Talk Talk - Laughing Stock (a review of a review)

The best review I ever read, in this feedback obsessed world of the internet,
where everyone with a broadband connection almost obliged to be a critic, was
something like:
“If you listen to this album and you don’t like it you need to listen to it
again and again until you do”.

A one liner but basically it sums up for me, the task of a music review, maybe
and maybe not so blatantly but it comes down to convincing someone of the
fallibility of their own senses, everything else is the making of comparisons to
something they maybe like to the unknown being reviewed. We all read reviews of
work we have experienced and work we will never see, like plays or notes made on
a meal we will never eat in a restaurant we will never go to. Each and every
mouthful is a unique event, every time a book is read is singular - art moves it
escapes us; even plastic art: each time you look at a painting it is different
because of what you have experienced - the mood that has taken you, events,
which have moved you, associations between time and events. Even great works get
tarnished and the poorest crap is amazing when it revives that crisp summer of
your first love and everything in-between.

Television reviews used to be written in the knowledge that the intended
audience had already seen it, the critique was post hoc and unlikely to
influence the watching of a repeat. Sport is not news for that reason no
pre-match predictions can gather anything of the match for the sports fan and
afterwards are similarly useless other than the score. The amount of time
dedicated to questions like ‘how does it feel to win today’ put against serious
world events, beggars my belief even for sports I am passionate about.

There is a fantastic passage in a David Lodge novel, where inadvertently,
chatting to some Professor, a Grad-student of literature is asked: what his
thesis is - and he says: ‘the influence of Yeats on Shakespeare’ (or some such
anachronistic mix up) and the Professor says ‘...oh I see that’s marvelous, you
mean how Yeats informs us of the way to read Shakespeare’. The Grad-student then
has to go away and spend the next 4 years of his life researching just that down
to a verbal mixup! The role of chance in life has few such explorations in art
other than abstract expressionism.

Getting back to the album in question in the opening one-line review - it was
about the 1991 album Laughing Stock by Talk Talk. They are a neglected band now
and the word laughter rarely associated with them, but their kind of evocation
of a fully English blues is a sound made more mainstream in the solo work of
Paul Weller and Radiohead I often think. The very act of association in the
title connecting torture with amusement by the historical reference of the
stocks is typical of this band, now genre-classified as post-rock. Stocks were
no funny ha ha thing of an Olde England but a means of exacting revenge, often
without mercy on a prisoner with no safe word. A piece of limitless sadism for
criminal vanillas made vulnerable by public incarceration - make no mistake
people extracted revenge with stones, not rotten vegetables.

It is recoded, somehow somewhere, that Jasper Johns was once having a chat with
John Cage (of silent music fame) about pop music and John said to Johns that the
singers failed to make clear their lyrics, to which Johns retorted to John that
he wasn’t listening. It took me a long time to understand this quixotic remark
because, for sure, you would have to listen with an ear attuned to the nuances
of the gnat to make out what Mark Hollis of Talk Talk intones in even the most
lucid of his utterances even in their earliest work about ‘Dum Dum’ girls and
‘It’s my life’.

I have since guessed though, that it is not the words in the sense of the
combination of the syllables that heed needs paying, it is the movement of the
emotion - the mood music of the voice. I have always felt that the most
numinous, the most whispered lyric, murmured into obscurity is the loudest, that
with the most clarity the dullest. That obscured by vocal stylings bears the
most listening, after all the voice is just another instrument, separated lyrics
and sounds usually yield nothing. Bob Dylan is the exception but also the
exemplar, his lyrics often work as poem and his voice, like, love or loath it -
draws in brings you to the story of the ballad by veiling it in a translucence.
That which risks ridicule places itself most firmly in the stocks and on the
line but is where entertainers become artists, I suppose.

I guess this is because the bulk of what artists wish to speak is that of which
we cannot make sense of. It may content philosophers to passover that which
cannot be spoken (by which I understand it is meant logically) must be passed
over in silence. It would however be a dereliction of the bulk of what is under
consideration in art and almost inhuman to do so in music, especially that,
which is expressed beyond the words that the voice produces. I am pretty sure
though that by this I am not saying scat is the highest art-form but what is the
most exciting part of the concert, besides the cacophonous end? It does seem
though that to earn the noise - artists must demonstrate control of order first,
like a courtship leads to orgasm through the dance of impressions of: taste,
interest, humour and probably bank account.

I would not sanction this misapprehension though, that the least clarity is the
most artistic; I remember the disappointment of someone in a manuscripts circle
I was once part of - in that I perceived the central conceit of her piece
because she wanted to draw a veil over it by making the pun, as cryptic, as
possible. Pretension of the highest water is possible through that route and
almost an insult to the audience to suggest they should be at such arms length
of concealment.

This is another internet foible - the definitive lyric - that sheet you refer to
in an argument with a friend about an REM mumbling or was it: “you better watch
out for the schoolies or the skin deep”? that the stranglers strangled? Nothing
of what you actually feel is contained therein though, in the dumb words. I
don’t think Johns cared then or probably now about what the words of Be Bop
Alula were any more than we care what Allahlulya really means or what Myrrhman
means to Hollis on Laughing Stock or the words it is composed of. Be Bop Alula
makes you want to move, Ascension Day on Laughing Stock exhilarates by the play
of percussion and dissonance masked by the incomprehensible sung over it like a
guitar subject to distortion. Those sophisticates inventing critical schools, of
course argue that a readerly approach is necessary to true appreciation and the
intended of the artist is second place; this seems to grant critic too much, too
much lee-way too much authority, it is not he who is putting wrists in the
clamps of the stocks or an arse on the line.

The sum of the parts should equal more than the parts out of combine. The
ambiguity draws one in, brings another play, that totality exposed is disposable
a one shot, an instant has been. What is at the edge of comprehension fascinates
and at least allows some creative interplay by listener. Let me put it this way
could you be friends with someone who’s every move you could predict
sufficiently to make a robot simulacrum programme a machine to replace them?

Some albums, not many, I am sure, in your collection certainly in mine, if
albums are your thing, are the greatest bargains you have ever bought - they
have the quality of being never boring - if you are lucky they get out of their
teens in terms of replays the best rank in the hundreds of repeats, they exist
in your DNA but still you need to experience by ear by heart. You have learned
them by that heart but what the heart knows it needs to be retold. They cannot
be pinned down they are not capable of emotional prediction. If one cannot
return to the beginning of a piece and see it for the first time then maybe it
is not worthy of record, it is just shabby shabby shabby. We must resist
bubble-gum for more substantial an aural meal, contrary to the latest thing the
decaying music industry would foist.

I tried with Laughing Stock and if I was ironic I would have the perfect
endpoint and say I still didn’t like it. The kid was right though it is a
masterpiece of exultant understatement, ranking along with Zappa’s Burnt Weeny
Sandwich, Tago Mago and Soon Over Babaluma, by Can and the less understated but
masterful 10 by Pearl Jam and Nirvana’s Unplugged in NY, Mystery White Boy, by
Jeff Buckley - the list goes on - all of which, for me, seem to bear unlimited
airplay. Then maybe it is me who fails the Turing Test, is capable of
distillation down to code and predictable, conservative in tastes, neophobic?

CODA
I am told by friends with children that the repetition of a story or viewing of
a video is the greatest delight to the very young, because it represents the
thrill of the familiar. This is the basis of the success of the Teletubbies,
because they replay even within the same programme the clips of whatever they
have clips of that week. If not failure of the Turing Test then, merely
infantile. I would be Ok with that but I am not sure it is something anybody
else, besides me, grows out of though, because surely it is the basis of the
success of: The Fast Show, Harry Enfield, The Kenny Everett Video Show and Benny
Hill before them - they are essentially the same every week, repeating familiar
catch-phrases to some point of infinite regression until the commissioning
editors patience is surpassed. Why should drama in the familiar not also exist
in music even for those out of short trousers?

Paul J. Yoward