There ought to be something like the graphs of innovation diffusion or the hype cycle for music. Years ago, when Strands was called MyStrands, they did something like that, and the rise of the Arctic Monkeys briefly followed the hype pattern. Paul Lamere blogged a couple of days ago about plotting artists whose star was on the wax or the wane, but not about the longer term trajectory of those who wane only to wax again later.
The standing of Talk Talk didn't follow any standard growth curve that I know of, unless it was a very elongated hype pattern. What am I going on about? Well, I remember when Talk Talk first started making records. I hear them on the radio and quite liked them, in the same way that I thought Duran Duran's Planet Earth was a decent pop song and I liked enough Tears for Fears songs to consider briefly buying and album of theirs. I was looking forward to seeing Talk Talk when they were on the bill at the Milton Keynes bowl in 1982: evidently I previously remembered arriving in the middle of their set, though that memory has left me now. After that I don't think I thought about them again until around the turn of the century. That was when word finally filtered through to ear-far-from-the-ground me that Talk Talk's later albums (and Mark Hollis's subsequent solo album) had got increasingly experimental and interesting.
So I probably should have listened and just bought one of the later Talk Talk albums, but I guess that trace of fondness for the early singles had a nostalgic hold on me and led me to get the "very best of" when I saw it in Fopp. Up to track 9 or 10, it all sounds very eighties — that drum sound; those Bryan Ferry inflections. It's the last two tracks, from Spirit of Eden, that open out the sound, wallowing in space and texture. Listening to the latter album as I type, it's evident that, yes, I would definitely have been better off buying that or its successor.
Meanwhile the Talk Talk stock still rises, as, for example, in The Clientele's fan forum.
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