. They were aspiring almost to a classical method of composition.
It was also very much against the grain of everything else that was going on in popular music at the time because while everyone else was using lots of processing and electronics, they achieved all the effects on the album simply by the way they miked up the space they were recording in, so all the sounds, the echoes and reverberations, are all natural. I’ve never heard better sounds than the screaming harmonica they use and the distorted guitars – it’s fruit for the ears.
The whole album only has four or five tracks, and on the fourth track, Inheritance, they bring in a boys choir to sing this beautifully uplifting melody line against a lovely chord progression – it gives me shivers even to think of it now. That particular track came to mean even more to me when my father died a few years later, because just as the choir starts, Hollis half-whispers half-sings the word ‘spirit’ and you can sense a spirit, almost as if a ghost is appearing out if the music.
I can see that what they did with this album has affected my own approach on my new album. I actually spoke to Tim Friese-Greene of Talk Talk about having him produce it, but he couldn’t. I haven’t gone as far as they did, but I’m definitely leaving more space in the music, and I’m conscious of how far you can go in terms of fracturing a song, breaking things down, but still retaining the essence of it.
(Source : not known)
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Spirit Of Eden came out when I was sixteen, but I didn’t actually buy it until the mid-80s when I was 20, living in Liverpool, an ex-art student on the dole, but I didn’t really get into it then.
It wasn’t until 1994, we were on one of those Guinness-fuelled tours of Ireland in an old Mercedes van and I’d just played in the Warwick Hotel at the Galway Arts Festival on July 23. We were on our way back to Dublin and I remember we stopped in Abbeyleix, at Morrissey’s bar, a brilliant old-fashioned pub where they sell Corn Flakes and groceries behind the bar, and farmers roll up in horse-drawn carts.
So we had a few beers then set off again and it was in the van that my mate Donal Dineen played me a track from Spirit Of Eden, and this astonishing harmonica sound just blew me away, and I realised I’d completely missed the point of this album and I’d have to go back to it and listen properly.
Most of the albums I love, like Astral Weeks or Nebraska, come about as a result of a time and a place and a set of circumstances, so they’re performance records, but Spirit Of Eden is the result of a huge layering of sounds and endless hours of editing to create an astonishing soundscape.
I think I hadn’t got into it right away because Mark Hollis has a voice that isn’t instant, but the more I started listening, I realised he was using it like an instrument, like a trumpet. I have a lot of Miles Davis albums, and I could see similarities in the way Talk Talk were using the space between the notes as much as the notes themselves to create this astonishing amount of space and silence and structure.
From what I’ve read, they turned all the lights down in the studio during the recording sessions, and had strobe lights flashing while the musicians played, just to create this weird atmosphere which would disorientate them, to see what would happen. They’d thrown away all notions of traditional song structure, like verses-chorus-verse, and you couldn’t even make out what Mark Hollis was singing half the time, but it didn’t matter.
What definitely comes across is that the mood of the music is darkened by some sort of dark, personal experience that Mark Hollis must have been through. He’s an extraordinary character. I was told by an EMI executive who worked with him that he had long hair and a bob for ages, then suddenly showed up with a skinhead cut. Apparently he’d been in a pub where he noticed a sign saying, ‘No skinheads’ so he put down his pint, went to the nearest barber and had his hair cut off, then returned to the pub to finish his pint.
Apparently they recorded absolutely everything, including mistakes and fumbles, and then they’d place all these elements into the mix. They were aspiring almost to a classical method of composition.
It was also very much against the grain of everything else that was going on in popular music at the time because while everyone else was using lots of processing and electronics, they achieved all the effects on the album simply by the way they miked up the space they were recording in, so all the sounds, the echoes and reverberations, are all natural. I’ve never heard better sounds than the screaming harmonica they use and the distorted guitars – it’s fruit for the ears.
The whole album only has four or five tracks, and on the fourth track, Inheritance, they bring in a boys choir to sing this beautifully uplifting melody line against a lovely chord progression – it gives me shivers even to think of it now. That particular track came to mean even more to me when my father died a few years later, because just as the choir starts, Hollis half-whispers half-sings the word ‘spirit’ and you can sense a spirit, almost as if a ghost is appearing out if the music.
I can see that what they did with this album has affected my own approach on my new album. I actually spoke to Tim Friese-Greene of Talk Talk about having him produce it, but he couldn’t. I haven’t gone as far as they did, but I’m definitely leaving more space in the music, and I’m conscious of how far you can go in terms of fracturing a song, breaking things down, but still retaining the essence of it.
(Source : not known)