12. Talk TalkSpirit Of Eden
This is another one of those throw-the-gauntlet-down albums. We’d just recorded Underworld mk I’s second album and we were touring Australia and coming to the end of wanting to be a rocky, poppy, funky group. We’d heard acid house on the radio and we wanted to do it and being stuck in that group felt like a life sentence. Our manager sent us a tape of Talk Talk’s Spirit Of Eden and said, "this is what you call brave." And we knew Talk Talk because our mate Tim Pope did all their videos, but this was unlike anything they’d ever done before. We were driving through the outback and listening to it on the radio and the driver – who was a geezer from up north – kept saying, "this is bloody shit", and we said, "you either shut up or you get out and walk." We thought it was genius and it made us want to give up. It’s mostly deconstructed music. Tim had told us about all these strange recordings they were making and that they’d veered off course from what everyone expected them to do. It almost sounds like they made the record and then took great chunks of music off it. It’s beautiful. It’s all about the sound of the instruments. It’s like a cleaner version of the Burial album; they could almost be the same thing. Spirit Of Eden travels with me everywhere. After we’ve had a particularly loud and banging concert I’ll get in my bunk and I’ll put this on. It’s the antithesis of Underworld.
