Everything Is Real: Looking Back On ‘Spirit Of Eden’

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Six years after founder Mark Hollis passed away, we look back at Talk Talk’s groundbreaking album ‘Spirit Of Eden’

Today, on 25^th February 2025, it will have been six years since Mark Hollis, singer, songwriter, and founding member of Talk Talk, passed away at the age of sixty-four. Hollis’ music first reached me via the recommendation of my uncle. Specifically, he suggested that I listen to Talk Talk’s 1988 album, ‘Spirit of Eden.’ 

At first, I couldn’t quite make sense of the sounds I heard within that album. Some things I thought I recognised, but in a somewhat unnerving fashion, like the inexplicably familiar face of a stranger. Other things — those far outnumbering the familiar — were unlike anything I had ever heard before. That, I suspect, is exactly why, across the years that have since tumbled by, that album has never strayed far from my side. 

To commemorate Hollis’ life, I’d like to look back at ‘Spirit of Eden‘, to lean in closer and see what it has to offer now, so many strange records later. 

To begin writing this piece, I thought I’d listen to the album in as close to the right way as I could. I lit a candle, dimmed the lights in my room, put on my best set of headphones, and clicked play. Yes, on Spotify, yes, not through loudspeakers, but nobody is perfect. Admittedly too, there was music playing in the other room, loud music, which from time to time spilled over the more delicate sections of instrumentation in my cans, but what can you do? Isn’t there always music in another room, in some sense or another? Certainly, one way to really notice your environment is to try and reject it. 

Regardless, I embarked — candle burning, and eyes closed — on my attempt to listen to this album as if for the first time. 

Things begin with ‘The Rainbow‘. A track which sets a theme for the album with an extremity of dynamic variation seldom seen in pop music. Following an ambient introduction featuring shy beds of strings and droning guitars, a cleaner bluesy guitar-riff begins, one which is soon accompanied by a searing harmonica.

As by a rooster on moonshine-slumbering ears, we are torn awake, violently birthed into the experience of this song. Countering all the extremity and the distortion though, there are moments of almost total quiet, of rustlings and hummings, of pianos played so softly that you almost wouldn’t know they were there. ‘The Rainbow‘ is a song of equally magnitudinous grace and terror. In that sense, it feels deeply natural, and almost boundless. 

Then, suddenly, we find ourselves safe again. ‘Eden‘, at least for the most part, doesn’t share the mercurial tendencies of its antecedent. The hopeful, light chords of a guitar ease us into a soulful expression of longing. “Everybody needs someone to live by,” sings Hollis, at the pleading apex of his vocals. 

After ‘Eden‘ come ‘Desire‘, ‘Inheritance‘, ‘I Believe in You‘, and ‘Wealth‘, each compositions bearing their own idiosyncratic wonders. ‘Inheritance‘, in particular, features some fascinating shifts in sonic perspective. At about 2:50 in, and with little warning, we seem to wander toward the woodwind instruments, the song’s other components falling away behind us, like a toddler loosed among the band. 

There is no shortage here of such unexpected, focused moments, but upon reaching the third song, ‘Desire‘, it occurs to me that going track-by-track through an album like ‘Spirit of Eden‘ might be to do the reader a disservice. It is an album that — much like the tree on its cover, as illustrated by James Marsh — holds things, that conceals elements of itself, demanding the right attitude, the right mood, the right amount of noise from the other room before showing its various faces.

So, my recommendation to you is this: sneak off, somewhere almost dark. Take a candle, take a drink, take whatever the hell you want to use for listening, and give this album a minimum of its run-length in time. 

If you are anything like me, it might just change your life.

Listen to Spirit of Eden here:

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