Artist: the Reaction/Mark Hollis*
Title: Caralyn (or I'm Telling You)**
Favourite Lyrics:
Caralyn, let me take you into a brand new world
You won’t go without
Get a car. Get a great big house
Never need
Why?: I feel like I've posted this before. If not, I'm surprised because ever since this was shared with me I'd fallen in love with it. It became my favourite song by Mark Hollis because he was clearly at the start of his song writing career here. You'll almost tire of the fact that so many people will tell you 'Spirit of Eden' or the 'Colour of Spring' was a masterpiece. Funny... I absolutely love 'the Party's Over' and I I tend to toss 'Laughing Stock' on more than I do 'Spirit of Eden'. But Mark Hollis' earlier stuff shouldn't be ignored despite the fact it is not the stuff that most Talk Talk fans will tell you was the best stuff he'd ever done.
There's a freshness and spontaneity about them that gets lost in the glossy and heavily produced debut and sophomore albums that happen later. This is a large part of why I love demos (which I've noted before). I've heard a handful of demos and I really like them. There's something about hearing a band at the start of their career that's simply adorable, like looking at one's baby pictures. If you listen closely, you can hear greatness at its conception. Like birth, it can be a little messy, it most likely needs to be cleaned up, but simply miraculous in it's own right.
The thing with unsigned bands demos are: they're new to the business; they're usually pretty young and they're putting their best stuff out as quickly as possible and as cheaply as possible. It must be impressive enough to the record company so they can get that deal and potentially start their career. A lot is riding on those recordings.
There's a lovely interview excerpt (Part III) with Viviane Morrison where Mark does a little reminiscing about the first days in the studio, where he drops this comment about how time was precious in the recording studio and if you took time to stop for tea, you had just wasted ￡10. I only bring it up because that statement is just so... British and adorable. :) Thanks @Alla for finding the interview (Part I and Part II linked here for your reference). For me, this interview was great because it was simply amazing for me to hear him discussing his time in the Reaction.
Footnotes:
*It sounds like this could haven been a demo for the Reaction, but without any supporting evidence to say for sure, I can only say for sure Mark Hollis had a hand in writing and performing it. There's no date or anything attached to the demo to verify anything else.
**Again, there's no evidence for the song title. Some people have a copy of this demo labelled "I'm Telling You" and others have it listed as "Caralyn". I almost suspect it is called the later and the first name was adapted in order to avoid confusion with "Does Caroline Know?"
Finally, special thanks to the 'Professor', one of the more knowledgeable Talk Talk fans I know, who was kind enough to share the demo with me before I located this copy on Vimeo. He remains anonymous because while he never gave me explicit instructions not to reveal that he had shared it, I didn't think he wanted everyone to bother him to share what he had.
No comments:
Post a Comment