King Crimson and Can were among their go-to inspirations – but in the new romantic era, Talk Talk couldn’t admit it

They were the New Romantic group who spurned their pop audience to create bleak, beautiful music that inspired Marillion and Porcupine Tree. In 2012 we asked the question: how prog were Talk Talk?

“There were three bands in the 80s who, for me, just defined how music could be arranged: The Blue Nile, Japan and Talk Talk,” says Marillion vocalist Steve Hogarth. “I’d first heard Talk Talk on the radio with [1984’s] It’s My Life and the other hits, and I thought they were a cut above the usual chart stuff. But it was with [1986’s] The Colour Of Spring that they came well and truly onto my radar.”

Teetering in from the fringes of the new wave and New Romantic movements, London band Talk Talk supported Duran Duran in 1981, and released their debut album The Party’s Over a year later. The band – late vocalist Mark Hollis, drummer Lee Harris, bassist Paul Webb and keyboard player Simon Brenner – played sleek synth-pop. The single Talk Talk was a belated Top 30 hit, earning the group an appearance on Top Of The Pops.

However, admitting to any influences from the progressive rock era in the 1980s was terminally un-hip. So the fact that Hollis used to carry around a set of King Crimson’s 70s LPs for inspiration, or that Can’s Tago Mago was a source for rhythmic sustenance, went unreported. After Simon Brenner’s departure, the band made their second album, 1984’s It’s My Life, as a trio with producer Tim Friese-Greene becoming George Martin to their Beatles.

While It’s My Life retained many familiar 80s signifiers, such as glistening synths and sliding bass, the seeds of change were sown. Guest musicians such as trumpeter Henry Lowther and pianist Phil Ramocon help evoke a glacial cool that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on the German jazz label ECM.

But the changing sound that so appealed to Steve Hogarth was more evident on 1986’s The Colour Of Spring. Talk Talk’s growing experimentation was assisted by former Pentangle bassist Danny Thompson’s vamping on Happiness Is Easy, ex-Traffic man Steve Winwood’s vibrant Hammond organ and the searing guitar work of ex-Random Hold member and Peter Gabriel associate David Rhodes on the single Life’s What You Make It.

“I went in for one evening, taking my pedals and guitar,” recalls Rhodes. Having played the backing track, Mark Hollis asked him to make the guitar sound “poxy.” “I pressed some pedals and asked if that’s that they meant, and he said ‘yes’. The other thing Mark asked me – which was very funny – was if I knew of Acker Bilk, the clarinetist who’d had a hit with Stranger On The Shore; and if so, could I play the riff like that?!”

Life’s What You Make It went to Number 16, with The Colour Of Spring reaching Number 8. Just when Talk Talk might be expected to make another record bristling with hits, they confounded all expectations. In February 1987, along with Tim Friese-Greene and engineer Phill Brown, the band went into Wessex Studios, the converted church in Islington where King Crimson recorded their first three albums, to begin work on Spirit Of Eden. There they would stay for more than a year, in a secluded, womb-like environment, bedecked with 60s-style psychedelic oil lamps, strobe lights and incense, embarking on a remarkable journey that would lead far away from their pop origins.

“I loved The Colour Of Spring but in retrospect it seems like the link between the pop/commercial era and the darker, more intense and beautiful two albums that followed,” says Porcupine Tree’s Richard Barbieri. “1988’s Spirit Of Eden and its 1991 follow-up, Laughing Stock, are quite simply works of art. Such fragile beauty and use of space in music is rarely found; and however long and hard the journey was in creating these, the overall feeling I get is one of spirituality and intuition. My desert island discs, for sure.”

Spirit Of Eden and Laughing Stock were seen as a significant departure. Brilliantly unpredictable, the handful of pieces on each album transcend the usual notions of song structure, becoming one amorphous, dream-like suite. The ingredients include echo-drenched bluesy licks bleeding into Messiaen-like chamber music interludes of viola, clarinet and bassoon; squalls of distorted harmonica merging with ghostly choirs; jagged guitar chords and teeth-rattling percussion; sonorous organ and icy piano.

But having abandoned the trademark synthesizers used on their previous records, there was nothing that could be described as a radio-friendly hook. In making this decisive break with their past, it’s no coincidence that almost three minutes and 30 seconds – the optimum running time of a single – elapse before Mark Hollis starts singing on Spirit Of Eden’s opening track The Rainbow.

Jacob Holm-Lupo, guitarist with the Norwegian art-rock band White Willow, believes the two albums – and Spirit in particular – represented a liberating force that went against the prevailing mood of the times. “The 80s were a time of rigidity in music,” he says. “Rhythms were being sequenced and time-locked, the harmonic vocabulary was solidifying into a set of effective but predictable clichés. Talk Talk loosened everything up. Time stretched and slowed, harmony was disassembled and reassembled. I was 15 when Spirit Of Eden came out. I had already discovered 70s prog, but this was the first time I found that similar sense of freedom, and that rainbow of possibilities, in contemporary pop.”

In a 1988 interview Hollis shone some light on the record’s progressive sound: “Well, it’s certainly a reaction to the music that’s around at the moment, ’cos most of that is shit. It’s only radical in the modern context. It’s not radical compared to 20 years ago. If we’d have delivered this album to the record company 20 years ago they wouldn’t have batted an eyelid.”

Theo Travis, sax player with Soft Machine Legacy and Steven Wilson’s current live band, is an admirer. “There are very few who’ve managed that trajectory from pop into... I don’t know what. Spirit Of Eden isn’t pop people playing at something jazzy or experimental. It’s a very mature album in itself and, musically, beautifully successful.

“On Laughing Stock there’s an absolutely classic drum sound which was recorded by a single microphone 30 feet away from the whole kit. That technique which Phill [Brown] brought to Talk Talk and on Mark Hollis’s self-titled solo album was extremely important and really quite unique.”

“Minute by minute, Spirit Of Eden and Laughing Stock are beautiful, sumptuous records,” says Radio Massacre International’s Steve Dinsdale, “a colourful tapestry of timbres blended to perfection, surrounded by hallowed silences and spaces. I didn’t know what to make of it as there weren’t many precedents.”

Spurred on by the momentum of expectant fans hoping for ‘The Colour Of Spring Part Two,’ Spirit Of Eden was by no means a commercial disaster, reaching Number 19. However, with no obvious hit single, and without a tour to promote the album, Talk Talk were no longer a viable chart act. Moving labels to Polydor, final album Laughing Stock was even more uncompromisingly stark and obscure. “They were just growing up and challenging themselves and taking things into a more esoteric area,” suggests David Rhodes.

But could they be considered a prog band? Theo Travis thinks so. “You could call them progressive in a non-generic way. Where ‘progressive music’ means a music that’s very ambitious to move forward, then Talk Talk absolutely fit the bill.”

In 1992 No-Man vocalist Tim Bowness was under the wing of Talk Talk manager Keith Aspden. “Steven [Wilson] and I definitely heard a kinship with progressive artists in the band’s eclectic influences,” says Bowness. “With each successive release, Talk Talk sounded purer and more focused than on their previous one. I could hear late-1960s Miles Davis in Laughing Stock and Spirit Of Eden, especially in the production and the restless and insistent drum patterns.

“I think the band’s fusion of sophisticated classical and jazz-derived chords with Mark Hollis’ soulful voice had something in common with similar approaches in the music of Traffic, Procol Harum and early Genesis.”

“I think ‘prog’ is such a strange word,” says Steve Hogarth. “It’s generally used to define a kind of music that was progressive in 1977. Bearing in mind we’re 30 years-plus on from there, it must mean it’s regressive by definition. If you stretch the word ‘prog’ back out to progressive again then any band that tries to reach out into the darkness and push their boundaries are by definition progressive – and that certainly applies to Talk Talk.”

By no means the first artists to make the journey from brightly-lit pop to rarified, sepulchral introspection, Talk Talk followed their muse no matter where it led. After 1998’s sparse, Zen-like acoustic solo album, Mark Hollis left the music industry. Since then, there’s been no hint of a Talk Talk comeback or reunion; only a profound silence.

Harold Pinter, whose plays are as famous for their dramatic pauses as the actual content, said: “When true silence falls, we are still left with echo but are nearer nakedness.” Pinter understood that when the words stop, truth can resonate more clearly. The same could be argued of Talk Talk and Mark Hollis, whose mysterious allure remains untarnished.