Twenty-five years ago this week, I began working in what became my career. At the time still recovering from a broken ankle (and I was certainly still on crutches at this point), I started what I thought was going to be a temporary role with BT Cellnet on the edge of Leeds (for those who know locally, at the Arlington Business Centre next door to the then relatively new White Rose Shopping Centre).

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/amodelofcontrol.com now has a Patreon page, at this stage purely as a potential way of helping to cover the running costs of the site. There is absolutely no compulsion to do so: if you feel you can chuck a small amount to the site each month, that would be appreciated.

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BT Cellnet morphed into O2 over the next year as BT divested them, and after four years there, I moved on and have built a career across the telecoms industry. I’ve worked in mobile, VoIP Telephony and Fibre Internet. I’ve managed and sold to corporate and business accounts, I’ve worked with other telecoms providers, I’ve trained staff, I’ve built and rewritten processes, I’ve built databases of data, I even worked with internet provision in a housing context. Nowadays I work in telecoms billing, helping other telecoms businesses do better invoicing.

The key link between all of this is talking. If I couldn’t talk to my customers, peers and colleagues, nothing would get done. An email or message is all well and good, but sometimes you have to arrange a conversation using one method or another, and talk it out. How do we do this? How do we do it better? What do we do next?

I’d like to think I’ve got good at it over the years, and I’ve learned an awful lot, and continue to do so. We in telecoms are in an industry that is constantly evolving, and if you stand still, you fall behind.

Ten years ago, on /Tuesday Ten /249 /Communication Breakdown, I looked at the use of telecoms in song, and this week, I’m looking at the wider subject of talking. Unsurprisingly, there were a load of great suggestions, and I only wish I had the time to cover more. Thanks, as ever, to all that took the time to submit suggestions.

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A quick explanation for new readers (hi there!): my Tuesday Ten series has been running since March 2007, and each month features at least ten new songs you should hear – and in between those monthly posts, I feature songs on a variety of subjects, with some of the songs featured coming from suggestion threads on Facebook.

Feel free to get involved with these – the more the merrier, and the breadth of suggestions that I get continues to astound me. Otherwise, as usual, if you’ve got something you want me to hear, something I should be writing about, or even a gig I should be attending, e-mail me or drop me a line on Facebook (details below).

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/Talk Talk
/Talk Talk
/The Party’s Over

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This week I learned that Talk Talk was not a Talk Talk original – Mark Hollis recorded it originally with his punk band The Reaction, and the song was known as Talk Talk Talk Talk, and released on the first Beggars Banquet release Streets at the end of 1977. That two-minute blast has an edgy, nervous energy to it, and when Hollis resurfaced with his new band Talk Talk in 1982, the song had been slowed down a bit, and drenched in synths and funk bass. The edginess of the track remains, though, as the lyrics are more audible, and reveals a song of frustration, as the protagonist just wants the other part to stop talking at them while offering no help whatsoever.

This continual change was part of Hollis’s career – he went from punk to new wave/synthpop, to sophisticated, detailed pop, to accidentally inventing post-rock in just fifteen years.

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/Soulwax
/Conversation Intercom
/Much Against Everyone’s Advice

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The first mobile phone call in the UK was made on New Year’s Eve 1984, by Ernest Harrison to his father (and chairman of Vodafone) Michael Harrison. Even further back, on 07-March 1876 – so 150 years ago next month – Alexander Graham Bell was granted the patent for the telephone, even if there remains debate over who actually invented it, but Bell was there first. The telephone exchange arrived just a couple of years later, and three-way calls – in other words conference calls – came around the same time, and interestingly, it took another fifty years before transatlantic calls were possible.

David and Stephen Dewaele were talking about communicating – and the troubles therein – on early single Conversation Intercom. The two parties here are seemingly talking at cross-purposes either by accident or design, unable to understand or reconcile their differences – something that phone calls can sometimes make all the worse.

It sometimes feels like Soulwax is the side-project of the Dewaele brothers mind: while they recently returned with a new album, their Radio Soulwax projects and particularly their 2manyDJs side-project is vastly better known, at least in the UK…

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/Of Monsters and Men
/Little Talks
/My Head Is An Animal

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Of Monsters and Men were a band I first heard when on holiday in their native Iceland back in 2012, when our tour guide put them on – and it was months before we heard them in the UK (they blew up first in Europe and, unexpectedly, in the US). Their first single was the joyous, chaotic, folk-rock jaunt of Little Talks, whose subject belies the anthemic sound. The band explained it years back, and basically it is a widow talking to her dead husband in the house that they shared their lives in, and there is a sense of reassurance being shared that despite he’s gone, things will be ok.

The video – like all of them from their first album – is a spectacular creation that is well worth a watch.

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/Longpigs
/She Said
/The Sun Is Often Out

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Sheffield band Longpigs were one of the bands who never quite realised their potential in the Britpop era, being seemingly cursed by issues out of their control and a sense that once he became better known, Crispin Hunt quickly realised that fame was really not for him, becoming a songwriter and producer (and had an attempt at a political career, too). It was guitarist Richard Hawley who found wider fame in the end.

The sad fact was that the band had some of the greatest singles of the era – particularly the gloriously bleak On and On – and She Said isn’t far behind it. A critique of capitalism and the ever-increasing push for more material possessions that don’t make you feel better after all, the whole song is written as a kind of conversation, from the point of view of someone relaying the opinions of a women they know, and Hunt’s unfiltered, powerful delivery sells the song.

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/Poison
/Talk Dirty To Me
/Look What The Cat Dragged In

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History hasn’t perhaps been too kind to many of the 80s Hair Metal bands – particularly after Grunge swept most of them from contemporary relevance almost overnight – but many of the bands retain big fanbases, and the majority have reformed to cash in on new generations of fans. Poison are no exception, and it is remarkable how many of their songs you’ll know.

The second single from their cheaply-produced debut album (that became a surprise hit after release in 1986) was this song, whose origins are disputed and indeed ended up in court, and was dismissed due to the time passed. Talk Dirty To Me is one of those catchy earworms, a cheeky ode to carnal attraction that is all about giving voice to your needs and then acting on them.

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/James
/Say Something
/Laid

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James are remarkable survivors. Originally formed in 1982, they had their greatest success around the turn of the 90s, mostly pre-Britpop, as their pop-leaning indie rock resulted in a number of enduring, much-loved songs: and to this day (even with a hiatus in the 2000s) continue to tour in larger venues than many of their surviving peers, a testament to the apparent bond built between band and fans.

Say Something is all about the idea of a failure of communication, of being unable to articulate what’s wrong and to get help (we’ve all been there, right?). Like many of the best James songs, there’s a bleak melancholy under the anthemic power, and it may well be my favourite song by the band.

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/Pitchshifter
/Stop Talking (So Loud)
/PSI

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The opening song to the final Pitchshifter album is rather more understated than previous album openers (Microwaved this is not), and has not been a song that the band have returned to in recent reunion tours. That said, it erupts into life for the brief and noisy chorus, and JS Clayden has, as usual, much to say within the lyrics. This is a song of dissent, and how to co-ordinate and manage that dissent: be careful who is listening to what you are saying and perhaps protesting about, in case the wrong people here. Nearly a quarter of a century since release, those warnings are still worth heeding.

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/Radiohead
/Stop Whispering
/Pablo Honey

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While later Radiohead material has long since eclipsed Pablo Honey – their pace of evolution meaning that the debut album sounds from a different era – there are still some great songs on the album, and probably the best of the lot is Stop Whispering. A song that gradually builds in power, it begins as a fragile song, with Thom Yorke reminding that those running things don’t want to hear from their constituents, and they certainly don’t want people speaking up to force change. The chorus is Yorke howling “Stop whispering, start shouting” like a call-to-arms, and later on, before all hell breaks loose in the closing coda, “Dear Sir, I have a complaint / Can’t remember what it is / It doesn’t matter anyway” gives voice to those going what’s the fucking point if they won’t listen?

In 2026, it is more important than ever to talk, to speak up.

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/Dubstar
/No More Talk
/Goodbye

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Dubstar had – and frankly, still do, now they’ve reformed and are releasing music again – a remarkable ability to wrap gorgeous pop songs around astonishingly bleak lyrics. No More Talk is one of those, where Sarah Blackwood’s resigned vocals detail someone who just wants the hurt to stop. Desperately pleading for the other party to stop the accusations, to stop the recriminations, instead just to move on so that no more talking has to happen.

Interestingly, too, it’s mentioned early on in the song how much they hate talking on the phone. It is, it turns out, nothing new…

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/The Delgados
/And So The Talking Stopped
/Peloton

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For their sometimes restrained sound and association with the Glasgow indie scene, the Delgados had a surprising amount of bile and fury unleashed in their songs, and their second album Peloton – long my favourite – has it in spades, perhaps a product of the spiky relationships between members and the difficult nature of recording it. This song, though, is another of relational conflict, and Emma Pollock as the protagonist has had enough.

Stopping talking is something I’m aware I don’t perhaps do enough. I’ve always been a talker, I do it to fill uncomfortable (and sometimes comfortable!) silences, when I’m nervous, when I’m excited about something. My career is literally based around people talking and communicating and providing ways and means for people to do it.

Whether others like it or not, it’s probably unlikely I’ll ever stop talking.