The Number Fortys: Talk Talk - "It's My Life"

In The Number Fortys, we review every song that was sitting at #40 on the Billboard chats, starting in the first week of January 1984, right around the time this writer became cognizant/obsessive about music. The seeds for the idea came from Tom Breihan's Number Ones column over at Stereogum. However, we here at k-postpunk believe that the bottom is more interesting than the top (and obscurity is more interesting than either).

There's something almost unspeakably poignant about hearing this song in the wake of Mark Hollis' death last week. I mean, the chorus of this song ends with Hollis singing, It's my life, it never ends, and I just, it's hard listening.

For anyone living under a stone, or with ears of stone, or with a heart of stone, Hollis was the main guy in Talk Talk. I hadn't listened to this song since he died, immersing myself instead in his later more experimental, (even) more spiritual music.

The melody is so beautiful, with its unexpected pauses, its unexpected rises and falls, that it's easy to miss the lyrics, which Hollis, in love with this melody he's found, mumbles a little bit so as not to get in the way. The lyrics are open to interpretation, but in a way that's ambiguous instead of ambivalent. That is to say, there is room in the song for people to inhabit it as needed. It's a mystery that invites you in rather than keeps you out. It also has a bassline so catchy that if Hollis had never opened his mouth you'd still go around singing the bassline to yourself.

This was the only Talk Talk song to reach the US Top 40, peaking at #31. Remarkably, it only reached #46 in Talk Talk's UK home.

Score: A couple of weeks ago, I would have been vacillating between a 9 and a 10, but this week the decision is easy. A solid fucking 10.

Some 90s band did a cover of this song that is better known than the original. Because their singer sounds like a sick duck begging for money, and their band sounds like everything horrible I heard growing up in California, their version is a 2.

I think I just came up with a great system for evaluating cover versions: score the original, score the cover, and then subtract the original's score from the cover's. So in this case that band's cover gets a -8 (2 minus 10). That's pretty bad. For comparison's sake, The Eagles' Take It to the Limit gets a 5, but Sarah Dougher's cover of the song gets an 8. What's that? You've never heard of Sarah Dougher, or her version of Take It to the Limit? It's only a well-placed movie scene away from becoming a classic.

So you take Sarah's 8, subtract the Eagles' 5, and Sarah Dougher's cover is a 3. Feel free to play along.

THE NUMBER ONE



Oh look, it's Phil Collins. Phil did some cool shit in his career, songs that showed he was paying attention when he was playing on those Eno records. In fact, with their mutual baldingness, their embrace of new recording techniques, and merging of electronics and soul, who's to say that Brian Eno couldn't have also been a star in the 80s on the same level as his 70s peers Phil and Peter Garbriel?

This song doesn't do any of those things. It's just a really good ballad with a video featuring two actors, Jeff Bridges and James Woods, who would, respectively, go on to a much better and a much worse future, Bridges would, of course, become one of his generation's greatest, most iconic actors. Woods, after a string of great performances (what the fuck do you mean you've never see Salvador?), would eventually descend into a paranoiac cesspool of hateful ultra-right smugness.

The song itself is too blandly sentimental and vague to actually convey the heartbreak it's ostensibly about. Phil invests the song with every ounce of soul in his being, and were his soulfulness the equal of say, Aretha or Marvin, or Karen Carpenter, then this song might be more than what it ultimately is; a 6.