The Very Best Of Talk Talk

GRIM TIMES. You find us in early-'80s Britain, and musically it's a disaster. Frightful goths with inverted crucifixes clog up venues around the country, while the charts are dominated by pasty-faced men in pirate outfits and badly-applied eyeliner.

In 1981, EMI sign Talk Talk and within a year have tried to force them to become like Duran Duran. They appoint both bands with the same producer (Colin Thurston), force them to go on tour together and do everything possible to land them with the 'new romantic' tag. They fail, though, because while singer Mark Hollis does wear an occasional suit, he isn't overly keen on make-up. What follows instead is a series of brilliantly lugubrious pop singles ('Today', 'Talk Talk' and 'It's My Life' - all featured here) that distance the band from the inherent embarrassment of new romanticism. These songs all sneak their way into the charts, and Mark Hollis is surprised to find his mournful electronica hailed as pop genius. Inevitably though, he isn't particularly taken with that title either, and the remainder of his career becomes an increasingly acrimonious struggle with his record company.

There are years off, public sackings of band members and a steely obsession with becoming more expansive and experimental. In 1986, there is another brief dalliance with Top Of The Pops when the band release the plaintive rush of 'Life's What You Make It' - but then Mark Hollis never said he couldn't write pop songs, it's just that he didn't really want to.

EMI become impatient. Hollis goes off and constructs the enormous reverb-drenched ambience of 'Spirit Of Eden', and EMI lose their temper. Disregarding his wishes entirely, they repackage and remix all his early material and then shunt the band off to Polydor where they continue to record frighteningly ambitious concept albums.

Six years on, and EMI are still trying to cash in on the band. The bleak excellence of the songs featured here - culled from throughout the aforementioned period - is a testament to Talk Talk's ability to withstand their label's financially-driven wishes. Now, of course, they're powerless to do anything about it.

Times don't get much better do they? 8/10

Review by James Oldham

London 86

It's the flick of Hendrix's Zippo, the gulp of Lennon's first-love heart: that elusive spark of musical rebirth. It's just that someone saw fit to actually record the moment when Talk Talk transformed from Level 42 in black polo necks into the avant-garde missionaries for the post-chorus generation who invented Mogwai's quiet bits ten years too early.

It was the moment the early pop grumbles of 'Colour Of Spring' clashed with Mark Hollis' desire to emulate the sound of the moons orbiting Planet Stonedtofuck. And it occurred during Talk Talk's last ever live performance at the Hammersmith Odeon in May 1986, when 'Life's What You Make It' segued into a lengthy funk-prog workout of 'Does Caroline Know?' and the U2 for socially crippled theology students realised they could never tour this earth again. 'London 1986' is their belated live swansong, a sumptuous eight-song set, naturally flawed by 13 years spent nestling under the master-tapes of 'Swing Out Sister Live At Anglesea Chuffgrinders'. With the help of Peter Gabriel's session musos and Hollis' ability to sing like the stone staircase from the 'Vienna' video, tunes like 'Renee' and 'Such A Shame' inevitably sound like an undead Yazoo. But after this they began recording the natural vibrations of cellos in a quest for the perfect noise, so set aside your allergy to slap bass and revisit the '80s' ultimate turning of the tides. 7/10

Review by Mark Beaumont