Last updated February 27, 1998
From UNCUT Magazine, February, 1998
Enigmatic return of Talk Talk singer
For six years, former Talk Talk frontman Mark Hollis has maintained a public silence. 1991's Laughing Stock turned out to be the last ever Talk Talk album. Rhythm section Paul Webb and Lee Harris went their seperate musical ways, through the experimental thickets of Orang - and now Hollis emerges with his own, rather more minimal post-Talk Talk offering.
'Mark Hollis' is the fruit of years of Hollis' experimenting with sounds, learning notation and trying out new musicians. The result is an album as far removed from the blaring imperatives of pop as it's possible to be. Recorded purely acoustically, it's a thing of quiet, transparent beauty, floating free of genre and time period. On initial hearing it seems unnervingly sparse and barely there - woodwind, guitars, harmonica, and Hollis' own quivering vocals ebb and flow, surface dramatically then subside. Stockhausen once devised a piece wherein he instructed his musicians not to play until they had "stopped thinking". Musical noises seemed to arise naturally like steam off still water. Hollis' methods aren't the same but the effects are similar. This is music that's unforced yet essential, a music that reveals itself slowly but surely on repeated playings as the required climate change takes place in your head.
"The Colour Of Spring", set around a skeletal piano riff, is as limpid as Erik Satie. But this is not ornamental background music. Hollis' vocals swell with an urgency that demands undivided attention, though his syllables slither and slide on the emotional surfaces of the songs. The feeling is disquietingly intimate, the actual words indistinct. "The Watershed" and "The Gift" are faintly jazzy, but this is jazz as it might have been performed by 19th-century folk musicians. "A Life (1895-1915)" sounds like a piece of early 20th-century chamber music played by woodsprites. "A New Jerusalem" ends the album with perfect, tremulous poise, before drifting back into the silence where it came. You've never heard music like this before, you probably never will again.
When we finished Laughing Stock, there was no way I could get my head around doing another album because what we'd just done was so complete an expression of what I wanted to do, that the idea of writing something different just seemed impossible at the time.
WHAT WAS YOUR THINKING IN CREATING THE SOUND FOR "MARK HOLLIS" ?
I have this love of jazz and contemporary classic but the area I'd never really looked at before was folk music, which I know very little about but wanted to capture the spirit of. So I was thinking of what instruments might be common to small units of folk, chamber music, and jazz - so that you can weave in and out of the different genres.
WHAT NEXT ? OR HAVE YOU REACHED ANOTHER FULL STOP ?
Some solo piano work, maybe. The other thing I want to do is some production work with Phil Brown. When you look at partnerships like Jimmy Miller and Glyn Johns, that's what a production partnership should be about - one person who has an understanding of sound and the other who is there for direction, spirit, arrangement and approach. This idea of production's become totally fucked up through the 80s, this idea of a big, brash, 'produced' sound.
Interview and review by David Stubbs