As Beautiful And Lost As Love

Sometimes life weighs heavy. Solution 2: Float Off.

Readers it is time to totally subsume ourselves in beauty and a beguiling timelessness.

Welcome, Talk Talk Spirit Of Eden, an LP that singlehandedly justifies there ever being a 1980’s in the first place.

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Ladies and gentlemen I shall now proceed to write about the most unclassifiable LP I own, right before your very eyes!

Thrill! As I wield fancy adjectives
Gasp!   At my awesome erudition
Marvel! At my grasp of all human culture thus far
Squirm! As my prose grows ever purpler
Envy!   My fucking sensitivity

I would imagine the very last thing that Parlophone (EMI) wanted in 1987 was their hot art-pop synth-ish band Talk Talk expressing their dislike of synths, singles and choruses before deciding to go all experimental, for 16 months in very expensive studios with their manager and label strictly forbidden from intruding.

It may be all very well replicating your love of the works of Miles Davis (Gil Evans vintage), Debussy, Satie and Bartók but it certainly isn’t great commerce.

Still, that is exactly what Mark Hollis and Tim Friese-Greene did. The marathon sessions with guests dropping in to add specific instruments to specific tracks were heavily edited and rearranged into … what exactly?

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Magnificence.

There are 6 tracks on Spirit Of Eden but it is difficult to make out the joins, apart from the glaring one when you have to turn the LP over*. There are variations, themes, different lands to wander through all loosely tied together in a sheaf but as diverse and insubstantial as your dreams, as beautiful and lost as love.

Take opener ‘The Rainbow’, trumpet and ambience give way to a harshly amplified harmonica (courtesy of Mark Feltham) that gives a certain barbed wire quality to an otherwise unearthly pastoral shuffle. Hollis’ choirboy tones conveying a sacral air before you even consciously tap into the themes of forgiveness and redemption. Phew!

The songs bloom out of each other, instruments manifesting as ink drops in water; a wash of guitar here, a bassline that’s almost inaudibly quiet yet driving a song forwards and always a refusal to rest on too easy a melody, or too sweet a chord. If Spirit Of Eden is a floatation tank then the listener is subliminally aware of the occasional dimly sensed tentacle shifting in the dark just out of your comprehension^.

Mark Hollis used to talk about his love of silence in the occasional interview he deigned to do and Spirit Of Eden is a record, odd though it sounds, full of almost silences, instruments dropping out, a skeletal beat with more pauses than strikes, everything ceasing unexpectedly and the sense of spectral melodies underlying all you can hear.

The tracks last as long as they need to and impressively for songs unencumbered by conventional structures, never too long. You can hear post-rock being invented before your very cochleas.

Listening to Spirit Off Eden is akin to running fabric through your hands at length, the materials, the nap, warp and weft constantly changing for you. Sometimes you slide along the sheen, at others you might snag on a seam as it moves, all the time it slips through your fingers like love.

I have not told you what a single song here actually sounds like, I struggle because they sound different and mean different things to me every time I experience them (listen seems too small a word). I have never known songs or music like this, they sound evolved rather than written to me.

What I can say is that the tone of Hollis’ voice, regardless of subject matter^^, gives it all a gently heartbroken tone. Not the slap-on-the-back ‘plenty more fish in the sea, mate’ type, nor the ragged jagged ugly crying type, but a dignified, beauteous type that bespeaks of something unique, pure and incalculable lost for all eternity.

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Talk Talk inevitably fell foul of dreary record label concerns^* and due to their own internal tensions split after one more LP. Parlophone did their best, hacking the heroin lament ‘I Believe In You’ down to 3-minutes and releasing it, the very definition of futile gesture.

Spirit Of Eden does not have any real clear touchpoints, then or now. The closest I would hazard along with Gil Evans/Miles Davis would be Davis Sylvian at his most obtuse or possibly John Martyn’s ever-underappreciated One World (there is a Danny Thompson link).

The production by Tim Friese-Greene is too perfect and too vast for me to even contemplate at this point. Someone needs to do a 25-part Netflix series on it and Spirit Of Eden, both.

Lets lose ourselves, readers.

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Because they weren’t singing about chicks and drinking my copy of Spirit Of Eden was not one bought on release when I was 16. My copy is a 2012 reissue including an audio only DVD of the LP, which remains half-played once; surely they would have been better advised to release a hilarious blooper reel DVD of them recording their farts, swearing and telling saucy jokes?

1232 Down.

*what a crap, outmoded format, eh readers?

^I said ‘tentacle‘ Beavis.

^^I for one am bereft that Hollis’ death precludes us from ever hearing Talk Talk reunite to cover ‘Sexy And I Know It’ by LMFAO.

^*although I half sympathise with the suits that ‘timeless ethereal experimental beauty’ doesn’t necessarily pay for 2 years of studio time and that weekend away in the Maldives with your Colombian mistress.