Last updated March 8, 1998
From NME, February 14, 1998
Radiohead, The Verve, Spiritualized....yup, everyone loves being miserable these days. So what better time for the spiritual uncle of new grave, former Talk Talk frontman Mark Hollis, to break his seven- year silence?
By Mark Beaumont
Fame stings, the spotlight scorches. No matter how fast you run, or how well you hide, the wasp spike of celebrity will skewer you in the end. And for the recluse, the camera-shy artiste who wants publicity like they want their tonsils removed with a jack-hammer, the spikes cut deeper.
Mark Hollis hears the click of Dictaphone shutting down, and sighs relief. Having survived another hour of explaining that his unexplainable music can only be explained by its sheer inexplicability, he downs the last of his Pepsi and rubs his forehead. That old nervous pounding again.
It's been a decade since his previous band, the now defunct Talk Talk, leapt bravely out of the cheesy synth-pop whirl of the mid-'80s into darker , more entrancing waters. Ten long years since he grabbed all the tinsel trappings of The Pop Star Life (Offered to him by the successes of 'Life's What You Make It' and its mother album 'The Colour Of Spring'), flushed them gleefully down the nearest bog and started exploring the stark sounds and swirling silences that would become the 1988 opus of weirdie, 'Spirit Of Eden'. Some 120 months out of the limelight, cultivating the general demeanour of a startled tumble dryer mechanic and still, every time he pokes his head out of the comforting studio haze, the demons of celebrity come to piss in his ears again. "I'm sorry if I was a bit uptight at the start there" he says, grabbing his coat from beneath a palm tree in the luxury conservatory of a South Kensington hotel, "but I've been a bit worried about something today..."
Last time, when he was dragged into the spotlight to promote the final Talk Talk album 'Laughing Stock' in 1991 (a press jaunt which would have been much less strenuous if he'd had the phrase 'Look, The Bloody Music Speaks For Itself, Alright ?' tatooed on his forehead), it was his legal wrangles with his ex-record company over the release of a shoddy greatest hits remix album, 'Natural History Revisited', that caught the press' imagination far more than the obtuse, improvisational jazz patchwork he came to tout. And now, after seven years spent letting his band quietly disintegrate ("It just sort of ended, I suppose. We'd reached a way of working that'd got to an end point"), composing avant-garde woodwind symphonies and 'getting down' to the sound of dust settling, he re-emerges with his most evocative and luxuriant album to date, only to find old lies and rumours hawked up and spat in his face. This morning he read a national magazine feature which implied that he was using heroin during the final years of Talk Talk. He is horrified. His wife is furious. Off the record he denies it emphatically. On the record, uh, he'd rather we didn't mention it, actually. The spotlight scorches, fame stings. And you bother to ask him if he regrets leaving pop stardom behind. "No, no" he snorts. "The only regret I'd have had is if I didn't feel I'D progressed in what I was doing or I'd done them for the wrong reason." From the piped PA, the gentle, vapid slush of a Simply Red tape filters in. The ghost of careers past. A vision of what might have been. Mark grins. "You leave everything behind."
So there's Nicole Kidman, right, and she's floating down the Suez Canal on a lilo when she's suddenly attacked by a savage pygmy tribe of bassoon players. She's dragged off to the tribe's jungle hideaway, where the savages are torturing Nicole with their experimental close harmony lute improvisations when there is a sudden hush and, from deep in the jungle there's the faint bellow of Dustin Hoffman, swinging to the rescue in his role as the world's first asthmatic Tarzan....
Ahem. Excuse me readers, just attempting to immerse myself in Mark's forthcoming eponymous solo album using the Mark Hollis Cinema In Your Own Head Method.
"Music works in lots of different ways," Mark fidgets by way of explanation, "as much as you want stuff that you can have a riot to you also want stuff where you can close your eyes and visually journey. I don't see it as a mental journey where you find out about yourself, I see it more that you create a film in your head that takes you somewhere."
Alrighty then ! Lights dimmed ? Patchouli oil sprinkled on your cerebral popcorn ? Kaftan donned ? Elaborate mirror system set up so that you can inspect your own arsehole for the next 45 minutes ? Then let's dive into the album's epic centrepiece 'A Life (1895-1915)'.
"That was someone born before the turn of the century," Mark relates "and dying within one year of the First World War at a young age. It was based on Vera Brittan's boyfriend. It's the expectation that must have been in existence at the turn of the century, the patriotism that must've existed at the start of the war and the disillusionment that must've come immediately afterwards. It's the very severe mood swings that fascinated me."
'A Life (1895-1915)' sounds like the apes from '2001 : A Space Odyssey' having their first clarinet lessons. It is essentially eight minutes of atonal woodwind chirping, a gentle piano groove and a tambourine player slowly falling asleep three miles away. The 'lyrics' consist of a slight moaning, like a rather damp hangover. around the two-minute mark and a vague whispering like a disgruntled undertaker, at 7mins 15 secs. Yet, remarkably, you can totally understand what he's on about. For this is emotive and evocative music rooted in the ancient jazz ethic : 'It's not what you sing, it's the way that you sing it'.
"The lyric is always last," Mark says, "the inflection and the phonetics must come first. The importance of the lyric is that in order to sing the thing properly you've got to mentally get yourself into what the subject is about. The lyric is extremely important in a performance point of view, but it's of secondary importance to the whole." So that's why you can't hear any of the bloody words then ? Hur hur. "No" Mark deadpans, "I just sing how it feels right to sing."
Mark Hollis, it transpires, is one of the last surviving members of the endangered Muso Wankonaboutshiteus species. He is on Style Police records as having used the phrase "geography of sound" in a built-up area. He recorded 'Mark Hollis' with only one pair of microphones so that there was a 'space' to the record that you can 'locate yourself in'. He worked entirely acoustically for two reasons. "One is because they exist out of any time frame, and secondly, when you hit them at a very low level they have an area of tonality and a degree of fragility within them which is very special." He is Ocean Colour Scene's dad and I claim my dreamscape of sonic resonance.
Except 'Mark Hollis' transcends any petty journalistic sniping through its sublime quirkiness and delicate dynamics. The sweeping silences of 'Westward Bound', the piano minimalism of 'Colour Of Spring' and the kooky flutiness of 'The Daily Planet' stretch so far beyond our blinkered rock parameters in the inner sense-tickling stakes that us whining indie tosserscan only turn to the camera in awe and whisper 'niiiiiice'.
And what's more, it's cool ! Introspection is 'in', daddio ! Mark Hollis has stumbled unwittingly into the left-field of the New Misero Revolution ! So does he feel venerated at last ?
Mark : "No, because I'm not aware of what that is."
You haven't heard The Flaming Lips' new album then ? Spiritualized ? Er, Radiohead ?
Mark : "..........."
Blimey. Well to put you straight you are the semi-mute weirdo uncle of new grave.
Mark shrugs. "Right."
Hmmmmm. Unsurprisingly, Mark takes a far more cultural reference point for his muse than, say, 'Urban Hymns'.
"If you look at a film like 'The Bicycle Thieves'," he says, "from a narrative point of view nothing exists at all but from an emotional point of view everything exists. That's where its strength is. I think music is the same. The way I think about it is to try and make an album that is unique. To try and make an album that could exist outside if the period in which it's written or recorded. That's the aim."
With which, he grabs his coat, furrows his brow and calls for his taxi. There will be no single from this album and no tour ever. Just the soft shuffle of a maverick and visionary melting back into the shadows. And elegantly licking his scars.