Talk Talk – The Colour Of Spring

I actually had never heard Talk Talk until quite recently. Which is really absurd! I’d heard ‘It’s My Life’, but I hadn’t listened to that album or Spirit of Eden.

One day in our rehearsal space, I had come up with the idea of how I wanted Ignorance to sound like broken disco music. Vulnerable, somewhat fractured, disco that was still poppy but messed-up. My drummer Kieran [Adams] was like, ‘It sounds like you’re talking about Talk Talk’. I told him that I’d never listened to Talk Talk and he said I needed to immediately. When I listened to The Colour of Spring I was like ‘Oh, this is my music!’ But I turned it off because I was worried if I listened to it too much I’d be too influenced by it and not make something distinctive. I didn’t listen to it again until I finished making Ignorance and then put it on whenever I wanted.

It’s so outside of anything I’ve heard and I can’t believe it exists. In a strange way, Talk Talk speaks to the same part of my mind that The Books do. It’s music that incorporates silence, space, and time in this really different way to the standard Western way of structuring a song as verse-chorus-verse-chorus. It’s incredible.