Music Machine – "Talk Talk" (1966)

My social life’s a dud

My name is really mud

I’m up to here in lies

I think that every class of new inductees into the 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” HIT SINGLES HALL OF FAME should include a one-hit wonder or two.

My wildly popular little hall of fame already includes several fabulous one-hit wonders – like “Fire” (The Crazy World of Arthur Brown), “Spirit in the Sky” (Norman Greenbaum), and “96 Tears” (? And the Mysterians).

And I’m including two more one-hit wonders in the 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” HIT SINGLES HALL OF FAME’S class of 2023.  One of them is today’s featured record.  The other one will be revealed in good time.

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The best rock ’n’ roll records include a heapin’ helpin’ of either anger or angst.

“Talk Talk” is an excellent example of an angst-filled record.  We don’t know just what the singer did wrong, but it must have been something pretty bad because he now finds himself thoroughly ostracized by his peers.

He knows that “it serves me right” to have been shunned, and he accepts that he has to “hide my face or go to some other place” until “the talk subsides to gone.”

The singer is “out of circulation” for the time being.  His “social life’s a dud,” and his name “is really mud.”  

He’s a victim of “talk talk!”

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Sean Bonniwell formed a folk music trio called the Raggamuffins in 1965.  The next year, he recruited two other musicians to join the group, which was renamed the Music Machine.  

Sean Bonniwell

“Talk Talk” – the group’s one and only hit – features a very tight arrangement and precise instrumental work.  (Bonniwell was a fanatic when it came to rehearsing.).  It peaked at #15 on the Billboard “Hot 100.”

One critic called it “the most radical single to be heard on Top 40 radio in late 1966,” describing the lyrics as a mixture of “sarcasm, rebellion, self-pity, and paranoia.”

Click here to watch the Music Machine performing “Talk Talk” on “Where the Action Is.”

Click here to buy the record from Amazon.