Colour of Spring heard live again at Kentish Town

On 5 September, musicians from Talk Talk’s circle took the stage at London’s O2 Forum Kentish Town for a one-off tribute marking forty years since *The Colour of Spring*. Founding keyboardist Simon Brenner appeared with Phil Ramocon and Ian Curnow. The performance drew on most of the 1986 album and reached back into the catalogue, taking in Life’s What You Make It, Living In Another World and The Party’s Over.

Guests included Ride’s Mark Gardener, Ed Harcourt, Guillemots’ Fyfe Dangerfield, Zero 7’s Sophie Barker, Turin Brakes’ Gale Paridjanian, Sweet Billy Pilgrim’s Tim Elsenburg, Chris Hampson and Jacob Brown. Support sets came from Harcourt and Dangerfield. The night was billed as a celebration of the record rather than a band reunion; Mark Hollis, who led Talk Talk, died in 2019, and the evening treated the songs as living works rather than museum pieces.

The reissue that opened the door

The gig followed the release of a half-speed-cut 40th?anniversary vinyl edition of *The Colour of Spring*, cut from the original tapes, overseen by drummer Lee Harris with Mark Hollis’s son Charlie Hollis, and mastered by Matt Colton at Metropolis Studios. The Kentish Town date was the live response — a single night rather than a tour, built around the album and its custodians.

Where the album sits

Talk Talk formed in 1981 around Hollis, Harris and bassist Paul Webb. The first two albums, *The Party’s Over* (1982) and *It’s My Life* (1984), reached the UK top 40 and produced the international singles Talk Talk, Today, It’s My Life and Such a Shame. They still carried the synth-pop frame of the early years. *The Colour of Spring*, released in 1986, widened the critical reach in Europe and the UK; its singles Life’s What You Make It and Living In Another World remain the most widely known doorways into the band. Two years later *Spirit of Eden* moved the group toward a more experimental sound informed by jazz and free improvisation, a shift later read as an early marker of post-rock; *Laughing Stock* followed in 1991. The 1986 record is the hinge between the hit singles and the freer records that came after — the point at which the writing opened out without yet leaving the song form behind.

Hearing most of the album played by musicians who had been inside the circle, joined by artists who grew up on the catalogue, made that hinge audible again. Brenner’s presence linked the night to the earliest line-ups; Harris’s role on the reissue kept the original rhythm section’s hand on the anniversary itself. The guests did not attempt to replace Hollis; they carried individual songs and shared the stage, which is the proper shape of a tribute when the singer is gone and the songs are still in circulation.

No further dates have been announced. The evening stands as a one-off: the anniversary vinyl in the shops, the album played through once more in Kentish Town, and the catalogue left where it belongs — with the people who made it and the listeners who still play it.