Last updated January 25, 1998
From The Sunday Times, January 25, 1998
ANDREW SMITH meets the former Talk Talk singer whose haunting new album marks the next stage in an intriguing musical odyssey
There have been stranger lives in pop, but few more peculiar musical journeys than Mark Hollis's. Hunched over a pint in a pub on a cold afternoon in Wimbledon Village, south London, his high voice will strike anyone who ever turned on a radio in the 1980s as familiar - this despite the fact that it has scarcely been heard in public for seven years. For Hollis began that decade as singer with the synth-pop group Talk Talk, the poor new romantic's Duran Duran, and ended it as singer/composer with a combo powerful and imaginative enough to make The Spirit of Eden, a wholly new kind of rock album that owed more to Miles Davis than Madonna, or even Prince. Bizarrely, that combo was also called Talk Talk and the price of their post-rock adventures was forfeiture of their enormous commercial success and an acrimonious dispute with their record company.
On the other hand, few records made in that era have endured so well as The Spirit of Eden, just as few current albums will endure so well as Mark Hollis's new, eponymous solo album. In its quiet way, Mark Hollis, the record (out on February 2), is as radical and innovative as anything by Goldie or Spiritualized. What's more, seldom has such a successful "pop" record been less rooted in its time. Like Radiohead's OK Computer, there is nothing to tie this music to 1998. Modern classical buffs will recognise something in the structure, instrumentation and shifting harmonic content of the pieces here, while jazz fans will be drawn to the lithe, lingering, free spirit of the playing. Those raised on pop will warm to the soul in Hollis's surging, melancholic voice and the compactness of the arrangements. And if such a description makes Hollis's project sound drily academic, now is the time to point out that the chief virtue of his work is its striking, understated beauty. There is no question but that it will be in my top 10 albums of the year, come December.
Looking thinner and more frail than he last did, dressed in a blue jumper of the type junior school boys wear with shorts, the reasons for Hollis's absence soon become clear. Softly spoken, with his broad Tottenham accent sounding as fruitily at odds with the rarefied nature of his music as it ever has, he describes sitting at a piano hitting a single key for four days on end, listening intently to the special cadences of the sound draining from a dying string. He will also enthuse about dissonance and Miles Davis and Ravel and Can and John Cage and Ornette Coleman and fail to mention a single other "pop" artist at any stage of our discussion. Surprisingly, he doesn't see the unorthodox trajectory of his career as anything other than logical, even inevitable. Surely, you'll suggest, as the first hit singles were spilling from Talk Talk's strangled debut album, The Party's Over, he would never have seen himself ending up here? But no. "The thing is, those records were just driven by wanting to not to repeat ourselves," he almost whispers. "To me, it doesn't look odd."
After that maiden album, things improved rapidly for Talk Talk, partly through the addition of producer/collaborator Tim Friese-Greene. Their second offering, It's My Life, was still in the synth-pop mould, but hits like the title track and Such a Shame were imbued with a shimmering depth and subtlety their labelmates Duran Duran would never get anywhere near. By The Colour of Spring (1986), the group had shrugged off the earlier perceptions of them, ditching synths, trading their catchy but clever four-minute pop songs for more expansive, intricate ones. The best-known tune from that period, Life's What You Make It, was predicated on a four-note piano bassline that stayed constant from start to finish, allowing Hollis's voice and the other instruments to swirl around it - especially guest musician Steve Winwood's swelling organ and the monumental guitar hook contributed by Pretenders guitarist Robbie MacIntosh. Not only was this a rousing number, it was devilishly clever. Talk Talk were now big stars on both sides of the Atlantic.
It is easy to see how EMI's accountants might have been a tad peeved when they heard The Spirit of Eden two years later, inspired though it was. Hollis and Friese-Greene had reached the end of what they could do within a standard pop format. They had decided to move beyond it.
"The Spirit of Eden was definitely the album where I thought, 'This is it. This is what we've been reaching for,' " Hollis now says. "Two things came together. First, because we'd previously sold so many records, we had a very large recording budget, which we decided to use to give us freedom to experiment. And second, digital recording had just come in."
Most artists were fired by the clarity of the sound that could be produced in digital studios, but Talk Talk saw further ways of harnessing the new technology. Now music could be recorded, then moved around - cut and paste if you like - without the degeneration in quality that would occur with traditional tape recording systems. The Spirit of Eden was the first album to test the limits of this development. The idea was to improvise, as a jazz band would, then take the elements and arrange them into an album structure afterwards. Thus, the playing was fluid and exploratory ("A musical idea will never be as good as the first time it's expressed," Hollis notes), while at the same time being subjugated to the requirements of the piece as a whole. The mood was sombre, reflective, but with an elegiac afterglow that drew you back again and again. And still does.
Talk Talk made one more fine album, Laughing Stock, in 1991, before going their separate ways. "There was no big split," Hollis shrugs. "By the end, everything was so loose that walking away didn't seem like a wrench. We'd reached an end point." In execution, Mark Hollis, the album, turns The Spirit of Eden on its head. In the intervening years, its maker had learnt to read and write music and had been composing short pieces for woodwind and piano ("just for the sake of it, not with any notion that it would be heard by anybody else"). He put his new skills to good use: the delicate tendrils of woodwind and brass that lead into the bluesy track A Life (1895-1915) or the spare, brilliantly evocative piano figures that underpin Inside Looking Out and the opening spiritual, The Colour of Spring, would probably have been beyond him previously.
"The idea was to have carefully worked-out structures, within which the musicians would have a lot of freedom. I'd just say to them, okay, we're here, we want to get there - now let's play. And I wanted there to be no more than four or five things happening at any one time. Over the course of the record, there are probably 20 musicians involved, but I wanted it to feel like a small combo from start to finish."
This combines with the fact that everything has been recorded acoustically - almost unheard of nowadays - to create a rare, passionate, intimacy, a stillness of a type that many pop-inclined listeners may never have experienced before. "It's nice to take your hearing down a step," Hollis remarked recently. "There are ways of lis-tening rather than just hearing, if you're prepared to make the effort." On the evidence he presents, few would deny that it's an effort worth making.