Plutonic Rainbows

Talk Talk's third album turned forty this month, and the fact that it still sounds like nothing else is probably the only review it needs. The Colour of Spring arrived in February 1986 at the precise moment when the band's label expected another synth-pop record and Mark Hollis had already decided he was done making those.

The first two Talk Talk albums were decent — The Party's Over and It's My Life had singles that charted, videos that rotated on MTV, and enough commercial momentum to keep EMI comfortable. But something shifted between 1984 and 1986. Hollis brought in Tim Friese-Greene as co-producer and collaborator, and between them they dismantled the template. The synthesisers didn't disappear entirely, but they receded. In their place: real strings, a harmonica that sounds like it wandered in from a field recording, Steve Winwood playing organ on "Life's What You Make It," and a general sense that the band had stopped caring about radio formats altogether.

They hadn't, of course. "Life's What You Make It" went to number sixteen in the UK, and "Living in Another World" charted too. The album sold over two million copies. What's strange is that none of those commercial facts prepare you for what the record actually sounds like. The singles worked almost by accident — they had hooks buried inside arrangements that were far more spacious and unpredictable than anything on the charts at the time. "Happiness Is Easy" opens the album with children singing over what might be the warmest, most unhurried four minutes in the entire decade. There's no chorus. There's barely a structure. It just breathes.

That breathing is what separates The Colour of Spring from its contemporaries. Every other mid-eighties record was compressed and gated and slammed into the loudness ceiling of the era. This one has room. Lee Harris's drums sound like actual drums in an actual space, not like triggered samples bounced through a Lexicon reverb. Paul Webb's bass sits low and patient. And Hollis's voice — already one of the most distinctive instruments in British music — occupies the centre of the mix with a vulnerability that borders on discomfort. He sounds like someone who knows exactly what he wants to say and isn't entirely sure he should say it.

"I Don't Believe in You" is perhaps the finest single track on the album, though it was never released as one. Seven minutes of slow accumulation, strings entering at the halfway mark like a tide coming in, Hollis repeating the title phrase with increasing conviction until it becomes something closer to prayer than pop. The production decisions are meticulous without being clinical. Friese-Greene had a gift for knowing when to leave a take alone — when the imperfection was the point.

The sequencing matters. "April 5th" follows and strips everything back to acoustic guitar and voice, the quietest moment on the record and the one that most clearly points toward Spirit of Eden two years later. The transition from the orchestral swell of the previous track to this bare whisper is the most sophisticated editorial decision on the album. It's also the moment where you realise this isn't a collection of songs. It's a single sustained thought.

"Chameleon Day" remains underrated. There's a guitar tone in the second half — distorted but somehow gentle, like looking at sunlight through frosted glass — that I've never heard replicated on any other recording. I've tried to identify the signal chain. I can't. Some sounds belong to their moment and refuse to be reverse-engineered.

James Marsh's cover art deserves separate attention. The atlas moths and butterflies arranged around that central symmetrical face have become one of the most recognisable sleeves in the catalogue of British music. Marsh painted every specimen individually, working from real entomological references. The warm ochre border, the careful taxonomy of wing patterns — it's not psychedelic, not surrealist, not anything easily categorised. It sits on the shelf and draws the eye forty years later with the same quiet insistence as the music inside.

What happened next is well documented. EMI expected The Colour of Spring II and instead received Spirit of Eden, a record so uncommercial that it triggered a lawsuit. Hollis had used the goodwill and budget earned by two million sales to make precisely the album he wanted, which turned out to be a work of near-silent impressionism that had more in common with Morton Feldman than Duran Duran. The label was furious. The critics were confused. History has been kinder.

But The Colour of Spring is the hinge. Without it, the later records don't exist — Hollis needed this album's commercial success to buy the creative freedom that produced Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock. And without the later records, The Colour of Spring might have been remembered as merely a very good album from 1986 rather than the first chapter of one of the most remarkable trajectories in recorded music. Each record retroactively elevates the others.

Forty years. Mark Hollis died in February 2019, almost exactly thirty-three years after this record's release. He spent the last two decades of his life in near-total silence, having said everything he needed to say in approximately twelve hours of recorded music. The restraint of that — the refusal to tour, to reissue, to capitalise — might be the most Talk Talk gesture of all.

Open a drawer you haven't touched in twenty years and find a bottle of perfume. Spray it. What happens next is not nostalgia.

Nostalgia is warm. It aches pleasantly. It knows it's looking backward. What this does is different — it collapses the distance. For a few seconds the earlier time doesn't feel remembered. It feels reinstated. The room, the light, the particular quality of a morning reassemble themselves around you with an authority that has nothing to do with conscious recall.

This is because scent bypasses the thalamus entirely. Every other sense — vision, hearing, touch — routes through that relay station before reaching the cortex. Smell doesn't. It travels from the olfactory bulb directly to the amygdala and hippocampus — emotion and memory, two synapses from the nose. Rachel Herz's neuroimaging work at Brown confirmed what Proust described in 1913: odour-evoked memories are not more accurate than other memories. They are more emotionally immersive. The affect arrives before the content. You feel the past before you can name it.

Freud had a word for this kind of return. He called it the Unheimlich — the uncanny. His 1919 essay rejected the idea that uncanniness comes from encountering the unknown. The opposite. It comes from re-encountering the known — something familiar that was hidden and has now resurfaced. Schelling's definition, which Freud adopted: "Everything is unheimlich that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light."

A sealed bottle fits this structure precisely. The fragrance existed quietly, materially intact, while the world shifted and your identity accumulated decades of alteration. When re-encountered, it produces a rupture in temporal continuity. Not because the scent has changed — it hasn't. Because you have.

Though even this isn't quite right. The fragrance has changed too — oxidised, its top notes degraded, the composition shifted by decades of slow chemistry. But its rate of change is so much slower than yours that it produces an illusion of permanence. The bottle seems to promise fixity. You cannot reciprocate. Human identity is processual, not static — you were never meant to remain identical to the person who closed that drawer. The discomfort is that the object seems to have managed what you could not.

This is where it diverges from hauntology. Mark Fisher's framework mourns lost futures — the feeling that the present has failed to deliver what the past once promised. That's a cultural displacement, a collective grief. What happens with a rediscovered fragrance is more personal and more disturbing. The object appears stable, almost indifferent to the years. You, by contrast, have aged, shifted, rebuilt. The bottle seems to have remained outside history while you were inside it. That imbalance creates a subtle ontological disturbance — the sense that time has behaved unevenly.

I've written before about objects that outlive the worlds that made sense of them. But this is narrower. This isn't about cultural context vanishing. It's about temporal suspension — the discovery that something of your own past survived unchanged in a drawer while you moved through years that changed you entirely. The eeriness isn't that the world has moved on. It's that the bottle didn't.

What sharpens this further is the sense that earlier versions of yourself are gone. Not just aged past — gone. That person, with his specific hopes, naivety, emotional intensity, blind spots, cannot be re-entered. You can remember him. You cannot inhabit him again. This is a common fear, though people rarely articulate it directly. It is not simply ageing that unsettles. It is irretrievability.

An old fragrance intensifies this because scent does something memory alone cannot: it reconstructs atmosphere. For a moment, the emotional climate of that earlier self flickers back into the room. Then it fades. The contrast between temporary reactivation and permanent loss sharpens the awareness that identity is not cumulative in a simple way. It is layered, and layers become inaccessible.

Though it is not accurate to say those versions are gone in an absolute sense. They are no longer active configurations of your nervous system, but they are structurally embedded in who you are now. Every preference, fear, aesthetic sensibility you carry is downstream from those earlier states. The younger self is not erased — he is metabolised. You no longer have access to the raw form, but his architecture persists.

The distress arises because memory gives you a partial reconstruction, not full embodiment. That gap feels like standing outside a locked room that once was your whole world. And if the feeling carries intensity beyond momentary unease — if it feels existential rather than reflective — it may be tied less to memory and more to mortality awareness. The two are closely linked.

There is another way to read the encounter. The bottle is static matter. You are adaptive consciousness. Identity is not a sequence of discarded selves — it is a continuous biological process that updates while retaining traces. The earlier version feels lost because you cannot be him again. But the fact that you can recognise him at all means he is still structurally present. The fact that you have changed — aged, accumulated, rebuilt — is not loss alone. It is evidence of having lived.

But that knowledge doesn't dissolve the feeling. Something intimate has persisted without your permission, and its persistence exposes, quietly and without malice, the fact that you are not the person it remembers.

Sources:

• Neuroimaging Evidence for the Emotional Potency of Odor-Evoked Memory — Neuropsychologia

• Das Unheimliche (The Uncanny) — Sigmund Freud, 1919

• Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures — Mark Fisher, 2014