Like many latter-day Talk Talk fans, I embarked on my journey searching for the Spirit of Eden, but while rummaging through the record racks, my eyes were drawn to The Colour of Spring, and I was intrigued to make it my first port of call. The album has a cover design depicting an entomological cabinet of curiosities filled with red, orange, and yellow moths (not their more attractive counterparts, butterflies, as might be assumed). In explaining the choice, Talk Talk’s singer Mark Hollis was uncommonly straightforward. “The beasts simply look much better than us. Animals are beautiful.”
Illustrator James Marsh, working in dialogue with band manager Keith Aspden, designed every Talk Talk album cover starting with the eponymous 1982 debut and crafted a visual identity that presaged the musical journey of songwriter Mark Hollis. The album artwork for 1984’s It’s My Life had birds sharing the skies with flying jigsaw puzzle pieces displaying characters from The Boyhood of Raleigh, an 1870 painting by John Everett Millais. The painting’s theme of wonder on sea and land has since been recast in satirical cartoons. Talk Talk’s esoteric music would find success in faraway places.
The most obvious symbolism for 1986’s The Colour of Spring was metamorphosis. The album displayed a startling transformation, subverting the new wave trappings that had brought Talk Talk commercial success with organic songs and verdant production that induced exhilaration, longing, and wonderment. In time, and given a moth’s capacity for destructiveness, the design has become a metaphor for impermanence, as the album would be retrospectively eclipsed in critical memory by 1988’s Spirit of Eden and 1991’s Laughing Stock. In the spirit of musical adventure, Marsh’s album artwork and penchant for ornithology took the themes of the natural world to further realms of abstraction.
“Each album is different. It’s like having kids; you like their differences, and you like each one for what it is – you don’t compare them with one another.” – Mark Hollis
The Colour of Spring, Talk Talk’s third album, was released on 17 February 1986. Its transitional reputation, as far as it has one, is unjust, as with the formative years of Radiohead, whose breakthrough third album, OK Computer, from 1997, honed pop songcraft as the basis for unorthodox experimentation. Talk Talk’s decade-long, five-album career was a straight arrow of artistic invention.
Talk Talk scored a number one hit on the American Billboard charts with the 1984 single “It’s My Life”, taken from their second album of the same name, a collection of sophisticated synthpop. Its commercial success gave Mark Hollis and collaborator Tim Friese-Greene the freedom to pursue a costly ambition, largely forsaking synthesizers in favour of authentic live performance.
“I’m influenced by everything. The more areas you take influences from, the less you actually receive them.”
It’s My Life was a platinum hit in the Netherlands, and The Colour of Spring would go gold on the Dutch charts. In July 1986, Talk Talk would play at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland. Mainland Europe was a mysterious land to the Anglocentric British pop music industry, but receptive to Hollis’s eclectic musical interests. Hollis spoke highly of Otis Redding and the Animals, and frequently name-checked Gil Evans and the arranger’s work with Miles Davis on the third stream jazz albums Porgy and Bess and Sketches of Spain from 1960. He also frequently mentioned modern classical composers such as Béla Bartók, Claude Debussy, and Erik Satie.
“I think we’re traditional in terms of a lot of our values. But we don’t restate the past. We are covering new ground.”
These influences came together on The Colour of Spring in a seamless blend of art rock, chamber jazz, and sophisti-pop. Hollis aspired to be a soundtrack composer, a faceless guise unlike a pop musician, and would subsume that desire with Spirit of Eden. Such ambitions were not highly esteemed by journalists at British music weeklies such as the New Musical Express, where pop-optimistic writers were more concerned with whether synthesizers or turntables would be the future of music and scornful of anything reminiscent of progressive rock. Talk Talk’s relationship with the English music press was perennially strained, even though their emotionally direct music was rooted in punk.
“By punk, I am convinced that musical technique is of minor importance. My feeling is that the strength, the zest in music, is much more important.”
The success of “It’s My Life” gave Talk Talk the freedom to spend 12 hours a day, six days a week, in the recording studio, with a cast of 60 musicians. The recording of The Colour of Spring took a year and two days, and after I first heard it, I listened to it each evening for a year and two days. It is Talk Talk’s most alluring record. The warm hues on its album cover are matched by the fiery vibrations of the organ, the earthy rhythms of the percussion, and the bright clarity of the variophon, the dominant voices in its music.
“It seems fascinating to me to play around with sounds. Especially the search for a balance between sound and silence, which is a fantastic challenge I would grasp with both hands.”
The variophon is an electronic instrument invented in the 1970s. By 1986, it had already become rare to hear (Tim Friese-Greene recalled only two of the instruments being available in London). Its pitch is controlled by the user like a keyboard, but, like a talk box for guitar, the player can control their inflexions with their breath, adding colour to a sound that synthesizes a trumpet. Inspired by the journeys on fellow musical explorer David Sylvian’s 1984 album Brilliant Trees with trumpeter and ethnomusicologist Jon Hassell, Friese-Greene and Mark Hollis would use the variophon to evoke the ambience of chamber jazz in “Happiness Is Easy”, “April 5th”, and “Chameleon Day”.
An instrument with sacred connotations, much like the trumpet, the organ is ever-present on The Colour of Spring. Hollis’s given inspiration came from the secular music of Booker T & the MGs and the British soul artist Steve Winwood. By the 1980s, Winwood was a bona fide star, with a two-decade-long career through the Spencer Davis Group, the jazz-rock band Traffic, and his contemporaneous success as a blue-eyed soul singer. He graced Talk Talk with a rare guest appearance, with his fiery organ textures providing kindling to “Happiness Is Easy”, “I Don’t Believe in You”, and “Living in Another World”.
The first thing the listening public would have heard of Talk Talk’s new direction was the song “Life’s What You Make It”, released as a single in January 1986, and energizing side one of The Colour of Spring. Chosen as a single because of its relative brevity, the song is driven by a rootsy Booker T & the MG’s-influenced piano riff, which cycles continuously without harmonic or rhythmic variation. The chorus is distinguished by a saturated, soaring guitar riff played by David Rhodes, who had worked on Peter Gabriel’s 1980 art-pop touchstone Peter Gabriel 3: Melt.
“We went right through the night, you know. We actually had to do that so that by the end you would sort of reckon it to be real.”
The “Life’s What You Make It” single was issued in a sleeve adorned by a golden moth, a hallmark of each single from The Colour of Spring sessions. The original music video for “It’s My Life” was filmed at London Zoo and intercut stock footage from a 1979 documentary called Life on Earth. The music video for “Life’s What You Make It” was filmed in a more naturalistic style over the course of a night in Wimbledon Park in south London, capturing the nocturnal antics of urban wildlife including badgers, foxes and owls, apparently undisturbed by the presence of a piano, a drum kit, and a parade of moths dancing in the spotlight.
“Baby, life’s what you make it / Don’t backdate it.”
Parroting an advertising executive or a new age therapist, Hollis hammered home the “Life’s What You Make It” title phrase in a series of repetitious chants interspersed with a string of nonsense rhymes. While they could have been inspired by the prevailing yuppie culture of the decade, the stream-of-consciousness lyrics suggest lampooning rather than championing that culture. Read in conjunction with the accompanying visuals, what sounds like a mantra of personal empowerment instead gestures toward something broader and more unsettling: that all life, human and otherwise, is shaped by shared action and responsibility.
“I always wrote about my feelings towards my surroundings. What interests me are the values that people construct for themselves.”
Lyrically, The Colour of Spring is melancholic. Solemn laments like “I Don’t Believe in You” and “Living in Another World” are paired with ambiguous exhortations like “Give It Up” and “Time It’s Time”, then contrasted with provocative phrases like “Life’s What You Make It” and “Happiness Is Easy”. In light of Hollis’s domestic bliss with his long-term partner and newborn child, and their inspiration for the song “April 5th”, it becomes difficult to hear these as straightforward bittersweet love songs, their emotional weight pointing elsewhere.
In an interview with the Dutch magazine Oor, Hollis gave unusually concrete answers regarding the meaning of his words. The cryptic claim that “Happiness is Easy” suggests that fulfilment follows naturally from a dutiful life, yet by placing his most explicitly Biblical language in the mouths of a children’s choir, a musical choice in a song abundant with unexpected sounds, Hollis subtly distances himself from that claim. “So ‘Happiness Is Easy’ is about wars in the name of God. Religion and war, two very different things that have nothing in common.”
“Any way you sing it / It’s the same old song / I don’t believe you.”
Emotionally direct but semantically ambiguous, “I Don’t Believe in You” teeters between rejecting the world and questioning faith itself. This ambiguity is reinforced when Hollis alters the lyric to “I don’t believe you”, which shifts the focus from wholesale disbelief to a more targeted, personal scepticism, in this case towards the British government. “‘I Don’t Believe in You’ has as its subject the propaganda films in which the government promised in 1945 that now everything would be as fantastic. Look what is reality.”
“Give it up / Or tell me why I’m so wrong.”
The request to “Give It Up” could refer to abandoning a fruitless idea or renouncing an unethical behaviour. The lyrics frame the latter, issuing an appeal to either correct one’s actions or challenge the narrator’s ethical position. Considering the vegetarianism of the Talk Talk members, the album’s visual symbolism, and the polemical resonance of the Smiths’ 1985 album Meat Is Murder, I interpret the song as a less provocative, ethically minded plea to give up eating meat.
“The aim of The Colour of Spring is to present great variety in terms of mood and arrangement, treating the whole thing as a concept.”
Grounding The Colour of Spring are three songs of Gil Evans inspired sophisti-pop distinguished by their rich instrumentation, lush production, and sublime key changes. The shimmering ballad “I Don’t Believe in You” and the exhilarating rocker “Living in Another World” feature Steve Winwood’s searing organ, the ringing guitar of Robbie McIntosh (of the Pretenders), and the organic percussion of Morris Pert (who played a part in Kate Bush’s ensemble on 1985’s Hounds of Love).
“It is very fascinating to produce a guitar sound with a synthesizer. Eventually, it does something a real guitar never could.”
The sparkling arrangement of “I Don’t Believe in You” is augmented by the clear and rippling tones of Gaynor Sadler’s harp. Its instrumental passage, and that of “Give It Up”, both feature soaring synthesized solos played by Ian Curnow. By contrast, the saturated production of “Living in Another World”, a song that addresses miscommunication, is pierced by Paul Webb’s melodic bassline and Mark Feltham’s chugging harmonica solo.
Lifting the album is a trilogy of compositions that are most clearly indebted to Mark Hollis’s interests in modern classical music. The two that continue to resonate most profoundly to listeners attuned to Spirit of Eden are “April 5th” and “Chameleon Day”. Because both tracks contain no percussion or backbeat and are harmonically static, they emerge like amorphous soundtracks, but take shape courtesy of fluid, jazz-inflected motifs played on either piano or variophon. The third song in this groundbreaking group is often overlooked, and crowdsourced reviews suggest that this is because the awkward addition of a children’s choir takes many listeners out of the moment.
Opening “Happiness Is Easy” and The Colour of Spring is an extended, unadorned drumbeat from Lee Harris, which ought to have dispelled any preconceptions that the album was going to be another synthpop record. The tension resolves into a lushly unfolding soundscape, and the song is among the most elemental in the Talk Talk catalogue. While it is also harmonically static, it is energized by a call-and-response cycle underscored by Steve Winwood’s glowing organ, and overlaid by Robbie McIntosh’s fluid guitar, Tim Friese-Greene’s bright piano, and chilly synthetic string effects from a Kurzweil synthesizer.
Two bassists augment the tapestry of sound. Alan Gorrie, of Average White Band and “Pick Up the Pieces” fame, plays a rubbery electric bass riff, which is countered by a woody acoustic bass hook played by Pentangle bassist and ace session musician Danny Thompson. The simplicity of each part, when considered alongside the skill of each player, suggests that Gorrie, Thompson, Winwood, and company were directed to improvise, to record multiple takes, and to whittle down their parts in the spirit of minimalism that guided Talk Talk into its most critically venerated era.
The Colour of Spring remains Talk Talk’s bestselling album, but, overshadowed by the deeply personal connections that generations of listeners have formed with Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock, the album has been denied a shot at a legacy. Following the release of Bark Psychosis’ seminal 1994 album Hex, the post-rock era began, Spirit of Eden was bestowed as post-rock’s creation myth, and Talk Talk’s earlier works were frozen out of the picture.
By pushing the resources and goodwill of its record company to their limits, Laughing Stock inflated the reputation for artistic integrity which Talk Talk’s music inherently possessed. The painstaking recording process, the scale of ambition, the audacity to stretch a pop record toward the sublime: all of it was present in The Colour of Spring. The key was that it sold in quantities significant enough to justify its expense.
As The Colour of Spring transcended the synthesized trappings of its era, its silky modulations and verdant production kept it grounded in new wave, while organically integrating instrumentation such as the harp and organ. Its textures were matched by a visual and lyrical identity that subverted 1980s materialism with an ecological sensibility, forming a holistic concept rooted in the natural world.