Talk Talk – Laughing Stock (1991, UK)
Our next spotlight is on number 908 on The List, submitted by arratoon.
It’s odd when you think you know a band, think you’ve heard all the albums…and then realize that you perhaps don’t and definitely haven’t. I thought I knew Talk Talk. I’ve been listening to the brilliant The Colour of Spring (1986), their third, for something like 15 years after an older wiser friend had turned me onto them. Colour of Spring was the album I absolutely latched onto, the album I recommended when singing Talk Talk’s praises, the album I defined their sound by (well, that and the title track of the previous album, It’s My Life [1984], a cover of which is how the band first entered my consciousness).
And so, when Talk Talk came up next for a spotlight, the last before my planned month-long blog break, I was both happy and relieved – familiar ground, I could bang out a post real quick. Since it had been a while though, I decided to give the entire Talk Talk discography a quick spin first, all of five albums, maybe try and figure out why arratoon had picked Laughing Stock and not, imho, the more obvious The Colour of Spring.
Reader, I did not know Talk Talk, and had not heard all their albums. As it turns out, I: (a) had not heard their entire debut, the rather commercial synth-pop The Party’s Over (1982) that doesn’t have any of the experimental art pop/rock I was familiar with; (b) had somehow forgotten all about their fourth, the moody, jazzy, pre-post-rock The Spirit of Eden (1988), a copy of which I was surprised to find in my record collection (and which, according to Discogs, I purchased the day we learned founder, principal songwriter, and vocalist Mark Hollis had left us); and (c) had never heard any of their final, decidedly uncommercial, bare, free-form masterpiece.
And so, after finishing the full discography listen-through yesterday and being blown away by what was inexplicably my very first listen of Laughing Stock, this morning I’ve gone back to Spirit to see if we had warning of what was to come (yep, sorta), and now am relistening to Laughing and reading a whole load of articles about it.[1] The studio (Wessex Sound Studios) essentially served as a multi-month-long drop-in session for something like 50 musicians (with only 18 of them making it on the final album), each allowed to hear only a small section of a track to riff off of (never the full thing), studio windows blacked out, clocks not allowed, the space lit only by oil projectors and strobe lights (the same studio and ambience was also used for Spirit). And, though it came out of the same improvisational and deconstruction/reconstruction processes first used in Colour and then in Spirit (the final parts selected and rearranged by Hollis out of countless hours of tape), and though it’s credited alongside Spirit as also being a seminal pre-post-rock album, Laughing to my ears is really nothing like the others. For that matter, whereas before I had defined Talk Talk’s sound by Colour of Spring, I would now say that, from Colour on, none of the last three albums really sound like the others. The Talk Talk sound I thought I knew? Turns out, all I could possible mean by that is Mark Hollis’ voice – utterly unique and somehow simultaneously soothing and fragile – on top of fantastic music lovingly stitched together by a genius with an uncompromising vision.
If you think you know Talk Talk but haven’t heard Laughing Stock yet, give it a spin. Better yet, give the entire discography a spin, and in any order at that. And then we’ll all be up to speed for a later spotlight, when we’ll dive into Mark Hollis’ solo record that we also have on The List.
Happy listening, and I’ll see you all in a month.
E.g., The Quietus piece is great: https://thequietus.com/opinion-and-essays/anniversary/talk-talk-laughing-stock/ ↩︎#1990s #ambient #artRock #experimental #improvisation #LeeHarris #MarkHollis #PhillBrown #postrock #TalkTalk #TimFrieseGreene
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