Last updated January 26, 1998
From Melody Maker, October 26, 1991
For every minute of music you hear on TALK TALK's new album, 'Laughing Stock', there's an hour of music abandoned. CLIFF JONES talks to MARK HOLLIS and engineer PHILL BROWN about how it was pieced together.
Talk Talk, like a wayward but brilliant child, are out to test the patience of their public once again. Their fifth studio album, "Laughing Stock", sees Mark Hollis and his band of sniggering cohorts pushing things as far as they dare before the teacher's ruler descends on their collective necks and brings them back into line.
With the delicate free-form beauty of 1988's "Spirit of Eden", Talk Talk isolated many of the fans they picked up on release of the million-selling "Colour of Spring". "Spirit…" was considered by many to be too cryptic, too awkward for mass consumption.
Disappearing into the studio in November last year having left EMI and signed to Polydor's Verve label, they returned seven months later with a record that picked up where the former left off. It refined the sound collage technique almost to the point of abstraction, a series of fragile ambient soundscapes.
The criticism now levelled at Talk Talk is that "Laughing Stock" is little more than a side step, an attempt at avoiding the issue of where to go next, and as such certainly can't be seen as a progression. For Hollis, though, it represents the opposite, the development of the theme pioneered on "Spirit…" to its conclusion. As for alienating their public…
"Of course it's at the back of your mind all the time, the desire to be appreciated for what you're trying to do, but ultimately I want people to understand it and come to an opinion having at least considered it properly. To me this is our first real CD format record and I don't think it's asking too much to expect people to at least concentrate on what's there, actually listen with a totally open mind.
"The record is meant to be listened to in one sitting and you can't appreciate it totally unless you do that. I'm not in the position where I need to make the sort of album other people want any more, I can decide what to do and how those ideas get developed, but I hope in the end to be understood for the music I do decide to put out and meaning and sense the music has. It's almost useless asking me questions about it, the music speaks for itself.
"If you don't understand then I won't help by just talking about it. We're doing something that's outside the conventional form and as far as I'm concerned we only stand out because that form has become so narrow, so constricted. We break the unspoken rules, but then nobody really likes rules do they?"
For many this apparent abandonment of convention in favor of the free association techniques that characterise "Spirit..." and "Laughing Stock" seemed sudden. Hollis maintains that there has always been elements of their new approach there waiting to break the surface.
"I do understand why some people say these last two albums are a complete departure, but for me I can trace the idea right back to 'Colour of Spring' and beyond. The early Talk Talk material was very synth-based, but I hate the things. I only used them to help make multi-textural music when we couldn't afford real musicians. 'Colour…' was that initial progression. For these albums we just tried to achieve the atmosphere in a different way. The experimental side where we let things take on a form of their is there on tracks like 'Chameleons Day' on 'Colour of Spring'. On 'Spirit' we had no idea where we wanted to go with the record and it eventually just grew, had a life of its own. For 'Laughing Stock' we wanted to work from the very start using the techniques we used on 'Spirit', getting an organic feel."
Hollis comments on the powerful influence the atmosphere had on the creation of the album.
"The studio was oppressive to the point of unreality — an all day every day existence. I wanted to be totally immersed in the environment to the point where all normal everyday concerns were wiped out. For seven months it was the case that we only left the studio to sleep. Nothing else existed except the recording, the studio and the nucleus of me, Friese-Greene, Phill and Lee Harris. That sort of intensity helps the thing develop.
"What we did on this album is what we call rehearsed spontaneity. There are no demos, no plans at all. I go in and put down a basic outline of something using my Country Gent guitar and then we fly other stuff in to build up the dynamics, the space. That's the key — space — it helps to build and resolve the tensions. Silence is the most powerful instrument I have.
"All the stuff is unrehearsed and may not even have been done for that song. If a note from another track sounds right we transfer it. I'm after creating an image that goes into all the dimensions, not just the plain two dimensions of most music. That's why I treat my voice like an instrument. I don't want to create this perfect ambience and then have the vocal ride over the top without any thought."
The album itself is a strange collage of intense sounds, mellow tones, minimal percussion and unfathomable vocals all held, suspended perfectly, in Hollis' created landscape. Ambience proves one of the record's key aspects, as Hollis explains.
"It's all down in the end to the placing of sounds in an overall space, an ambience and the creation of that space is as crucial to the overall sound as what you actually put in it. A lot of what we do is accidental, built around mistakes. I'm looking for notes and sounds that are unique and the idea is how to build things, other little sounds around them. The whole idea is to build up tension and then be able to release it using the different sounds and the control of the space they sit in. In a way it's a very dynamic thing, a natural sense of the ability to create and break tension. It's amazing how little you actually need to achieve that sort of emotion. For example, on this records we recorded over 40 different musicians and kept only 20. Of those 20 we only kept sections or sometimes only individual notes because they weren't the right ones for the effect to work. For every minute that ends up on the album, there's probably an hour's worth of stuff that didn't make it."
Recorded at Wessex Studios in London, "Laughing Stock" saw Talk Talk once again united with engineer Phill Brown. Brown, a man of considerable pedigree having engineered under Glyn Johns and Eddie Kramer, recalls the Talk Talk sessions as totally unlike anything he'd encountered before.
"I thought the sessions for 'Spirit' were intense until we got into the latest one. The whole thing was incredibly disorienting. We were working to create a vibe most of the time, and although that sounds very 1967 there were elements that were very psychedelic in the true sense of the word. On 'Spirit' we worked with oil projectors in the studio and a great deal of darkness. For the new one it was like that from the start. Oil bubbles breaking on the walls, candles, incense and definitely no daylight. You'd get to the studio and within an hour be totally unable to remember what time was or how long you'd been in there. Very subdued, very strange.
"We worked hard at creating an ambience and just about all of it is natural room, as we only used a little spring reverb on Mark's voice and an EMT plate reverb on the album to give a wetness here and there. All the rest was achieved using miking techniques and flat eq on the SSL desk. I find you lose a lot of signal if you start eq-ing, so I like to get the signal right using positioning and the right mic.
"On the drums, for example, we tried six different mics, valve and solid state, and ran off a test reel so we could compare all six. The drums were in mono on the record, and we eventually settled for a Neumann U47 and an STC placed 30 feet from the kit. The same was true of the guitars and just about all the instruments including Mark's voice, all distance miked at over six feet from the source. We also had mics there to help us get a sense of the room, a feel of the depth. When you listen you can hear the space and you're somewhere in the middle, these four musicians playing around you."
Having cut his teeth working with the band on the last album, the sound montage techniques were relatively better understood for the making of "Laughing Stock".
"To give you an idea of how it worked, on this album we had six basic tracks recorded onto the Studer 24-track. Drums in mono, guitar, bass and keys. The rest, and sometimes we were using up to three slave machines — that's over 60 tracks — were just noises and little snippets that helped create the whole. We'd fly stuff off other songs and edit stuff onto others. In some cases we'd take Tim's keyboard lines and edit them together into one, do the same with Mark's and then sequence the two into a track."
What of Hollis' legendary "difficult" side and the apocryphal tales of his studio behavior?
"Well, he's not difficult — it's just that he has a real solid vision as to what he wants. The story about how he got in a 25 piece choir on 'Spirit…', got them to sing this beautiful part and then came in the following day and erased it all is true. He says things can sometimes be 'too perfect'. He goes for an atmosphere and that is a delicate and personal thing. The key to this whole album is space, and I think we created a very special ambience on this one."
"Laughing Stock" and a series of CD EPs featuring all the tracks on the album plus alternative versions are out now on Verve Records.