Talk Talk were neither the biggest nor the most acclaimed group of the 1980s, but they were perhaps the strangest. From the synth-pop rush of early hits like “Today”, “Talk Talk” and “It’s My Life” – back when they were described by one critic as “the drinking man’s Duran Duran” – to the experimental post-rock stirrings of their final two albums, Mark Hollis and Co travelled further than any of their contemporaries.

Talk Talk formed in London in 1981, led by Hollis, the band’s singer and principal songwriter. Following the success of their second album, , they spent most of 1985 in various London studios, eschewing synthesisers for a more organic sound-palette built around piano, organ, acoustic guitar and drums. The result was The Colour of Spring, a pivotal work that produced the classic hit single, “Life’s What You Make It”.

Talk Talk were nominally a trio, comprising Hollis, bassist Paul Webb and drummer Lee Harris. On The Colour of Spring, however, producer Tim Friese-Greene – the man responsible for Tight Fit’s “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”, no less – became Hollis’s sole co-writer and primary collaborator. The pair took full control of the album, playing many parts themselves or delegating to outside session musicians.

Webb and Harris “clearly operated in Mark’s shadow”, recalls engineer Peter Woolliscroft, who initially found Hollis a somewhat peculiar presence. Half seeker, half geezer, his lyrics were existential, abstract and heartfelt, but he could be abrasive, aloof and wickedly sarcastic. “He called everyone a c**t,” says Woolliscroft, whom Hollis nicknamed “smackhead”, implying that the frequency with which he left the room meant that he must be shooting up in the toilet.

Rather than heroin, the sessions ran on a drip-feed of Fox’s biscuits, which arrived by the box each day. At Hollis’s insistence, there was also a mandatory TV break. “We knew what we were doing was really interesting, commercial at the same time as being daring – and then everything stopped because was on!” says another of the record’s engineers, Dennis Weinreich. “It was odd but also endearing. Mark wasn’t difficult, but he was a single-minded and complex character.”

The band were no longer thinking in terms of hit singles, but their label, Parlophone, had other ideas. When executives visited Battery Studios in the summer of 1985 and heard nothing suitable for radio, they requested the band write something “catchy”. Woolliscroft recalls an unimpressed Hollis asking what exactly they meant by “catchy”? The execs suggested something “happy, snappy – like that Bran Flakes advert”.

A fixture on mid-80s television, the ad campaign for Kellogg’s Bran Flakes was tagged on an insistently nagging jingle: “They’re tasty, tasty, very, very tasty/They’re very tasty!” Rather than dismiss the task of writing a simplistic single to order, Hollis and Friese-Greene embraced it as a conceptual challenge.

They quickly created the circulating drum loop that drives “Life’s What You Make It”, over which Hollis played the repetitive piano riff, his interpretation of the Bran Flakes motif with an added pinch of Booker T & The MG’s’ “Green Onions”. A two-bar section was sampled and looped, and the genesis of the song was born. There were other influences. The relentless Fairlight-driven rhythm track was partly inspired by Kate Bush’s recent single, “Running up That Hill”. Many years later, Hollis and Bush, the JD Salinger and Harper Lee of pop, explored the possibility of a collaboration, which perhaps unsurprisingly came to nothing.

Signalling the increasing fragmentation of the band, top sessioneers such as Danny Thompson, Steve Winwood and David Rhodes played on The Colour of Spring. Peter Gabriel’s go-to guitarist, Rhodes had recently performed live with Talk Talk and was asked to add a guitar part to “Life’s What You Make It”. His spiralling notes punctuate the title phrase, serving as a second hook.

“I remember Mark saying he wanted it to sound ‘pox’, which was his favourite expression – as though it were on the edge of breaking,” Rhodes recalls. “I tried some things, then Mark turned and said, ‘Can you play like Acker Bilk?’” Rhodes insists this eccentric prompt proved helpful. “You start thinking about a bloke in a bowler hat and a stripy shirt and you’re away from where you are. He did that a lot, trying to play with musicians’ ideas of themselves in the studio.”

“Mark was pushing all the time,” says Woolliscroft. “If you give somebody a ridiculous request, they either say, ‘Piss off!’ or ‘That’s interesting – I’ll try it.’ He probably didn’t want it to sound like Acker Bilk – he just wanted somebody to do something different.” “It was fun, and it worked,” says Rhodes. “And, for my trouble, I was paid 120 quid!”

The lyrics to “Life’s What You Make It” were inspired by Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, the faded heroine clinging on to her glory days: “Yesterday’s favourite/Don’t you hate it.” The song continued to evolve until the final day of recording, when Hollis came up with the fragmented piano solo. He played it once, said, “Yeah, that’ll do”, and sauntered back into the control room.

A classic art-pop distillation of a beautifully simple idea, “Life’s What You Make It” reached No 16 in the UK charts. It gave Talk Talk a significant launchpad for their magnificent new album, but Hollis vowed never again to play the industry game. For the next Talk Talk LP, Spirit of Eden, no label executives were permitted into the studio, nobody heard a note until the album was delivered, and there would be no hit singles.

Following the release of The Colour of Spring in February 1986, an expanded version of the band toured for much of the year. The unit that can be seen and heard on the DVD was a powerhouse ensemble capable of conquering the world. Instead, a concert in Salamanca, Spain, on 13 September, 1986, was Talk Talk’s last-ever live performance. Keyboard player Ian Curnow says Hollis regarded touring as “a necessary evil. I think he hated it. He was a very private person and didn’t enjoy being in the limelight. As soon as he could, he turned his back on it.”

In one of his final interviews, Hollis outlined his reasons for stopping. The more intricate material became harder to play, and he grew tired of “dealing more with recreating the past than looking into the future”. He disliked the bunker mentality of touring life and was using alcohol as a coping mechanism. Perhaps most significant was his recent marriage and the imminent arrival of his two sons.

So it was that “Life’s What You Make It” and The Colour of Spring bade farewell to the more visible, commercial iteration of Talk Talk. Steered by Hollis and Friese-Greene, the band released two further albums, Spirit of Eden (1988) and (1991) – beautiful, challenging and pioneering records largely ignored at the time, but now revered by Radiohead, Elbow and scores more artists.

Hollis released an eponymous solo record in 1998, but by the time No Doubt’s cover of “It’s My Life” became a worldwide smash in 2003, he had fully retreated. When he died in 2019, aged 64, one of Britain’s most enigmatic and intriguing artists had released no music of note for 21 years. “Yesterday’s faded,” Hollis sang on “Life’s What You Make It”. He proved as good as his word.

The half-speed vinyl master of ‘The Colour of Spring’ is out on 4 September. ‘In Another World: The Four Seasons of Talk Talk’ by Graeme Thomson is out now, published by New Modern.