Baby, yesterday's favourite - don't you hate it?

Continuing my trip back through the 1986 album charts

23/02/86 : The Colour Of Spring - Talk Talk


Well, I didn't think I'd be meeting this lot - what a nice surprise. I have listened to this album, but not in a long time - every so often I visit their best-of (which is a fine collection) but it will be nice to remind myself of their other stuff.

Well, this is just lovely! It's less full-on synth than their earlier stuff and somehow stripped-back and complex at the same time - it's all (or at least mostly) very subtle. There's loads of stuff in there, but not too much of any of it (except for maybe on "Time It's Time" - I really didn't need those recorders) and Mark Hollis's voice is, as always, sublime. "Life's What You Make It" is the one everyone knows (it's been covered by Placebo, Weezer and The Divine Comedy, which is quite the mix), but I also really liked "Happiness Is Easy", "Living In Another World", "Give It Up" and "Chameleon Day". It's quite possibly my album of the year - I'd forgotten how good it was.

We're at #8 in the charts this week with a new entry on the start of a surprisingly long nineteen week run - it's their most successful studio album. The top five this week were Dire Straits, Whitney Houston, Rocky IV, Phil Collins and Eurythmics and the next highest new entry was Elvis Costello.

Wikipedia has more than I was expecting on the album, but there's very little content of interest there - it's their third album and features some interesting guest artists including Robbie McIntosh (of The Pretenders) and Stevie Winwood, both of whom we've already met this year. The critics were pretty nice about it and it did better commercially than you might expect, getting to #3 in Switzerland and #1 in The Netherlands and even a pretty decent #58 in the US. The band's entry is quite interesting - there's a lot of love for the band amongst other musicians. I also didn't know or had forgotten that Mark Hollis was no longer with us, having died from cancer in '19.

"Customers also listened to" Simple Minds, The The, A Flock Of Seagulls and Big Country - which is a slightly peculiar mix. However I'm not sure anyone's really like Talk Talk - certainly when you consider the journey they went on across their albums and this is a particularly fine one.

16/02/86 - Not for me
02/03/86 - Doesn't quite work for me

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