Talk Talk bears repetition

First impressions always count, and they are almost always wrong. This is particularly pertinent if you review albums for a living, as I used to years ago. You would listen once, maybe twice, possibly three times if you were really being good, and then form an opinion, which was as much based on your preconceptions — and indeed taste — as on anything you had heard in the grooves. And then you would write your review. You would then forget about the record in question because there were so many others to listen to. It was essentially an industrial process, and it quickly ground my enthusiasm for music into dust. Music, though, is one of the few art forms, if not the only one, in which appreciation is inexorably tied to repetition. We only need to read a book or see a film once to have an opinion about it and, in most cases, to have exhausted all it has to offer. But a good record is something we have to live with, and we may not even realise it’s any good until we have lived with it for a while. It works the other way, too. If you are a fan of a particular band or artist, you will have listened to their worst album over and over and over again, desperately waiting to hear something that simply isn’t there. And when you finally admit to yourself that it is a vast steaming mound of the purest excrement, it feels like an epiphany of sorts, a liberation even. Our relationships with particular records can be long and complicated, even tortured. Around a quarter of a century ago, then, I heard and immediately loved The Colour of Spring, the third album by Talk Talk, a sort of post-new-romantic pop band from the wilds of Essex who were then developing in more arcane, acoustic directions.