In 1982, Talk Talk issued their debut album The Party's Over, an LP which - in addition to kicking off with the band’s signature song and one of their most familiar singles - helped set a standard for just how artistic and sophisticated synthpop could be.
Although the intervening years have led to most casual music fans thinking of Talk Talk almost exclusively in terms of its frontman and predominant songwriter, Mark Hollis, there’s more to the group than just the one man, or at least there was in the beginning. They began as a four-piece, featuring Hollis on vocals, Simon Brenner on keyboards, Lee Harris on drums, and Paul Webb on bass. It’s fair to say that Talk Talk and Duran Duran had a fair amount in common, and not just in their duplicating-word names: they both loved Roxy Music, they both shared a manager, and when Duran Duran went on tour in 1981, Talk Talk opened for them.
Although Talk Talk’s debut single, “Mirror Man,” failed to set the charts on fire, the group went backwards a bit for their second single, re-recording a song by Hollis’s previous band, The Reaction. This time, the band found success, if on the smaller side, with the single hitting No. 52 on the UK Singles chart, but upon releasing The Party’s Over a few months later, not only did the band’s next single, “Today” hit No. 14 on the UK Singles chart, but the decision to reissue “Talk Talk” put the song into the Top 30.
All told, The Party’s Over would find its way to No. 21 on the U.K. Albums chart, and once it found release in America, it eked out a peak of No. 132 on the Billboard 200. Of course, when Talk Talk released its second album, It’s My Life, the band would hit new chart heights in the U.S., even as they suffered a sophomore slump in the U.K. Ah, but that’s a story for another time…
- Log in to post comments
