"The more you try to live by different rules, the more you stay the same."
During the recording sessions for The Party's Over, Talk Talk, unhappy with Colin Thurston's Duran Duran-clone production agenda, assumed control of the production booth, and though it didn't bear fruit on their debut, it did offer an early glimpse into Mark Hollis' idiosyncratic and uncompromising tendencies. For the It's My Life sessions, Hollis recruited producer Tim Friese-Greene, whose most notable work had been with Thomas Dolby. Over the course of the next seven years, Hollis and Friese-Greene went on to forge an artistic partnership that fueled Talk Talk's unprecedented artistic transformation, though Friese-Greene never became an official member of the band. After the release of Laughing Stock, Talk Talk's swan-song, Friese-Greene went on to produce and play on Catherine Wheel's Ferment. Heligoland, Friese-Greene's more recent ongoing solo-project, bears little resemblance to his work on the later Talk Talk albums; instead of using silence as a musical element to give form to aural spaces (later Talk Talk's trademark), on Heligoland, Friese-Greene explores thinner, scruffier distorted guitar-based textures recalling Radiohead's mid-nineties work. Although Friese-Greene's vocals can sound a bit thin at times, they do manage to serve the overall paranoia of the album well. Not essential but an interesting and often engaging footnote to the Talk Talk saga.
