Last updated January 30, 1998
From The Wire, January 1998
As the prime mover behind Talk Talk, Mark Hollis threw off the shackles of a pop existence to create the bleakest, yet most lyrical orchestral rock this side of Scott Walker. This year he breaks a seven year silence with a brand new solo album. Words: Rob Young, Photography. Frank Bauer.
Thrill has gone. Back from the wilderness, back to the circus. Film demands your image: photogrciphers lead you into the cold. Writers keep you hanging around. You don't want to be doing this. You cover your face with your hand.
"At the point when you finish an album," Mark Hollis is saying, "the last thing in the world I could think of doing is start writing another one. At the point where you've made it, that says what you want to say at that point in time, so it's not like the next day you can begin another one".
Anyone whose ears were pruned and re-rooted by the last three Talk Talk albums should make the most of Hollis's new, self-titled collection of nine songs. It's been a long time coming - seven years, in fact, since the great white spaces of the fifth (and, it transpires, final) Talk Talk album Laughing Stock - but unquestionably worth the wait. Deceptively simple acoustic surfaces shimmer with all manner of spring-loaded detail, choked and wrenched vocal performances, miniature symphonies of wind instruments, and references to the recording process itself (at times, the creaking of Hollis's guitar stool is louder than his singing; at others the oral noise from his mouth makes you wonder if he had the mic down his throat). Perhaps as a reaction to the big budget, commercial suicide productions of late Talk Talk - Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock - Mark Hollis was recorded with a minimum of flash. "Yeah, well the thing about that is," Hollis explains, "everything's just recorded off this pair of mics at the front, vocally as well. The reason I like the idea of that is, you've got the whole geography of sound within which all the instruments exist, but if you listen hard enough, you can actually hear where my head's moving in position as I'm singing. Because it does exist in a real room space."
The musicians on the new album include pianist Phil Ramekin, guitarist Dominic Miller, drummer Warne Livesey and a wind quintet; while Phill Brown has taken over the producer's chair from Tim Friese-Greene. They don't add much to the model established on Laughing Stock - drummer Livesey provides deadringer equivalents to Lee Harris's damped snares and ringing ride-cymbal mosaics, and the music palpably breathes - but there is a continuity here that leads back to the jagged edge at which Laughing Stock tore Itself off after 40-odd minutes. "Cor!" he replies (his response to any mildly heavy question), "well, all that I can really say is that from album to album, you want to actually make a development, otherwise what's the point of recording it?"
Given that the majority shareholders in the future of music are those involved in offshore deals with dance music, Hollis's new offering is a brave and unworldly return to active service. Press material sent out with the record fashionably namechecks Stockhausen and Miles Davis, but I hear neither: Morton Feldman seems a much closer presence. Hollis is not known as a volatile interviewee, but that observation hits the jackpot "Yeah, Morton Feldman is a total winner," he says, sitting on a park bench in West London - the only situation in which he'd allow himself to be photographed. "There's one particular thing called The Viola In My Life Part 2 - what I really love with that is, for me, that's the closest thing I've ever come across that I feel I identify with; not only for its Minimalism, but the actual level at which he hits the notes. He's as much interested in the tonality of the instrument as he is with the note itself, and that's really important to me."
Many points on the album seem to achieve the ultra quiet ppppp dynamic that was Feldman's speciality. "Yeah, it is extremely quietly recorded. On "Westward Bound", that is without doubt the quietest I've ever done a vocal. I could barely even get a sound to come out. I really like instruments hit at low level, and like I say, given the point that everything is playing at that level, you've got to be in sympathy with it."
The album is seasoned with weeping woodwind interruptions, testimony to Hollis's exploratory listening habits over the intervening years since 1991. "There's so much out there to listen to, and that takes all my time. For me, the best of that earlier bunch of composers that I've become aware of was Ravel, who I only ever knew for the Bolero, that hideous piece of work - and yet you've got stuff like his String Quartet, also his music for poems by Stephan Mallarmé, which are just a fantastic bit of writing and arranging. So it's like meandering along these little avenues and listening to stuff. That's how it works for me." Nothing on the album is electrified. "The minute you work with just acoustic instruments, by virtue of the fact that they've already existed for hundreds of years, they can't date. When you're looking at writing music, the ideal must be: I'd like to make music that can exist outside the timeframe. So your biggest chance of doing that, I guess, is working with instruments that by their nature don't exist in a time period. So, no syndrums - great as they were ..."
"Saw the bridges that I burned " - "The Colour Of Spring" (1998)
Routes to the loot, part one: allow a major label to hammer all your quirks, noise, mistakes, inspirational innovations, 'uncommercial' sounds, arhythmic breakdowns, unsummarizable sentiments, into a conveniently marketable musical krush. Let market forces be the sandpaper that stops you chafing. If that's what pop groups are supposed to do, Talk Talk did it wrong. They began (in 1982) happy to be moulded as an airbrushed, prinking-and-preening pop outfit, but gradually extricated themselves via the committed pop of 1986's The Colour Of Spring, which wheeled in Traffic's Steve Winwood's Hammond to burnish their granular grooves. Then came the big jump: Spirit of Eden, the album classed by some as an Astral Weeks for the 80s. In the climate of nostalgia, irony and postmodern mimickry that characterised the culture of the times, the record pricked the bubble economy of the Thatcher years like no other. But was it made for the same reasons that caused the group to form in the first place?
"Cor! No, no, at the point when I first started," he says, "It was because I just loved records. And I really wanted to be in a band to make music. And then when we first started, the kind of stuff I was listening to was obviously very different to the stuff I'm listening to now. And you've got this thing where from album to album you want some kind of development, but at the same time in order to get development and not to hit repetition, you constantly come across things which you think, yeah, I can do that if I do It the way I've already done It, but I don't want to do it that way. And that, I think, is what forces you into other areas. You see, through these albums, for me, each one has felt like a very natural progression from where the one before was. But from this one to the fIrst one, there's no relationship there at all." Did something particularly significant happen between the making of The Colour Of Spring and Spirit? "No, I think at the point we got there, Spirit of Eden was very much felt like where it was always kind of heading, but no, nothing ... More than anything, it was just not wanting to repeat what you've done. All the time, you're getting older and everything and nothing is static It feels far more bizarre to me that there should be no change. That feels really very weird to me."
"Makes it harder more you team " - "The Watershed" (1998)
Look back over the lyric sheets in the very first Talk Talk albums, The Party's Over (1982) and It's My Life (1984), and you'll find the word "change" repeated passim. Although stylistically those records are likely to remain locked in time, with their Simmons drum pads, bendy synth solos, guitar synthesizers, Fairlight sequencing and Athena poster-style paintings by James Marsh, there weren't many pop groups at the time capable of confessional stanzas like "Happiness can often bleed/Beggars lay among the sheep/Let me take the choice/The sermon pleads"; "Take this punishment away Lord/Name the crime I'm guilty of/Too much hope I've seen as virtue/Name the crime I'm guilty of". ContemporarIes like Duran Duran and ABC wrote puffed-up, straight-to-video poetic contrivances; TT were closer if anything to the earnestness of Tears For Fears, who later revealed they'd embarked on a pop career in order to fund their own psychoanalysis sessions.
Hollis and Talk Talk, though., never allowed themselves to slip into the smug certainties and flash lifestyles of the 80s pop nouveaux riches (they didn't take part in Live Aid, for a start). Hollis's early songs struggle with notions of fate versus faith, with imagery swinging from the Bible to Luke Rheinhardt's cult novel The Dice Man. When the songs for which they're best known, "Life's What You Make It" and "Give It Up", hit the charts in 1986, they sounded like Cassandra baying In the wilderness - a lone, moral voice railing against the backdating of experience by mass media exposure and the tragedies of drug abuse. On top of that, their own travelling circus became too much to bear, you could hear it in Hollis's blasted shreds of vocal. "Originally," remembers HollIs, "I thought playing live was the best thing you could ever do. The problem when you hit ninemonth tours is, firstly, for nine months you're dealing more with recreating the past than with looking into the future. You've also got this horrible thing where, despite the fact that you go through different countries and different cultures, you're totally oblivious to them and you're just shelled out against that. So that's quite ugly; also within the day you've only got the one hour which is about performing and the rest which is obviously about very mundane things. The other problem when we hit that last tour was that the material was becoming increasingly hard, even with The Colour of Spring, to perform live. So even in that tour in 86, maybe two thirds of the material was based around the second album rather than the one we'd just finished making.
"And the other thing: I just think it's really important if you perform that you actually mentally go where you've got to go, and to do that six nights out of seven is extremely wearing. The only way over a period of time, I could get to that, was to do a lot of drink. And I don't think that is a good exercise" Were the anti-heroin songs inspired by personal experience? "No, not at all. But, you know, I met people who got totally fucked up on it.. Within rock music there's so much fucking glorification of it, and it is a wicked, horrible thing, you know?"
"I don't like to read the news/D'you know anything I'm going through?" - Have You Heard The News?" (1982)
After 1986, the three core members of Talk Talk became fathers. Hollis decamped to a farm near Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk (don't call it a 'retreat': "I see things in terms of pursuit rather than avoidance," he tells me), where he surrounded himself with a menagerie of domestic animals "Tons of 'em, 18 at the peak, all running loose," he recalls with a wry smile. (He's recently moved back to South London: "That was just because I've got children, and I just wanted my eldest one to be aware of the culture that exists.")
In this rural setting work began on the music that would usher in the second phase of Talk Talk's development Spirit Of Eden. When they emerged, blinking briefly in the light, the cosmetics had been kicked down the same chute as the synths, syndrums and trite rhymes. "The world's turned upside down", sang Hollis over a blaze of amped-up harmonica and Henry Lowther's muted trumpet. With an augmented lineup that included Danny Thompson on double bass, percussionist Hugh Davies, classical clarinettist Andrew Marriner, Nigel Kennedy on fiddle, and the Choir of Chelmsford Cathedral, and tricked out with a humanist/ecological/holistic 'message', this was a full-scale rock Passion that picked up cntical acclaim, but permanently destabilised the group's relationship with EMI. Three years later, the company retaliated by shunting out History Revisited a quick-fix dance remix album assembled without the group's consent.
Spirit closed with the line "Take my freedom for giving me a sacred love" - it sounded like Hollis had been boning up on the renegade, mystical Christianity of William Blake. The thread leads through to the new record, with its references to "A New Jerusalem", redemption, purification, blood, repentance and atonement. Astonishingly Hollis cries ignorance of Blakels work. "I'm not a born again Christian, no," he says. "But I would hope there's a humanitarian vision in there, for sure". So where does that elliptical imagery derive from? "If I think of favourite films of mine, what they deal with is character and virtue, they don't deal with narrative. That's a very secondary thing. The two films I would think of more than anything would be The Bicycle Thieves and Les Enfants Du Paradis." Curiously I had seen The Bicycle Thieves only the week before. "It's fantastic, isn't it?" he says, animated. "What happens? A bloke gets his bike nicked. But it's all there - just amazing. And the emotion in the end, with the little kid, when his Dad gets tugged [for stealing a bike]: it's all there, really strong."
Like the the film's anti-hero Hollis had his most treasured possession stolen from under his nose when EMI remixed the soul out of his precious music. The writ that subsequently hit the fan 1et to the record being buried, but the process cost the group's future. He says he's enjoyed the two albums former members Lee Harris and Paul Webb have since released as .O.rang, but admits that they've stopped playing together. "I don't see them any more," he says. Why not? "I'll tell you if you don't print it."
"The good has bled to dust" - "The Watershed" (1998)
Touch Hollis for an explanation of his new songs' thematic content, and you'll encounter a thick hide. He won't be printing the lyrics on the sleeve, and If you can decipher more than a third of the words on the recording, I'll sell my ears. Like the posthumously released, harrowing demos of Nick Drake, John Martyn's Celtic psychedelia, or Robert Wyatt's keening treble, Hollis possesses one of the great unrock voices. It's all whisper and no scream: at times, the voice is little more than a thin parting of the air in the studio; the words are stretched out, torn apart, boiled down to consonant acoustics. "With lyrics," he says, "they're totally important in one way, but equally they're not of any importance at all, because they've got to be secondary to the actual way the thing moves phonetically. When Malcolm Mooney was singing with Can, he invents his own language, and does it in a way that doesn't sound contrived or Stupid. You don't think he's gone into Toytown land or something ..."
Like Mooney, Hollis loads elliptical verse with apocalyptic weight. The timescale referred to in the album's incredible centrepiece, "A Life (1895-1915)", spans the turn of the century 20 years in which the Victorian Age got trampled into the mud of the trenches. "The dates were taken from ... it is the First World War and it's just that at the time I read a few books about that period, like All Quiet On The Western Front, Testament of Youth; and I think those dates - I might be wrong, but I've got a feeling they were Vera Brittain's boyfriend. It was more that idea that you're only one year into it and then you're topped." The reference to "A New Jerusalem", meanwhile, is "much more tied up with two things, when I thought about it that was the way they talked about 1946; but equally, I thought: whether you're back from Vietnam or whatever, it's just that conflict between expectation and reality." It's an emotional state Hollis is adept at expressing in his music. Does he look for epiphany in such moments? "I don't know I think of it being to do with compassion, if you like. It's a tricky one. But you may well be right in what you say. You may well be right."
Thrill has gone. The party's over. And, once again, the future's bright.
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Last updated January 30, 1998