Mark
Hollis – singer, musician, composer
Born
January 4 1955; died February 25 2019
Mark
Hollis, who has died aged 64 following a short illness, was one of the most
wilfully singular musical artists of the late twentieth century. As the
vocalist, writer and driving force behind the band Talk Talk, which he formed
with drummer Lee Harris, bassist Paul Webb and keyboardist Simon Brenner, Hollis
moved from euphoric 1980s synth-pop to a form of exquisitely nuanced and
timeless sounding contemporary classicism. After initial chart action, the band’s
record label, EMI, found Hollis’ latter tendencies difficult to slot into a
marketplace overloaded with saccharine gloss.
Hollis’
stubborn unwillingness to compromise his vision to an industry only interested
in shifting units saw him eventually retreat into a private silence where only
his family mattered. The small but perfectly formed body of work he left behind,
however, was enough to leave its mark. Over five Talk Talk albums and a final,
self-titled solo set, Hollis helped redefine what was possible with pop.
Moderate
commercial success came with the band’s first two albums, The Party’s Over
(1982) and It’s My Life (1984). The hi-tech studio sheen of the latter’s title
track may have made for something deceptively anthemic. Like the album that
sired it, however, the song was laced throughout with a sophistication and a
melancholy that gave Talk Talk a depth beyond many of their apparent peers.
With
producer Tim Friese-Green stepping in for the now departed Brenner, Hollis and Talk
Talk moved into more organic waters with The Colour of Spring (1986). The
latter record’s success afforded the band the resources to craft its follow-up,
Spirit of Eden (1988), into an epic six song suite of slow-burning pastoral
hymns, with Hollis’ whispered, barely there but utterly impassioned vocals
framed by elaborately layered acoustic arrangements. Critical reaction to such
an epic musical misfit helped give rise to that now much overused term,
post-rock. The album also led to lengthy legal wrangles with EMI, with Talk
Talk eventually leaving the label.
With
Webb also now departed, Talk Talk went on to release their final album, the
even more minimalist Laughing Stock (1991). It would be another seven years before
Hollis would break his silence with his intricately textured self-titled solo
album. As his final substantial musical gift to the world, Hollis was saying
the quietest of goodbyes.
Mark
David Hollis was born in Tottenham, London, the second of three brothers. He attended
grammar school in Muswell Hill, and at various points claims to have left
before taking his A-levels, and to have dropped out of a course in child
psychology at the University of Sussex. Hollis was already writing songs while
working in factories prior to forming his first band, The Reaction, in 1977. A single,
I Can’t Resist, was released on Island Records, while a demo track, Talk Talk
Talk Talk, later appeared alongside The Members, Slaughter and the Dogs and
John Cooper Clarke on the Beggars Banquet label’s punk compilation, Streets.
The Island
connection came through Hollis’ elder brother, Ed, who was managing Eddie and
The Hot Rods, and had connections with London’s thriving pub rock scene. Hollis
was briefly given his own Speedball imprint by Island, though nothing came of
it. Ed Hollis had a huge record collection, and its eclectic range of free jazz
and other out-there music undoubtedly rubbed off on his kid brother. It was Ed
too who introduced Hollis to his future bandmates in Talk Talk, who formed in
1981.
The band’s
first skirmish with the charts came with their second single, a reworked and
truncated version of the Reaction song that gave them their name. More
mainstream success followed, though it was when Hollis began writing with Friese-Green
that his musical voice became increasingly expansive.
With
The Colour of Spring having already set the tone, Spirit of Eden was no ambient noodle
designed for soundtracks and chill-out rooms to come. Here was a record full of
space, an intense and insular affair which made demands of the listener even as
it disrupted its own inherent beauty. Alongside Talk Talk’s core, Spirit of Eden featured a large
ensemble of players, including iconic double bass player Danny Thompson and veteran
jazz trumpeter Henry Lowther, with violinist Nigel Kennedy also making an
appearance.
Despite their grandiose
intent, the songs on Spirit of Eden were in no way pompous. They were developed
organically through extended studio improvisations and recorded in the dark
with the band surrounded by candles and psychedelic oil lamps. The various
light and shade musical textures that saw the record move between meditative hush
and fleeting cacophonies gave Hollis’ songs an emotional ballast that grounded
them, even as they seemed to push towards something celestial and terminally
out of reach.
Hollis’ vocals on Spirit
of Eden are laced with a confessional vulnerability, which, while at times
barely a whisper or a mumble, becomes something indelibly transcendent. Nowhere
is this more evident than on I Believe in You, a six-minute paean to Ed, who by
the time it was released had fallen prey to the fatal effects of long-term
heroin addiction.
A remixed
and edited version of I Believe in You was released as a single, complete with
a video featuring a largely static but uncomfortable looking Hollis. Filming the
clip was a move he later came to regret. Despite this, the song in both forms
is as much of a masterpiece as the album that spawned it, and sounds holy
enough to resemble a very personal prayer.
Hollis’
appearances on record beyond his solo album in 1998 were rare. He played piano
and co-wrote a track on Unkle’s Psyence Fiction album, and produced, arranged
and played on two tracks on Anja Garbarek’s Smiling and Waving record. The last
piece of original music by Hollis to appear in public was a clip barely a
minute long that appeared in 2012 as part of American TV drama, Boss, a vehicle
for Kelsey Grammer.
In
Hollis’ extended absence, the rest of the world seemed to catch up with his
sense of widescreen ambition. Spirit of Eden in particular became a huge
influence on a new generation of auteurs, with the baton picked up by the likes of Bark
Psychosis, Graham Sutton’s indie noise band turned solo exploration of similarly
inclined sonic sculpture. The 2004 Bark Psychosis album, ///Codename:
Dustsucker, features extensive input from Talk Talk drummer Lee Harris, who
also played on Webb’s collaboration as Rustin Man with Portishead vocalist Beth
Gibbons, Out of Season.
Hollis, however, stayed
determinedly out of view. Like
contemporaries such as Kate Bush, with whom he might be said to have shared
much in terms of aesthetic sensibility, Hollis was too often dismissed by a
myth-making music press as a reclusive eccentric. In actual fact, while devotion
to his art alone had pointed up a purity of intent, it was the profound
importance of a family life lived in private that mattered most to him. A hint
of this could be found in April 5th, a track on The Colour of Spring
that marked the birthdate of his wife, Felicity.
In
today’s arguably more eclectic times, and with the means of production easier
to access, if Hollis had continued
to release music,
he might have been able to operate on his own terms more easily than when
forced to deal with big corporations.
While already a cult figure, he could also have become a respected elder
statesperson of avant-pop a la David Sylvian or Scott Walker, both of whom made
similar journeys from the mainstream to music’s more interesting outer edges. As
it is, Hollis’ withdrawal from music has left behind a vital body of work that
must now be regarded as complete, and which continues to take its listeners to
the higher place its creator strived so hard to reach.
Hollis is survived by
his wife, Felicity, and their two sons.
The Herald, February 28th 2019
Ends
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