Laughing Stock

Talk Talk used to be a pop group of passable accomplishment, until they made enough money to scorn the wishes of their fans and make music the way they really wanted to; meandering, tune-free, chipped slowly out of improvisation rather than carved out of old-world limitations such as structure and songcraft. Real muso’s music, rock music that wishes it were jazz – than which there is nothing worse.

Laughing Stock, like its predecessor, Spirit of Eden, wants to be Astral Weeks, but had none of its dramatic conception and takes few of its chances. The results are No Fun in spades; crepuscular moods of cello and trumpet and heavily reverbed guitar, tippy-tap cymbals, double bass, funereally slow tempi [sic], blurry textures, whispered vocals, opaque lyrics and needlessly elongated tracks. This is the modern equivalent of ‘progressive’ music with all the snobby self-regard that implies.

The ‘songs’ here, of which there are apparently six, are at best half-glimpsed through the instrumental shrubbery which, despite Talk Talk’s obvious desire to make something fluid and organic, remains deathly throughout. As for Mark Hollis’s lyrics, heaven only knows what the poor chap is on about. Analysis, one suspects, may have proven cheaper.

Review by Andy Gill

Mark Hollis

This may well turn out to be one of the albums of 1998 but as with all of Hollis’s output since Talk Talk’s 1988 opus Spirit of Eden, we won’t really be able to tell for another year or two, so diffuse is the music it contains.

That album and its follow-up, Laughing Stock, were often (erroneously) compared to Astral Weeks, a record whose textual depth they emulated, though not its passion. With Hollis’s first solo album proper, the process of diffusion continues further, with delicate, tentative settings based on acoustic guitar and piano, and seriously painful vocals that often seem little more than prompts.

It certainly bares no relation to rock’n’roll, but instead seems to aspire to the condition of classical music, with the enigmatic, faintly quizzical wind arrangements of tracks such as ‘A Life (1895-1915)’ and ‘The Daily Planet’ particularly reminiscent of the open, asymmetric patterns of the American minimalist Morton Feldman.

Like Feldman, Hollis prefers to let his melodies accrete over time, like dust settling, rather than be forcefully stated. The results play strange tricks with time; though few of these tracks last under five minutes, they barely seem to have begun before they’re finished.

Review by Andy Gill

Spirit Of Eden (reviewed by Rob Dickinson of Catherine Wheel)

This is an album the whole band is fond of, though the tracks ‘The Rainbow’ and ‘I Believe in You’ are probably the ones I would take to a desert island. I’d go as far as to say they cleanse my soul. I heard it when it came out in 1988. My friends and I had been eagerly awaiting it, and it just took us completely by surprise.

It was probably my first experience at a very tender age of something that could move me, and it’s something I haven’t grown out of, which I think dots the ‘i’ of my love for it. I have the cassette in my car and I listen to it during every journey I take. It almost seems an injustice to label it a classic record – that’s the least of what it is. I suspect one reason it means so much to me is that it’s been the soundtrack to love affairs I’ve had and it seems to have said everything which needed to be said at that time. If you could sum up the music in one soundbite, it would be that it’s like the inner groanings of the soul. It’s endlessly evocative with a terrible, terrible sense of sadness which appeals to me enormously.

‘The Rainbow’ is the opening track. The way the instruments come in is like blood seeping out of a wall. It’s the true sound of music: breathing, living, organic, it envelopes you from the first note of the harmonica. It’s rare that’s such a sparse piece of music can be as powerful as this.

What the album did specifically for us is bring into focus what we always believed we had in the band: a balance between the aggressive side of what our band does and the incredibly soft, introverted side. It’s constantly listened to on the tour bus and it’s a great wind-down at the end of the night when we’re having a joint or a glass of wine.

History Revisited: Pop remix faces legal challenge

The remix, a practice of the music industry in recent years, in which technicians and producers are let loose on successful records to change them beyond recognition, is about to be the subject of a test case.

The experimental free-form group Talk Talk are suing their record company EMI for releasing a remixed album of their greatest hits, History Revisited, without consulting the group. Mark Hollis, Talk Talk’s singer/songwriter. was said by his present record company Polydor, to have been ‘’mortified’’ when he heard what had been done to his songs. The case could set a precedent for all future recording contracts.

The average remix can involve drastically changing the rhythm of a song, adding different instruments and more often than not a disco beat. Old hits such as Tina Turner’s ‘Nutbush City Limits’ and Ian Dury’s ‘Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick’ have been remixed to become hits again after their release. Jive Bunny, two remixers extraordinaire, scored major chart success by remixing old hits with permission.

But remixing an artist’s work and releasing it without their permission is unusual. EMI’s publicity material for History Revisited pulls few punches about the changes made to the music. The remix, it says, is “not history rewritten but reinterpreted, Talk Talk through the dance keyhole, taking the diverse sounds of their eighties output and giving it a nineties groove. It’s the measure of a timeless tune that it can be put into a new setting without destroying its essence, and here yesterday’s favourite’s are given added dimension by innovative remixers who’ve delved into the dreamlike world of Talk Talk to contribute their own brush to the canvas.”

Keith Aspden, Talk Talk’s manager, said: "EMI have already sold one million copies of a greatest hits album and now they release this. They haven’t just remixed what is already there. They have practically replaced all the instruments with new poppy dance sounds from other people’s records, even including an African chant.

"We are hoping to set a precedent here and say there has been a false attribution of authorship."

EMI declined to comment.