Talk Talk - "It's my Life"
Talk Talk’s frontman Mark Hollis is an...well...unusual artist...at least when compared to most of the others 80'ies hitmakers. After Talk Talk's third album "The Colour of Spring" he convinced his fellow band members (keyboardist Tim Friese-Greene, bassist Paul Webb, and drummer Lee Harris) that it was about time they changed tracks.
Hollis had become increasingly fascinated by...silence...and clean mellow tunes. The next couple of albums presented the listener with looong slow but beautiful passages and soundscapes, - something that made their record company EMI pretty damn pissed. Talk Talk had turned their back to commercial success and were instead aiming on musical integrety...EMI were furious and kicked them out.
I later read an interview with Hollis in which he stated, that they'd all made the money they needed to be able to focus 100% on creating music they wanted and not the music the charts were craving for.
The last record I heard with Hollis started with 2 minutes of complete silence...after which Hollis hits a single key on his piano...followed by another 40 seconds of complete silence. Not sure I like it, but then again...Hollis and co could probably not care less...they've made enough money to live comfortably the rest of their lives.
Anyway...check out this classic…Odd thing is that except for the first Talk Talk album, the music is pretty much timeless...:
"It's my Life" version 1 (better sound quality):
"It's my Life" version 2:
Enjoy...
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can we go a little easy on all the 80's backwash... please?
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hollis' story sounds a little like green/scritti politti inverted.
- Why?
- Indeed!
- Without the 80s we're all nothing.
- parallel to our Ex-minster for foreign affairs Joschka Fischer (strange idea, but why not?)
- aged cheese, delicious as it might be, should be consumed with moderation. right now, this place is flooding with it.
Talk Talk is not cheese. The 80s were the heyday of the music video. And for fuck's sake when people post stuff like this on antville can they please put their massive editorial commentary in as a comment so it doesn't eat up the front page?
The Hollis / Talk Talk story is a bit more complicated than that, anyway.
(i knew i'd be misunderstood.) aged wine, aged armagnac, aged anything!
dir. Tim Pope - classic
That was wicked too; I'd always assumed the 80's were a cultural black hole, but I guess there was a lot of good stuff going on if you knew what to watch. -j
I didn't know there was a different group before No Doubt's version.
The beauty of this video without a shadow of a doubt is that I can no longer watch BBC nature programming without thinking of a mouthless Mark Hollis in a zoo! Tim Pope's video is one of my favourites, but not as good as 'Life's what You make it'- apparently not one of Tim's favourites but I can't live without it and clearly remember seeing it on MTV2 years ago.
This is nice. It's made from such a different place than modern videos. like, not all gimmicked out. It's subtle , but I think it holds up with a certain purity. I really enjoyed that.
i actually remember being really perplexed by the (almost fischingeresque) scribbles when i saw this back then.
