Talk Talk
The Party's Over

At the dawn of post-rock, on one side there's "Spiderland", and on the other, there's "Laughing Stock" (Verve, 1991), with its understated and elusive existential abstraction, amidst non-linear rhythms and feedback guitars, intimate dynamics, and unanticipated depths. A masterpiece built through the dripping and polychrome layering of sound bands, an uncircumscribable radical jazz-rock work, with vocal melodies no longer tangible, yet so intimate and intertwined with the human soul.

The splendid "Spirit of Eden" (EMI, 1988) marked the environmentalization of pop, post-pop, forcing the song format, crafting an increasingly expanded chamber blues with jazz and whispered psychedelia. A work that presented itself as rarefied and highly evocative.

"The Colour of Spring" (EMI, 1987) extended a pop music deviant from the rules, we would say complex and tormenting, already art rock.

"It’s My Life" (EMI, 1984) managed to be an album of sophisticated electronic pop, thrilling, where synthesizers and traditional instruments served flexible plots and compelling, personal melodies. The songwriting began to operate independently of both contemporaries and archetypes (Roxy Music and Ultravox).

And “The Party's Over” (EMI, 1982)?

It's the debut album, the starting point we reach by reversing the chronological sequence of this remarkable process of evolution and revolution.

British, English, or rather “in quiet desperation”, the Talk Talk formed in 1981 in London, in the Tottenham district. They are Mark Hollis, leader, multi-instrumentalist, singer (a distinctive voice that tears, that scratches the walls of the soul), Paul Webb on bass, Lee Harris on drums, and Simon Brenner on keyboards. The latter would soon abdicate, giving way to producer and multi-instrumentalist Tim Friese–Greene.

“The Party's Over” is a commercial new wave, new romantic album, the pathetic branch led by Duran Duran, from whom they borrowed producer Colin Thurston for the occasion. They released a colorless, dull LP, out of focus, in the name of a conventional and uninspiring synth pop. The extracted singles don't say much: "Mirror Man" (a poor exercise on Depeche style), "Today" (a minor effort) and the acceptable "Talk Talk", with a catchy rhythm emphasized in the lyrics: «I'm tired of listening to you answering me in rhymes/ …/ All you do for me is talk, talk/ talk, talk, talk, talk». The best thing, then, seems to be the sinuous "Have You Heard the News", while the title track harbors Hollis’s good vocal performance that adds depth to the synthesizers so shallow they barely reach the surface. The words dispense a forlorn bitterness: «I am all of what I'm guilty of/ Take this indictment away, Lord/ Name the crime I’m guilty of/ Too much hope I took as virtue».

In summary, we face an interim album, transient, entangled in the syrupy and fatty gloss of new romantic. Yet right here lies the origin of a band in continuous growth, able to become—as time unfolds—influential like few others, puzzling like none other. It’s worth, then, learning where one comes from. And returning here evokes tenderness, where, in every other of their works, we can find wonder.

The album, so to speak, “of the eyes that speak”, also titillates their curious artwork: every cover of theirs will always be intriguing, full of enigmas, symbols, trees, moths, and flamingos. All, truthfully, better than this one.

The Talk Talk gave rise to the inverted apotheosis, the exact opposite of rock bands, which come to dissolution exhausted, while they seal a decade-long cycle (with constant rise and change) strong of two masterpieces.

And to think that Hollis’s beginning was in '78 with the Reaction, the authors of a single, “I Can’t Resist”, a r'n’r clumsy with strained vocal harmonies. The closure will instead be with a sole solo album, the touching self-titled one of '98, then to vanish. Webb and Harris, as .O.Rang, will close shortly after.

As in elegies, “to feel is to fade.”

But we'll still be waiting for you. What else to do?

Waiting for you is justified.