Marketing and Release History
Spirit of Eden's moody, experimental nature made it a challenge to promote; one critic said it "is the kind of record which encourages marketing men to commit suicide." Tony Wadsworth, Parlophone's marketing director at the time, told Q: "Talk Talk are not your ordinary combo and require sympathetic marketing. They're not so much difficult as not obvious. You've just got to find as many ways as possible to expose the music." Evaluating some masterpieces of the eighties in a 2004 article for The Guardian, John Robinson calls Spirit of Eden, like David Sylvian's Brilliant Trees, "triumphant, completely unmarketable."
Although the band did not originally plan to release a single, EMI issued a radio edit of "I Believe In You" in September 1988 (the previously unreleased "John Cope" was included as the B-side). The single failed to breach the UK Singles Chart Top 75. Around November, Tim Pope directed a music video for "I Believe In You", featuring Hollis sitting with his guitar, singing the lyrics. "That was a massive mistake," said Hollis. "I thought just by sitting there and listening and really thinking about what it was about, I could get that in my eyes. But you cannot do it. It just feels stupid."
The band did not tour in support of the album. Hollis explained, "There is no way that I could ever play again a lot of the stuff I played on this album because I just wouldn't know how to. So, to play it live, to take a part that was done in spontaneity, to write it down and then get someone to play it, would lose the whole point, lose the whole purity of what it was in the first place." They would never tour again.
Spirit of Eden was released worldwide in 1988. It did not enjoy nearly as much commercial success as The Colour of Spring. The album spent five weeks on the UK Albums Chart, peaking at #19. The album cover depicts a tree festooned with seashells, snails, birds, and insects. It was illustrated by James Marsh, who did Talk Talk's artwork throughout their career. The booklet provides reproductions of Hollis' handwritten lyrics. The album was digitally remastered by Phill Brown and Denis Blackham in 1997. A hybrid Super Audio CD (without surround sound) surfaced in 2003.
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