Producer Tim Friese-Green and vocalist Mark Hollis are the brains behind Talk Talk: a band absolutely individual in its musical style and unusually uncompromising in its approach to modern musical technology.

Tim Friese-Green and Mark Hollis are two of a kind. Between them, they write and record all of Talk Talk's music, and have just come up with a highly original album: The Colour of Spring. In many musical aspects, they see eye to eye, although the opinions they share are often unconventional. It is presumably for this reason that they have been working together for the past three years. Was Tim now fully incorporated as another band member?

Tim; In some ways I suppose I could be regarded as such. I write a lot of the material with Mark and generally I have more involvement with this project than would normally be the case.

When I started producing, in about 1975-6 I worked with a lot of bands, but I've never been so involved in one as I am in Talk Talk. I'll go on producing Talk Talk records for as long as they want me to.

Where was the new album recorded?

Tim; It was mostly recorded and mixed at Battery Studios, although a couple of mixes were done at Camden Town. It should be out by the middle of February.

Talking Technology

There are a lot of acoustic instruments on the album. Did you use any special recording techniques?

Tim; I'm a bit of a purist when it comes to miking up instruments. A traditional way of miking any instrument is often the best way, because it's obviously the method that most people have found works best. Quite often it's merely a question of how far away you put the microphone, not of how many tricks you can use with it.

I don't actually like high technology and I don't get on with sequenced or synthesised music very well. I try to keep that aspect to a bare minimum, partly because I don't enjoy working that way and also because I don't enjoy listening to those sorts of records. I only use it when necessary.

Would you say then that technology was getting in the way of the music itself?

Tim; Not exactly, but I do think that it's detrimental to the spirit of music. I suppose 'clinical' is the word that's often used in the context of musical high technology: electronic drum kits, digital recording and so forth. I'd much rather have somebody playing properly, flaws and all. The performance aspect of somebody actually playing is for me far superior to something that is 100% in time and 100% in tune. Those things tend to get very boring. Quite often the mistakes are the best part of the performance. Perhaps the only exception is dance music, where that sort of approach sometimes works best, but that's not an area that I find particularly enjoyable.

Which instruments are featured most strongly on the album?

Mark; There's a good deal of piano, acoustic and electric guitar, a little bit of soprano sax, lots of percussion, recorders, choirs, acoustic harp and harmonica. There are also some African instruments like little lyres. They look a bit like an little oil can with a branch coming out of it; strings and twigs attached.

Tim; There's also a Variophon, which is quite a rare instrument in this country now. In fact most people haven't even heard of it, and there are only two in London that I know of. It's basically a very small keyboard with a breath controller that enables you to put some expression into your playing, so that all sorts of inflections are added to the synthesised sound. The reason we get on with it so well is that it doesn't give you the feeling that it's synthesised. It's basically a woodwind or brass instrument. Its wide range of expression is the main reason that we used it so much.

The Case Against Synthesisers

Tim; Ian Curnow played keyboards, but this album really contains very little synthesiser compared to the last.

Mark; I suppose you could count a Hammond as a synthesiser. There's a Hammond on every track. On tour there will have to be a certain reliance on synthesisers because we'll be trying to get as close as we can to the actual sounds on the album and that is not always practical on tour. For instance, excluding the choirs there's about 15-20 people on the album. On tour I think we'll have to pare it down to the essentials.

Synths were also used as an economic measure on the It's my Life album. As far as I'm concerned, the only good thing about synths is that they give you a large area of sound to work with and I'll only use them if I have to. Beyond that I absolutely hate synthesisers; they've got no feel to them whatsoever. All synthesisers have enabled us to do is to go some way towards reproducing organic sounds when we can't afford the real thing. I don't believe that there is a manufactured electronic instrument anywhere to compete with a piano.

Don't you think that as technology has developed they've become more friendly, more expressive and more directly controllable by the user?

Tim; No, I think they're becoming less expressive. When synths first appeared at least you had to play them. Now all you have to do is write your part and have it played for you by a bunch of chips.

Then there's the question of the sounds. Take for example the Kurzweil piano sound, which is generally held to be one of the most accurate copies of a piano. It still doesn't feel like a piano to play and what is produced doesn't therefore sound as though you were playing a real piano. There's no comparison with the real article.

Compared to the piano imitations available five years ago there has been progress in terms of copying the sound but not in terms of the feel. I don't understand why people don't play a piano rather than a Kurzweil.

What about synthesised sounds in their own right as opposed to imitative synthesis?

Tim; They're alright for people that like them. When people say that they have 'new sounds' on their album I don't usually find them very different. I simply hear more synthesisers. Whether he has some new filter doesn't really seem to give a new sound.

Personally, I consider expression to be a neglected aspect of synth manufacture. But there are so many different schools of thought about this because it's basically a matter of taste. There are a lot of people who really enjoy synthesised music and like the feel produced when everything is MIDId up and played by some kind of device. I think there will inevitably be some kind of backlash against that.

Mark; I think MIDI is a four letter word.

Tim; There's simply nothing printable that I could say about MIDI. We don't actually come into contact with it all that much because we don't tend to use synthesisers much, and the idea of MIDIing up an acoustic piano is gross. I've heard the demonstration tapes they send round with the product. They say 'This is how you could play if you MIDI up your piano' and then they present you with this piece of music which is so hideous in it's feel as to put you off MIDIing up your piano for life.

It's very easy to get outstripped by technology, especially if you work in it; it's either exciting or frustrating. I imagine it's exciting if you're extremely rich, because you can afford to update your gear every six months. For those people who aren't so well off I imagine it's very frustrating because when you've saved up to buy one piece of equipment it's very quickly superceded and you wish you had the newer model.

Do you use sampling at all?

I do occasionally on drums; none of the topline stuff on a Talk Talk album is sampled. I use it where there are drum patterns that the drummer can't actually play. That's not to say that the drum patterns are especially complicated in musical terms, they're not, but we do have some hi-hat patterns that aren't actually playable. On those occasions I do use triggered samples. It's used simply to get over a problem. Where the drummer can play it I'd much rather he did. When we're writing it's obviously not practical to write with the drummer there, so like a lot of groups we tend to write with some sort of drum machine. Then the track will be formatted around whatever drum pattern I choose to program in. But once you get used to a certain drum figure it's very hard to let it go. Even in the studio sometimes I try to program a drum pattern that the drummer can play. But I'd much rather the topline stuff was played on guitars or keyboards.

Mark; We've tried to use natural instruments to give a degree of tonal variety without having recourse to synths or sampling. We have someone blowing the phlegm out of a soprano saxophone for instance.

Digital

Do you also regard digital mastering as giving an unnaturally 'clinical' sound?

Tim; Digital recording I think is a little different. I must say that I've never recorded anything on digital multitrack, but considering the projects I've been involved with since it's become available there's no way I could have justified the expense. If I'd done an album by some really slick American band, where cleanliness is all-important, I would possibly have considered it, but with something like Talk Talk where cleanliness of recording is sometimes actually to it's detriment I would rather stick to analogue. There's a certain dirt you get from recording on analogue tape which I quite enjoy and so I'm not going to be converted to digital quickly. There are certain tracks I could have used it on where, even with Dolby the signal to noise problem was substantial, but overall I am glad that I stuck to analogue.

A Single Man

How did you arrive at the choice of single?

Mark; With the exception of a little 4-part horn figure it's the shortest track on the album. It's as simple as that. It was a surprise to me to see it go straight into the charts. Usually they spend three months at number 80 and then go down.

Tim; A lot of the tracks are rather long for singles, not because they've got 30 verses and 15 choruses but because each inherent section of the song is long in itself. The next single will be 'Living in Another World'.

How do you feel about doing 12" singles?

Tim; I have done them but I don't enjoy it and I make no secret of the fact. By their very nature they have nothing to do with subtlety. They are designed primarily to dance to and if you have a track that wasn't written as a dance track, you end up trying to make something out of the record which was never intended in the first place. Secondly you're forced to chop the song up. We spend a great deal of time working out the structure and format of the song and then we have to fit it into a completely different format. It works on some occasions. I've done a couple of 12"s that are okay, but for most of the I can't generate a lot of enthusiasm because the structure doesn't work. I would much rather that they were farmed out to people who specialise in that area and enjoy that sort of work.

Then you don't think that the artist should bear the 12" format in mind when recording their songs.

Sometimes when I'm recording in the studio I think of the 12" aspect, but it's always overridden by the essential needs of the song. I can't really anticipate what will work for the 12" that early. When I start doing the 12", then if anything else has to be recorded to make it work as a 12" then I will record it. Nowadays it's rare to find simple extended versions; most of them are actually completely new arrangements. Some people do it extremely well.

I know Trevor Horn spends a lot of time doing a great selection of 12"s and I think they're extremely imaginative. But personally, whenever I get to the stage where I have to think about recording new tracks for a 12", I invariably think that I would much prefer the sound of the track without that extra overdub, otherwise I would have put it on the 7". It always ends up sounding superfluous.

I think it would be different if I were with a band predominantly into dance music. Although you can dance to Talk Talk records, and I'm sure many people have done very happily, they're not designed as dance tracks.

Musicianship and Engineering

With your scant regard for some aspects of modern technology, have you involved yourself much in the engineering side of production?

Tim; Well, I started out as a tape-op, then became an engineer and then a producer. There are plenty of highly respected producers around who've never concerned themselves overmuch with the engineering side, know nothing about it and work very happily that way. Although I can see myself working that way, I do prefer to be in total control of everything. If out of the corner of my eye I see the engineer doing something on the board, I like to know what he's doing. That way I know exactly what I'm getting. I do sometimes engineer myself. It's a help for me to know why things happen the way they do, and from that point of view tape operating is a very useful apprenticeship.

Things are very different these days and it's very difficult for kids to come to producing through that route, partly because of the high degree of automation in modern studios means that the role of tape op is generally obsolete. Engineers have remotes and do all their own tape operating. All the tape ops I see in studios are really nothing more than tea boys that happen to occasionally stick up mic stands. It's unhealthy, because if you aren't involved you get bored and if you're bored you don't take in what's happening and that's no way to learn. But in studios that go a long way back like Wessex, where I was tutored, there's what I would call a tradition of tape operating. Tape ops who were around in my day taught me to be a good tape op and I passed it on to the young up and comings when I was an engineer. When new studios spring up from nowhere they hire a whole bunch of new staff and tape ops begin their careers thinking that all they should be doing is making tea and putting up mic stands. That's not the way to make the next generation of producers and engineers.

Do you think that courses have any function in combatting this situation?

Yes, courses help, but the practical reality of studio work is very different to a course. For instance there's the diplomacy aspect, which I always think is very important. I've never been on a recording course but I would imagine that studio diplomacy is the kind of thing that could only be taught by watching other people fall into traps and realising how to avoid them yourself. Until you've actually been in these situations it's hard to deal with it.

There's no real schooling like a practical one, which is why some of these courses do include a year of being out in a studio.

Good Intentions

Unlike the first two, the third album doesn't sound like a pop album at all.

Mark; I don't think any of them are. A pop album is something that is by definition popular. When you're making an album like ours, you shouldn't give any consideration whatsoever to how many people like it, so therefore by definition it's not popular. We're writing primarily for ourselves, not writing what we think other people would like to hear.

I do get something more out of the fact that people like what we're doing. If the 'It's my Life' album hadn't sold at all, I couldn't have given a shit, but the fact that it did made me a lot happier.

So where do you draw your influences from?

Mark; Everything. The more areas you take influences from the less you actually receive them.

Tim; There's no honest person who could deny that he's influenced by something. Once you're capable of writing without deriving anything from anybody, you're at the level of genius. There are only a few of those.

Mark; Although we can't help but receive influences from other sources we have never pandered to public opinion. The reason for the first two albums being more simplistic than this one was purely economic. With the first one we were basically in a position where we had just signed a record deal and had about one month to make an album. With the second we had reasonable scope in which to make the arrangements and about six months to do the album.

The most important thing about it was that we thought it was good. Whether or not it sells is not important. The only difference it made was that since the album did sell, when we came to make this album we had absolute freedom over time and recourses. In those terms, it means a lot, but to make something that sells can never be your primary intention in writing an album, because otherwise there's no point. Groups write music for either the right or the wrong reasons. If you do it for the right reasons, no matter how crap it is for anyone else, it's good, and if you do it for the wrong reasons, no matter how good anyone else thinks it is, it's crap.

It's absurd to concede your musical principles by following trends in order to try and make the record sell because trends only last a few months and albums take a year to make. If you started off with one particular trend in mind, that trend and three more would have come and gone before you've even finished making what you're doing.

Do you think that your music has ever been misinterpreted?

Mark; I don't really think that it matters whether we're misinterpreted or not, because we're writing for ourselves and we can't misinterpret ourselves. Take lyrics, for example. Lyric writing is very important to me, but for years I never used to listen to lyrics because then it didn't seem an important aspect of music. Now I don't think that the music I was listening to at the time suffered as a result of that in my eyes. Equally, I think that if people don't listen to our lyrics, I don't think that that harms us. What matters is that I believe those lyrics I've written are good.

Talk Talk is a band with strong musical and artistic principles, determined to go their own way where their music is concerned terms. Their original attitudes to the writing, playing and recording of their music has resulted in a highly original third album. The fact that one member of the band is a 'producer-in-residence' has meant that these attitudes can be followed through from the initial writing stage right through to the final production.