Winter in Seattle can be long. We’re pretty far north. On December 21st the sun rises at 7:54am and sets at 4:20pm. We’re hemmed in by the Cascades to the east and the Olympic mountains to the west, so the experience of the sunrise and sunset here happen later and earlier than documented. And only if it’s not overcast. Winter in Seattle is dark.

That also gives it a certain charm. We create light in other ways and it glisten and glows across the wetness of everything. It is strikingly beautiful.

Soon it’s February and suddenly you notice that the sunset is closer to 6pm. The trees start popping buds. It’s still cold and drab, but the earth and the air begin to awaken in aroma and light singing a harmonious spring is coming.

Every year when this happens, I find myself listening to the legendary English band Talk Talk. I don’t know why, other than to say seasons are rhythmic and so is music, and there are certain sounds that hit particularly right in specific seasons.

Though, maybe there’s something prescient about the title of their 1986 record The Colour of Spring, but not in a direct way. That album represented the beginning of their offramp from pop music. Their first two albums The Party’s Over and It’s My Life were polished and successful synth pop records. If you haven’t heard their version of It’s My Life, you’ve probably heard No Doubt’s version (which does it justice, btw). But with The Colour of Spring they begun an irreversible journey down a road everyone thought would lead to career suicide, including their own record label. Talk Talk decided mainstream success was not their measure of success. Their measure of success was making music they’d want to listen to. They ditched conventional pop song structure. They ditched synths, grabbed real instruments and captured improvised jam sessions recorded in the dark so they couldn’t see each other. Mark Hollis sang quieter, or not at all. The result was the antithesis of the excesses of the 80s. Organic, contemplative, and weighty. Their label was right. The Colour of Spring was a commercial flop. They’d never have another commercial success.

Most bands would have felt the existential threat of commercial floppage and pivoted back to something more familiar for the market. Talk Talk could have walked it back. They could have dusted their synths off and wrote songs with hooks. But instead, they doubled down.

In 1988 they released Spirit of Eden, going further down the rabbit hole. There is no trace of pop song structure. More abstract. More physical. More dynamic. More delicate. Today, it’s whispered in conversations of the greatest albums ever, but at the time nobody knew what to make of it.

Laughing Stock came in 1991. To me, it’s the perfection of their formula. It was their last studio record as the band dissolved shortly after its release. Mark Hollis disappeared from public life, declined interviews, and aside from releasing a solo record in 1999, vanished from the music scene. There were likely multiple reasons why, but this quote from a rare interview he granted years later always grabs me, “I choose for my family. Maybe others are capable of doing it, but I can't go on tour and be a good dad at the same time.” Every touring parent feels this. But Mark Hollis did something about it.

For the rest of the 90s into the 00s, they mostly were a curious artifact of the 80s. But there was something in those records that kept people coming back. In 1998 UNKLE sampled the drums from New Grass off of Laughing Stock for their song Rabbit in your Headlights that features Thom Yorke of Radiohead on vocals. I must have listened to this song a hundred times (huge Radiohead fan) before I connected the dots. In 1998, David Stubbs wrote in Vox “Nobody...in pop music has journeyed so far from the neon-lit safety of pop mediocrity out into the fearful wildernesses of the rock avant-garde.” His interview with Mark Hollis is rare and worth a read. In 2003, Laughing Stock placed on MOJO’s top 50 eccentric albums of all time, and Pitchfork ranked it #11 on the best albums of the 90s. In 2011 when Laughing Stock was reissued on vinyl, Pitchfork's Jess Harvel gave it a perfect 10. This paragraph says it all:

How startling, isolated moments of sound, or a formless wash of sound, can wring emotions out of listeners as powerfully as any conventional melody. How the ambient sound of the room in which an album was recorded can be used almost as instrument in itself, and how the studio can be used to create a sense of environment in the listener's mind that has nothing to do with recording booths and control decks. How far the sound of a rock song can be pared back and loosened up and still be "rock," or even still be "a song." And especially how sound can become all the more powerful when surrounded by silence, great gulfs of which are all over the later Talk Talk albums, especially Laughing Stock

Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock now are held up as crowning achievements of what's possible with music as an art form. What a difference a decade or two can make.

We don’t talk about Talk Talk enough. We should because we love resurrection stories. Stories of people being rewarded for integrity which they purchased at great cost to themselves. Stories of pioneers exploring and blazing new trails. Stories of visionaries establishing their vision before anyone else could see it. Today, they’re rightly considered pioneers and legends, yet still mostly live in obscurity because we don’t talk about Talk Talk enough.

To me, Mark Hollis and Talk Talk are heroes of art. In a time of great excess, and in a moment where they had momentum and fame, they were sober enough to realize the game they were playing was inherently flawed and were courageous enough to resolve to play a different one. Those three albums are not mere artifacts of the best music of the 80s and 90s, they are monuments of vision and conviction.

I love these records. They evoke something visceral in me. Kinda like the feeling I feel when I read TS Elliot’s The Four Quartets: weighty, important, otherworldly, and somehow soothing and comforting. It takes a particular type of art to accomplish that. It’s why I want to talk about Talk Talk more.

I think Robert Plant said it best: “Mark Hollis just quit in the end. He said, 'I can't do this anymore.' And yet what he was doing was spectacular.”

Spectacular, indeed. Just like when winter gives up it’s gray to the color of spring.

Talk soon...(about Talk Talk)