Stuff I'm Listening To #100 - Guilty Pleasures #6 - Demos - Caralyn - Mark Hollis (the Reaction)

Caralyn by the Reaction (Mark Hollis) from Finn on Vimeo.
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.

Stuff I'm Listening to #67 - Three kinds of "Candy" - Talk Talk and The Reaction

For the past couple of days my vinyl sensei @Threadpennyvinyl's been posting about Talk Talk's song 'Candy'. Officially, the song hails from their debut album, 'The Party's Over'. She noted an interesting counter-factual that reminded me 'Candy' had been planned as their debut single. Perhaps things would have gone differently for the band. But without bending the laws of time and space, and lacking the time circuits and flux capacitors to properly construct a TARDIS or Delorean Time Machine, we'll never know.

Last night she subtly pointed out the differences between The Reaction's version (lyrically speaking) versus Talk Talk's release. My mind geared up and decided, I'm going to write a blog post! It's NaNoWriMo after all. And while I just don't do well with things like that, getting off my butt to write anything which I'm willing to post publicly is always a challenge, fun, and exciting. Any writing exercise I get done for myself is good exercise. 

The original intention of this post was to prattle on about the how valuable demos are for fans of any band. They're usually made as quickly as possible, as cheaply as possible (because what real struggling band do you know actually has money?) and meant to get them in the record company's door and signed. Years ago, I heard one of U2's demos where Bono must have been barely 15, a voice not quite cracked yet, on Alan Cross' Ongoing History of New Music (It's a wonderful show and I highly encourage anyone with an interest in learning about the backstories of new alternative music to have a listen). It was an eye (ear?) opening moment and a really good glimpse of what we all knew was to come for U2. Surprising for me because I had no idea Bono and the Edge had known each other for that long!

Personally, I adore demos. They're going to be the band at their very amateurish best, unrefined and full of energy. You're hearing conception in these demos. It's quite amazing, especially when you look at the scope of what the band will eventually become. The Reaction, Mark Hollis, Talk Talk. Their demos leave me speechless. To hear Mark Hollis so young and untouched by the music business is definitely a feast for the ears.

Speaking about demos being cheap, I need to relate the tale of my hometown band, the Barenaked Ladies. They made their demo for $1. We had a thing called Speaker's Corner, where, for $1, you could record a two minute video in a booth and once a week, they'd pick the highlights into a half hour show. It felt like Public Access Television deconstructed (think Wayne's World, Mike Myers being another Scarborough alumnus), but in Vine video length. Barenaked Ladies piled into this slightly larger than a phone booth thing and recorded their song 'You Can Be My Yoko Ono'. They waited until the weekend for the show to air. They recorded their piece and went off to the record company to show off their demo. The rest is clearly history.
  
As usual, I have digressed. 

So... Because of Threadpenny and a blog post by Dervswerve about the song (which I fully admit, I read last year back when Talk Talk was shiny and new for me, then decided maybe I should give this track a listen as I only had downloaded the singles from this album at that point), I had gone in to listen to the song again, all three versions that I have with an open ear.

Going chronologically backwards, let's start with the album version first. 

Quick note: All YouTube links are audio only. Please... please, let me know if the links go dead and I'll do my very best to find new ones. 

Talk Talk's official relase of the song from their debut album 'The Party's Over'

Here is producer Colin Thurston's cleaned and polished version of this song. At this point, the song had gone through two bands worth of tweaking and Colin made it as New Romantic ready as he could. A ballad worthy to sit with the other moody synth-pop staples of the time. Kudos to Simon Brenner for his synthesizer work here. You cannot beat Lee Harris and Paul Webb as a rhythm section. Instrumentally, this song is perfect. But to me, Mark always sounded a little flat, (not off key! but...) as if he's already sung this song too many times. It's a great piece, nonetheless and if you hadn't heard the other versions, you wouldn't hear the flatness I'm talking about. Almost as if the business had already started pissing him off and grinding him down a little. 

Talk Talk's demo - featured on their 'Asides and Besides' album

Now here is the demo, from Talk Talk. Fortunately they released this officially on their 'Asides and Besides' album so you need not worry about hissy bad quality tape recordings here. Slightly faster than the album version but mostly the same. Mark's not as flat here. All the emotion behind the song is much more pronounced here. But I think he's still holding back.

The Reaction's demo - unreleased

So when I started working on collecting the music I liked, it became pretty clear there was a specific style of music I gravitated towards. Anything ska, mod or punk was going to be my cup of tea. Here is the demo that Mark Hollis' first band, The Reaction, pumped out. Mark's younger here and channeling all the energy of the mod revival/punk. If you ever needed to hear this song at it's rawest, here is it. This is, vocally speaking, my favourite version.

This pack of candy comes with a 25% bonus - The Reaction's LIVE performance of Candy

 
It is with some surprise, when I started traveling through the Internets earlier today, that I should find this. I went out just to satisfy my own curiosity that there were no other versions of the song that I might have missed in order to write my directionless and rambling post today. I'm not sure how I missed this. The YouTuber posted it in May. I'll assume that I was being inundated by too much stuff all at once when he uploaded it for the world. There were a total of 6 views when I discovered it. Sad really. Seems a lot of people missed this.

I tend to steer away from discussing live versions of songs. They're all going to be different from one another and different from the demo/album/single. It also depends on how the musicians were feeling that night. Being a one time audience member, you're likely not going to notice if a performance was slightly off. But this being the only recording I've ever heard of The Reaction, well... Damn. It's pretty effing good! It's on par with the Reaction demo. Mark Hollis, as usual, is able to pull off a live performance that more often than not, overshadows the original album version (in this case, the demo). 

Oh, for good measure, here's a pic of the Reaction performing at the Aylesbury Friar for no more reason than I really like this picture. 

Photo by Mark Jordan. Found at the Aylesbury Friar's website.  From L to R (George Page (guitar), Bruce Douglas (bass), Mark Hollis (vocals, guitar), Gino Williams (drums)