Last updated March 31, 1998
Since TALK TALK's final album, Mark Hollis has been hidden away. Now the 'anti-pop star' is back with a new solo LP. From reluctant New Romantic to musical innovator, it's been a long, strange journey.
VOX has only been in the pub on Wimbledon Common for ten minutes when Mark Hollis grabs his coat, gets up and shoves his chair under the table. Leaving already? Hollis' reticence in interviews was legendary in his Talk Talk days but... er, this interview hasn't started yet.
"I thought we could move round the corner," suggests Hollis in his quiet, diffident way, indicating a dingy little annex between the lounge and the tap room, "Get away from the noise."
It's 3 o'clock in the afternoon and the pub lounge is deserted except for an elderly couple in the corner nursing a half of lager each and staring catatonically at the horse brasses on the opposite wall. But Hollis is right, there is noise. Piping out of the ceiling are the bland, fulsome tones of the ubiquitous bloody M People. Hollis has no idea who M People are. He lived a hermit-like existence in Suffolk for several years after the release of 1991's 'Laughing Stock', the last Talk Talk LP. And, with admirable, almost perverse high-mindedness, he only moved back to London because he wanted his kids to experience the busier cultural life there. Mark Hollis knows nothing of M People, but he dislikes them and is prepared to move to the grottiest part of the pub to remove himself from their aural intrusion. I like him already.
So we settle at a table that tilts dramatically to starboard every time you put your pint on it, Hollis on a low stool, VOX on a cushion on a window ledge about a foot above eye contact level. Moreover, the radiator is unremittingly belching out a sequence of drones, clanks and wheezing noises reminiscent of the electronic experiments of Stockhausen, Pierre Henry and Ligeti in the '50s. That's fine by Hollis."I've always loved dissonance," he remarks. "It's so fantastic, when you listen to some of the stuff that was written in the '50s, it's so incredibly left-field. Decades ahead of anything in pop music..."There's only a single hint of Mark Hollis' remote past - a donkey jacket cum-tunic, with big, brassy buttons which has a New Romantic air about it. He's travelled a long way from 1981 and Talk Talk. Hard to imagine that this slight, unassuming, early fortyish fellow contains the strength of will and undeflected courage to have made the journey.
Hard to imagine what he had in common with the gel and mascara set, either. For back in 1981 Talk Talk seemed like a poor man's Duran Duran (who they supported on tour), a Let Loose to Duran's Take That. One expected them to evaporate like a burst of cheap hairspray from an aerosol: tacky and annoyingly pungent for a moment, then gone. They stuck around, however, and treated the success of each album as an excuse for taking greater artistic liberties on the next. By the time of 'The Colour Of Spring' they had drafted in such guest musicians as Danny Thompson and Steve Winwood to enhance their hand-painted musical visions, and 1988's 'Spirit Of Eden', released to critical adulation and a lukewarm public reaction, was a melted, free-flowing, improvisational classic. Other pop artists bullshit piously about doing what Mark Hollis has done, protest they're in it 'purely for the music'; promise they'll break boundaries, ignore commercial factors. Then comes their next LP and, for reasons of expediency, spinelessness or poverty of imagination, they end up trotting out the same tried and trusted fare.
Other pop artists bullshit, but don't deliver. Mark Hollis has delivered and carries on delivering. Nobody, but nobody, in pop music has journeyed so far from the neon-lit safety of pop mediocrity out into the fearful wildernesses of the rock avant-garde.
Talk Talk reached, in Hollis' words, an "end point" after 199l's 'Laughing Stock', an album still more fluid and free of the four-square conventions of pop than 'Spirit Of Eden'. He and 'silent' creative partner Tim Friese-Greene decided to call it a day.
"Both of us felt that we didn't just want to repeat what we'd done in the past, but develop," says Hollis, always obliging in tone but choosing every word with great care. "That gets harder the longer you work. It was good that after 'Laughing Stock' he was of a like mind that that was it. It was hard to see where we could have gone from there."
Talk Talk's rhythm section, bassist Paul Webb and drummer Lee Harris, carried on Talk Talk's spirit with O Rang and the torrid stream of musical consciousness that was 'Herd Of Instinct'.
Hollis, meanwhile, after six years has finally re-emerged with his eponymous new album. It's one further step removed from his pop origins and is a distillation of his new-found enthusiasm for classical music, his desire for the conditions of a small jazz unit and an imaginary take on the spirit of folk music. Recorded with a variety of unfamiliar names, such as pianist Phil Ramekin, Dominic Miller and Warne Livesey, and engineered by Phill Brown, it's a beautiful, fragile amalgam of piano, guitar and woodwind arrangements, with, of course, Hollis' surging, tremulous vocals.
It's a unique record, arising from entirely natural conditions; from months, turning into years of, as Hollis puts it "experimenting - not towards any particular end - studying notation, writing for writing's sake, without any concerns for drumbeat or anything like that", and without the record company snapping at his heels to meet a deadline.
"It's a great position to be in. In an ideal world, everyone should work that way," he says.
Whereas 'Spirit Of Eden' and 'Laughing Stock' were built up from improvisations, 'Mark Hollis' was written in advance and is more restrained and minimal. Hollis' lyrical diction, as on 'The Watershed', is often dissolved in the emotional ebb and flow of his vocals.
"Sometimes I'm listening to arrangements by Ravel and I don't even know what language it's in, but that's not what's important - the sentiment is what's important. Then again, lyrics are very important to the singer because you have to mean what you're saying."
Talk Talk, incidentally, were unique in that their lyrics were often indecipherable, even with a lyric sheet, as this was always rendered in Hollis' tiny fastidious but barely legible handwriting.
"I should have spent more time in school!" he laughs.
Though it's not always clear what Hollis is saying through the hazy film, this is a remarkably, achingly intimate record, an effect achieved by recording the album purely acoustically. Every note hangs in the air as palpably as a dewdrop on the end of a twig.
"You look at blues music, Robert Johnson and John Lee Hooker, and there's total honesty in the way it's recorded," enthuses Hollis. "What's so great with an acoustic instrument is that it's not only the note that exists, it's the friction, the creaking on the neck of the double bass. And when a lot of acoustic music gets produced, they fuck it up, they glob out all the great charm of the instrument, in order to make it seem 'polished'." He spits out the word.
A drop-out from a child psychology course at Sussex University, Mark Hollis began musical life with his first group The Reaction. They only lasted for one single on Island records, 'I Can't Resist', but Hollis had been sufficiently hooked by punk to drop out of college.
"Before punk, I never believed there was any way I could get involved with music. Punk was all about enthusiasm," recalls Hollis, eyes misting nostalgically. "And access. Suddenly, there were places all over the place where you could play. It didn't matter that 90 per cent of it was crap: the energy was what was important. And record companies didn't have a clue what to do with it."
The single was dodgy New Wave, but he then formed Talk Talk, who EMI signed on the back of sessions for Kid Jensen's show and demos recorded with Rolling Stones producer Jimmy Miller. They released their debut album, the seemingly aptly titled 'The Party's Over' in 1982.
"You always make what you believe is the best album you can, given the circumstances. And that was the case with the first album," is all Hollis will say about that one today, distinctly less misty-eyed.
Undermined by the trappings of dodgy New Romantic coiffure and shiny white suits, sharing the same producer as Duran Duran at the behest of EMI, their singles were characterised by the boxy rhythms and naff syntherama of the time, and you imagined they'd be blown away by the next gust of fashion. Yet there was something about the band - Hollis' nervy, tenacious vocals, perhaps - which kept them in there. Even from the beginning, he was talking about Coltrane in interviews, about writing pop songs as an academic exercise, anticipating future musical directions.
The follow up album, 'It's My Life' saw songwriting partner Tim Friese-Greene come aboard, and the title track, bursting with a sort of sanguine, embattled passion, hinted at evidence of a racing pulse within this particular synth beast. The single was popular Europe-wide and Talk Talk were established as a serious musical concern.
"Through economic necessity, we had to use synthesisers to get the arrangements," says Hollis. "We'd have preferred to have brought in individual musicians, but we couldn't afford to. When it came to 'The Colour Of Spring', we'd had quite a bit of success and we had more money to make that album, so it was closer to what we wanted."
'The Colour Of Spring' was the first indication that Talk Talk were genuine craftsmen. Reminiscent of Traffic at their finest, it was adorned with virtuoso contributions from the likes of Steve Winwood and Pretenders guitarist Robbie McIntosh and contained potentially stadium-swelling songs such as 'Life's What You Make It' and 'Happiness Is Easy'. Already enjoying substantial success on both sides of the Atlantic as well as both sides of the commercial/critical divide, Talk Talk could have gone on to rule the world.
'Spirit Of Eden', the daringly beautiful Talk Talk album of 1988 was an untrammelled expression of the purity of musical intention. Commercial suicide, in other words.
"'Spirit Of Eden' was the LP where I felt 'This is where we're heading' and really felt 'yeah, we've got it' - in terms of the totality of mood."
EMI's mood was pretty total, too, when the album came through to them. They totally freaked out. Hollis refused to release a single from it and refused to take it on the road, arguing that it was "impossible to recreate the essence of it live". The album barely scraped into the Top 20. To EMI it was the equivalent of U2 deciding to become a barber shop quartet. In 1990, in a desperate attempt to salvage something from what they saw as the 'wreckage' of the 'Spirit...' episode, they put out 'History Revisited', an album of Talk Talk's greatest hits remixed. Enraged, Talk Talk sued EMI for tampering with their work without their permission. They won the first round of the case and eventually EMI agreed to withdraw and destroy all copies of the album.
Hollis doesn't like to talk about this episode. He won't talk about anything that doesn't appertain to the pure pursuit of music-making. What Simon Le Bon was really like, backstage anecdotes from the early days on TOTP, the general state of pop? Forget it. His most common response to that sort of enquiry is an actually quite sincere: "Oh, I wouldn't know about that."
It's still possible to raise his hackles a little over the subject of EMI.
"It always seemed they preferred the LP before to the one they were given at the time, only they never liked that when it first came out, either."
Even so, he'd rather not pursue the grievance.
"It's...immaterial, really. We were always fortunate to make the records we wanted to make and that's the only consideration. When artists have some sort of grief with the record company, the whole journalistic side of things just concentrates on that antagonism."
This might seem a little precious, but Hollis conveys the rebuff to the nosey profession of which VOX is a part with such gentle courtesy it's impossible to take it the wrong way. Hollis doesn't give much away, but he speaks with the air of one only too willing to be of assistance. But if he seems unjaded by age or cynicism that's because he's taken the trouble to ensure both he and his work remain unsullied. It's his refusal to become distracted that has allowed him to get from where he was musically to the quiet brilliance of where he is now. Oh, and it should be pointed out that Hollis isn't entirely the delicate aesthete. He's a football fan; always a sign of humanity. A Spurs fan, indeed, which may account for the sparse, melancholic undertow of the new LP.
In the press notes accompanying his new album, Hollis says : "I love sound. And I love silence. And in a way, I like silence more." One of the many great things about this album is that, like Hollis' hero Miles Davis at his eclectic best, it approximates to the condition of silence - perfect stillness. Each track is buffered by several seconds of silence, arises from silence then disappears back into it (you can be sure a journalist likes an LP when he starts praising the gaps between the tracks - Ed).
Hollis himself is careful to make the distinction between what he does and Ambient. "That's not the same thing because you've always got this wash of sound in there. Whereas silence is something most people are afraid of. It gives them an opportunity to think and people aren't at all comfortable with that."
Silences of the awkward variety are a frequent feature of a chat with Hollis. Conversation is occasionally halting, but on the subject of his sound he starts to flow a little.
"It's important to create the right vibe. On 'Spirit Of Eden', there are a couple of soundless gaps, as if to say, 'What's the hurry? Let your head settle out, then move into the next piece'."
Unlike Brian Eno and Erik Satie, the 20th century godfathers of Ambient, Mark Hollis does not regard his music as constructed for the background.
"It's nice to take your hearing down a step. There are ways of listening rather than just hearing, if you're prepared to make the effort."
"In general, people are oblivious," he snorts as the landlord helpfully boosts up the sound on M People round the corner. "People just let all this crap go past and exist. It's like with televisions, like with radios, it's easy just to leave them on as background noise."
Ultimately, the musical trick Hollis has pulled off a chemically impossible one he's made an element from a compound. His 'purity' is one of approach rather than an imitative adherence to a single style.
"That's bad terminology," he says. "There's no such thing as 'pure' jazz or 'pure' blues. The best way to be original is to be as eclectic as you can and the best way to do it is with belief. It's as simple as that."
Mark Hollis is as anti pop as it's possible to get. Yet he could never have got to where he's at except via pop. It's a paradox, But don't worry about it. Just listen.
MILES DAVIS "That Miles Davis/Gil Evans period is one of the most important things musically to me. With his 'Sketches Of Spain', there's this great feeling of space, and that feeling of being extremely tight in the way it's put together, and yet also extremely loose, which is very rare. A great achievement."
RAVEL "It's a great tragedy that most people only know him for 'Bolero' when you've got things like his small chamber pieces. His settings of poems by Stéphane Mallarmé are superb."
CAN "'TagoMago' is an extremely important album."
DONATONI "He's an Italian composer. I always get him mixed up with the Italian centre forward [What? Zola? - Ed]."
JOHN CAGE "I haven't time to listen to what's happening now. I'm still working through his 'Orchestral Works'."