This isn’t a post about a line in an advert for tinned custard. Instead it’s about Talk Talk. Yes, the band from the 1980s who stopped recording in the early 1990s after five albums. One of my favourite bands.
Yesterday I was in Totnes, Devon, to meet Dan Arborise and have a chat with him about his second album, Of Tide And Trail, which I’m putting out this year for its vinyl debut. There wasn’t a huge amount to discuss, just a few details about vinyl colour and which photos we could use, etc. Oh, and the split of the tracks across two discs. That took about half an hour.
The rest of the three hours we spent together we talked about music. How it’s made, what it’s like to tour and so on. Quickly Talk Talk came up and Dan asked me what my favourite album was and I said it’s their final one, Laughing Stock. Ask most people who know the band’s output and they’ll be Spirit of Eden, or Colour of Spring. Both excellent choices.
And yet, to me, Laughing Stock is the pinnacle of their releases simply because it pushes to the absolute limit what musicians can do with a simple request: to experiment and improvise, using your emotion and ‘gut’ to lead your playing. It’s not really about technical ability, although that clearly exists. It’s what makes jazz so exciting, once you get past the idea it’s navel-gazing noodling. It’s Dan’s favourite album, too. A strong bond was formed.
Music has got me many places, opened a lot of doors and gives me, still to this day, immense joy to play and listen and discover. It’s clear that ai is coming for it, although it’s been a long time since anyone got into the music business as an artist to make money.
As I’m listening to Talk Talk’s final album, Laughing Stock, I get to following the obvious thread. The idea of providing freedom to over 50 people to improvise from the seed of an idea only to select a mere 18 of them and using their music as the starting point for what became the thing you hear. I mean, it’s ridiculous.
If Mark Hollis had ai to play with, would he have used it? After all, he was ‘prompting’ musicians and then taking their output to build up his final version while adding 100s of overdubs and tweaks. It came out rather well, too. He was using the chops and ideas that these musicians had learned and refined and built their own ideas from and creating a set of bits and pieces from which he then went on to create Laughing Stock.
Is it any different to using ai? Perhaps, given that Hollis himself was an excellent musician with a keen ear. And yet, if he was using it, is it a tool to allow him to recreate what’s in his head?
So, would he have used it? I think not. Why? I don’t think he’d have the happy accidents, the unexpected, the mistakes and misshits, the madness of doing those sessions. Then again, he conjured something from the initial sessions. It was a lot of his own work once he had the outputs to his ‘prompts’.
Whatever the answer it matters not a bit. Laughing Stock is faultless. I’m forever amazed it was created by humans whenever I listen.
Oh, okay, here’s the Ambrosia advert with that memorable line.