talk talk live

Talk Talk live comes in three major chunks - 1982, 1984 and 1986, and, apart from a few one offs this is the extent of it.

I recently played a bunch of 1984 shows as the band were plugging It's My Life.

First up was a show from the Hammersmith Odeon right at the start of the gigging for that year...

At this early April show the band seem rather tentative; it was one of their first performances since late 1982, and the first with an expanded six piece band (the core of Hollis, Webb and Harris are augmented by Ian Curnow on keyboards and synths, Phil Ramocon on piano an Robbie Macintosh on guitar (and at some shows percussionist Morris Pert appears to have played)). Lots of It’s My Life tunes in the show of course, but most of these would really flower later in the year as TT became far more self assured.

After a month or so of European gigs in the spring, TT played in the US for much of the summer, usually supporting other bands such as the Psychedelic Furs, Berlin, Sparks, or here, at San Francisco’s Warfield Theater, the Alarm. Macintosh had prior commitments with the Pretenders, so John Hook comes in on guitar with Phil Reis installed as full time percussionist.

This radio broadcast is magnificent, and show itself opens brilliantly with a long build up into "Such A Shame". Arguably their best opening number, so it's, ahem, such a shame that this song would more usually be played as an encore. 

Then in September the band returned to Europe and the UK for more shows. A number of these gigs were televised on the rapidly expanding European tv channels. A May show from Florence had appeared on MTV Europe (though no concessions were made to the tv audience and the performance seems very dark and gloomy on tv – these days the show would be lit differently to benefit the tv cameras), the Dutch show Veronica’s Rock Night, which was syndicated across mainland Europe, broadcast a show in September (much better filmed as the gig was set up for broadcast) and the November show in Dortmund was reshown numerous times on Germany’s ZDF network. In addition I have at least another 5 shows that were aired on European radio stations, one of the best being the Paris gig from late September (although I could do without the annoying DJ interruptions). So 1984 was a great year for TT shows, and yields a large number of very good quality recordings (plus a healthy number of pretty decent audience recordings too).

And every recording I have is uniformly excellent. This was a very strong live band, and a very consistent one too.