Talk Talk It’s My Life” 40th Anniversary Half-Speed Master (Parlophone)

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Talk Talk is a band whose reputation has grown exponentially over the past 30 years thanks in part to the genre-busting album Spirit Of Eden and the tragic death of main-man Mark Hollis in 2019.

Formed in 1981 as a synth-pop quartet in the style of Duran Duran, their first two albums (including It’s My Life) definitely fell into that kettle of fish. But by the time they got around to 1988’s Spirit Of Eden, they had abandoned those synth-pop stylings for something more sonically adventurous, incorporating elements of improv, jazz, classical, ambient and dub into something eventually called “post-rock”.

In-between, they released The Colour Of Spring in 1986, musically straddling synth-pop with post-rock and becoming the band’s most commercially successful record with hits like Life’s What You Make It, Living In Another World and Give It Up.

But this being 2024, it’s the 40th Anniversary of It’s My Life we are here to observe. Talk Talk drummer Lee Harris and Charlie Hollis, son of Mark, have overseen a new, half-speed master version of the album, cut by Matt Cotton at Metropolis Studios. The goal was for “greater depth” and less compression than was fashionable in the early-CD days of 1984. And that’s exactly what we get.

This new pressing sounds awesome. The music really pops and those cheesy synths now sound better than they have every right to.

Hollis himself decried the use of synths, but felt forced into using them due to financial restrictions, claiming that, “If they didn’t exist, I’d be delighted”.

I’m with him on that and I’d love to hear It’s My Life re-recorded using “real instruments”. Sadly, that’s not possible, but we do have this, vastly-improved version instead.

And here’s hoping Harris and Hollis will be motivated to perform the same aural magic on The Colour Of Spring and Spirit Of Eden…the next anniversary isn’t that far off.

Marty Duda

Marty Duda
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