In his weighty 2010 tome Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music, Rob Young charted a century's worth of musicians who helped define British folk. In the latter stages he rightly identifies and aligns the often-overlooked Talk Talk with the likes of Kate Bush and Julian Cope as genuine outsiders whose music belongs to a deep-rooted British tradition – artists who "sought to kick their way free of expectations and create hybrid, idiosyncratic sound environments ... [to] maintain a distinctively British voice".
It was a reminder of a band who, though they may have slipped from public consciousness in the two decades since their split, are being felt more as an influence than ever. Talk Talk are one of a few genuine pioneers of their era not to have succumbed to the oxymoronically named Don't Look Back reunion circuit. Though their name may now be more synonymous with a broadband package, there was time – the 80s – when Talk Talk were surging forward into experimental new territories. This is also a band who divide opinion and remain nigh-on impossible to categorise; canvassing opinions online this week, retrospective reactions ranged from "Amazing!" to "Humourless, wafty and loved only by Balearic DJs".
A reminder of such influence came via an unlikely source in 2003, when Gwen Stefani's Californian ska-pop crew No Doubt scored a chart hit with a fairly faithful cover of It's My Life. But the band's influence is most obviously evident in the output of Wild Beasts. Like Talk Talk, Wild Beasts are an inherently English band preoccupied with the possibilities of space and atmospherics (and falsetto) in their sounds. "All the best bands change shape," says Wild Beast's Benny Little of their love of Talk Talk, ahead of the Beasts' new album, Smother, released in May. "The best parts are unquantifiable," agrees bassist/singer Hayden Thorpe.
A rarity in the 80s pop milieu, Talk Talk treated pop not as a shallow medium through which to get laid/rich/a sports car but, thanks mainly to frontman Mark Hollis, a conduit through which to explore uncharted waters, often in painstakingly detailed production. And unlike contemporaries such as Scritti Politti, who went from politicised squat-dwelling post-punk to lightweight winebar soul music of the mid-80s, Talk Talk went in the opposite direction: from new romantic synthpop to the avant garde by way of chart success.
Though EMI had hopes for them to follow the success of tourmates Duran Duran, Hollis was less inspired by the staple early-80s influences of Bowie and/or punk that had gone before and instead preferred everything from Satie to the Seeds to the modal jazz of Miles Davis. This was cerebral pop that refused to stand still, and as the decade progressed – and producer/keyboard player Tim Friese-Greene joined – Talk Talk released a series of wilfully diverse records that drew on jazz, classical, folk and pop without falling strongly to any one camp.
With its rolling piano riff, 1985's Life's What You Make It remains their best known song and has since been covered by various people (including Weezer). The success of the subsequent 1986 album Colour of Spring gained them enough commercial success for EMI to stump a hefty budget for their next album. Retreating to a church in Suffolk, Talk Talk lost themselves in their music, overshooting all deadlines and budgets. The result was 1988's Spirit of Eden, now considered a classic, albeit one that was initially commercially unsuccessful.
The influence of the layered texturing (the close-miking of individual instruments ensured an air of intimacy) and ambient leanings of the album is now evident in a disparate array of artists: from the post-rock of Tortoise and others that emerged in the 90s to associated Talk Talk bands such as Bark Psychosis and Catherine Wheel, through the trip-hop of Portishead, DJ Shadow and Unkle (whose 1998 debut Hollis played on) to the vocal fragility of Antony and the Johnsons and the natural world references of British Sea Power, finally arriving at latter-day Radiohead – and Wild Beasts.
There's always something reassuring about a band whose ending really is a full stop; this way, there is no opportunity to taint the legacy. Hollis retired from music in the late-90s – explaining: "I can't go on tour and be a good dad at the same time" – and has shown little wish to return. Perhaps the best thing he can do is sit back and watch as the small shoots that he helped plant now blossom in strange new forms.
