Talk Talk Brought Fire and Negative Space to ‘It’s My Life’

There is a certain incorrect narrative about the British group Talk Talk: They had a few hits as a fairly anonymous but marginally interesting band in the New Romantic vein in the early and mid-1980s before bandleader and singer Mark Hollis turned them into a post-rock collective and released two albums, Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock, that were way ahead of their time, and completely different from (and better than) anything else the group had ever done.

One listen to It’s My Life, Talk Talk’s second album, can dispel much of this received wisdom. This LP, just re-released by Rhino Records on its 40th anniversary, shows that Hollis was already breaking away from any genre boxification on their second album.

Start with “Dum Dum Girl,” track one on side one. This surreal “anti-prostitution” song gains its power not by bombarding listeners with sounds and fury but by slow builds and cathartic releases. The verses are quiet, almost wistful reflections about the life of a sex worker: “Another sigh with no regret / More coins inside her hands / One time to learn respect / Now mercenary she stands.” In the pre-chorus, Talk Talk unleash its power as soon as Hollis inserts himself into the story: “I’m no boy / Stealing pennies from the poor / Break it down / Can’t you see.” Then everything drops away for the meditative chorus, just repetitions of the syllables in the title. When we hit the bridge, it’s all rising keyboard sweeps and rhythm-section rumble, raising the emotional stakes without Hollis having to say a word.

The tracks here earn their keep by knowing when to amp up and when to back off—not a strategy Talk Talk really utilized in their first album. On slow songs such as “Renée” and “Tomorrow Started”, Hollis and producer Tim Friese-Greene are mad scientists playing with silence and negative space, making us wait for song structures to unfold just as the narrators are waiting to find out what is going on in their lives.

Mark Hollis had a great trick with his voice where he could start a line strong, kind of pause mid-phrase, and then finish with a bigger crescendo than he started with. This is used to great effect on the spooky “Such a Shame”, a song legendarily inspired by Luke Reichardt’s cult novel The Dice Man about a guy who makes all his decisions at random. Hollis sings, “The dice decide my fate / That’s a shame / In these trembling hands my faith / Tells me to react, I don’t care.” These lyrics don’t read well, perhaps, but the singer’s absolute conviction and the stop-start instrumentation put across whatever message you want to take from it.

This reticence helps set off faster tunes. “Call in the Night Boy” has a nasty synth hook on top of real fire from the most underrated rhythm section in New Wave: the fretless bass of Paul Webb and the drums of Lee Harris. Webb (later known as Rustin Man) and Harris are also the drivers of the title track, one of the most beloved songs of the New Wave. They establish a gentle loping cadence to anchor the broken-hearted verses, then lock into a discotheque-friendly whomp for the chorus so Hollis can shout, “It’s my life / Don’t you forget / It’s my life / It never ends!” This track was a top 40 hit in the US and many countries worldwide, and its beauty somewhat obscures its deep weirdness. But as always, there is a weirdness if you’re paying attention.

While It’s My Life‘s big feelings and fervor set Talk Talk apart from some of their contemporaries (like a certain other doubly-named New Wave band with whom they toured), it also revealed to Mark Hollis that he didn’t want to play dice with the record company. Their video for “It’s My Life” mostly features animal footage, and any shots of Hollis show him defiantly refusing to lip-synch to his own words despite orders from EMI. He was an artist, dammit, not a commodity! In the “Such a Shame” video, he found another way to rebel, where he filmed six versions of himself singing in different personas, then switched between them randomly by rolling a single die.

Talk Talk would be more popular after this; their single “Life Is What You Make It” was massive in 1986, and they would be more critically revered with their final two records, as stated above. But this is the purest form of the band’s power. The next record, The Colour of Spring, saw Hollis and Friese-Greene seize complete control of the Talk Talk sound, bringing in 14 non-group musicians and a children’s choir to flesh out their vision. That led to fine results, but it was the beginning of the end of Webb and Harris as band members, reducing a lot of Talk Talk’s power. Laughing Stock and Spirit of Eden are lovely, but their tracks are more like hushed tone poems than songs, often with more negative space than actual music. I might be a philistine, but I prefer the muscle-car version of Talk Talk, as embodied by this album.