Outtakes, B-Sides, and Rarities #1: Talk Talk, "It's Getting Late in the Evening"

I've long meant to add MP3 files to the irregular rotation of things I do with this blog, and the time has finally come. To inaugurate this feature, I will post a series of ten or so favorite outtakes, B-sides, rarities, lost or otherwise uncollected and lesser known songs. First up, and probably my favorite, Talk Talk's "It's Getting Late in the Evening" (1986).



This song arrived as a B-side on the "Life's What You Make It" 7" and 12" singles, and was later (much later) included on Asides Besides (a spotty retrospective of extended dance mixes and previously uncollected songs put out by Caroline Records in 2000). Though recorded during sessions for the bestselling album The Colour of Spring, "It's Getting Late in the Evening" foreshadows the direction Talk Talk would take with their next album, the band's creative breakthrough into something entirely new, The Spirit of Eden. Everyone and his sister who writes about the band mentions Mark Hollis's heroin addiction as both a creative influence and obstacle. I neither know nor care to explore the connections between drug use and the music he made. After all, the music is all I can experience now. And the music is sublime.

"It's Getting Late in the Evening" opens softly, with a tentative organ and tambourine rhythm shadowed by some distant electric guitar scraping. Hollis sings, "Everybody's laughing," and the listener can't be sure if everyone is laughing in pleasure or mockery. The effect is disorienting until the song drifts into a poetic (and characteristically unintelligible) verse about redemption, followed by what amounts to the song's chorus: "The tide shall turn to shelter us from storm,/ the seas of charity shall overflow and bathe us all." The entire affair feels quite fragile, if hopeful, until the song shifts into a gradual orchestral swell that, twenty-plus years later, may sound vaguely familiar to fans of Bjork, the Cocteau Twins, or Sigur Ros. Yet at the time the steady progression toward a luminous flash--a flash that never quite arrives--was breathtaking. This swell comes off as more a gentle ascent to heaven than a wild, abandoned release. Now and then someone laughs in the background, or drops something, and the wash of sound takes over. And it does indeed bathe us all.

In the second verse, starkly more fragile than the first, Hollis makes believe that his exile--our exile--is chosen, and we realize we haven't been lifted to heaven after all. Hollis had simply raised his eyes and arms heavenward, offering nothing more substantial than frail hope.

Considering the music he was yet to make, he (and we) had much to hope for. It's tragic that he ended his solo career a decade later, shortly after it began.

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Download: TALK TALK - "It's Getting Late in the Evening"
Buy: TALK TALK Asides Besides