Well, I have my doubts starting a thread on a topic of probably very limited appeal, but, what the hell. It is the forte of this site. I realize, looking back over this, that it’s pretty long-winded and full of holes, but if I tried to fill them it would be even longer.
So, anyway. I don’t want to get too deep into a bio and lineup thing, but I guess I should gloss over some of this stuff. Talk Talk started out inauspiciously enough, producing kind of broodingly fluffy but somewhat catchy synthpop songs. Mark Hollis was really the main creative force of the band, as well as the singer. His brother Ed, who helped him get started on the first album, recruited bassist Paul Webb and drummer Lee Harris to create the band. Way, way back in 1982 they came out with their first single, the self-titled “Talk Talk”. With a heavy bass line, even heavier synthesizers, and Mark Hollis’ signature plaintive voice, the song pretty much sums up their beginnings. For a kinda rinky-dink synth song, this at least has had some staying power on the radio. Their first album “The Party’s Over”, more or less follows the same formula as the single “Talk Talk”. Personally, I’m not as interested in their earliest work, though at the time, yeah, I listened to it. They weren’t my favorite band, but I had their albums back in the day. Musically they transmogrified over the years into something utterly different. Say what you want about the music, but Mark Hollis really cares about making music for the sake of the music. Not to discount the other band members, it seems they appreciated the direction things went. I kind of hate it when people focus on the front member and ignore the rest of a band; but from what I can tell, Hollis was the heart of the music.
I don’t see myself as a songwriter, I just see myself as someone who’s looking to make an album as an experience, rather than a sequence of tracks… I do think that from one album to the next, there are definite things that you decide that you want to do that you didn’t do before…
With time and the addition of Tim Friese-Greene as a producer and collaborator, the sound developed a bit more complexity. The second album, “It’s My Life”, while still a bit dated and keyboard-heavy, had a much fuller and more deliberate sound.
What followed this was their most commercially successful (and up to that point most musically successful) third album “The Colour of Spring”, which showed a further maturation in depth and songwriting, eschewing most of the synthesizer-heaviness of the earlier work and incorporating collaboration with a wide variety of other musicians, including Steve Winwood (really, it worked), Danny Thompson, and Robbie McIntosh, among others. Some very solid songs on this album.
The term “commercial suicide” was tediously (if honestly) repeated to describe the last two albums of Talk Talk. Following the success of The Colour of Spring, the band had relative freedom to take time and record what they wanted, and that’s just what they did. This, to me, is when things really get interesting. Two and a half years of quiet and they come out with “Spirit of Eden”. It’s hard to categorize this music. The first time I heard it, I was honestly a little confused. After a two-minute or so intro of sketchy horn and string sounds, the first track builds in as a slow, pensive song, breaking down, nearly stopping, and coming back, and bleeding into the next track (the first three songs really blend together into one twenty-three minute track). Some of it sounded good, right away, but some parts were to my ears cacophonous. The first listen, at least.
I guess I should describe Mark Hollis’ singing. Especially on the last two albums and his solo album he doesn’t enunciate very clearly, and the lyrics are mostly like nonsense poetry, the words may be intended to evoke some emotion, but more obliquely than directly. He says:
The lyric is always last, the inflection and the phonetics must come first. The importance of the lyric is that in order to sing the thing properly you've got to mentally get yourself into what the subject is about. The lyric is extremely important in a performance point of view, but it's of secondary importance to the whole…I just sing how it feels right to sing.
Obviously, it feels right to him to sound pretty soulful, pretty often. Sometimes, nearly whiney. I think that’s probably one of the complaints I’ve heard the most, that the words are unintelligible, and he can sound so emotional as to make some people a little squirmy. But I think for the most part his voice is another instrument that works very effectively with the music, which is very emotional. It is, to me, like great abstract visual art, in that it is hard to intellectualize or subjectively describe the music (though yes, I’m trying a bit here), it is evocative in a way that is mostly beyond language. Not to sound too heady or anything. I mean, flavor is nearly impossible to describe with language, also. As Mark Hollis said The last thing I would ever want to do is intellectualize music because that's never been what it's about for me. I suppose without getting into prancy abstractions, I’d say I think this music is beautiful, with a great depth of emotion and sonic fullness.
Another quote I like, along this vein (though speaking specifically of his later solo album):
If you asked me: "What picture would you look at, when you listen to this album?", I would say something like a picture with only two colours, for instance purple on black, black on red. I would say something where you have something extremely simplistic to look at with no narrative content at all, that has enough texture within it. It’s your imagination that it makes work, and from one moment looking at it to another moment, different things will appear in it. If you just glanced at it, it would just look like nothing was there. It’s like in a relationship. The more you focus on the music, the more you will hear from the music. The more that you give in terms of listening to what’s happening on the album, the more things will reveal themselves within the album. Which, I dunno, might sound wanky. I’d only disagree with his characterization of the music as that minimalist. But what the hell, he made it.
After SOE came the similarly created but probably even more free-form “Laughing Stock”. While I’m using the term “free-form”, this is not to say the music lacks structure, I’m speaking more of the compositional process. Starting (at least a little) as far back as “Colour of Spring” Hollis and Friese-Greene, it seems, generally built the loose architecture of the song that was filled with mostly improvisational performances by like-minded musicians. Hollis said it is arranged upfront, so that everything is thought about precise. But when it comes to the way it’s performed, the whole attitude towards that is very loose and free. The like-minded part was very important to the creation of the music, in having a loose, comfortable atmosphere for the performers to feel free to create. The initial musical expressions of these collaborators were then expanded on, sometimes taking hours of elaboration to gain a small addition to it. One song, “After the Flood,” contains a minute-long playing of one squalling, fluctuating note on two saxophones. The first time I heard it I couldn’t believe how long this harsh sound went on. I thought, “Christ, let it stop, I’m getting uncomfortable.” Now, I wallow in the sound, I get goosebumps. It somehow works perfectly.
Many years after the release of “Laughing Stock”, Mark Hollis released his self-titled solo album. This album is stark, totally acoustic, and recorded with the most intimate sense, as though you are in the room as the music is performed. You hear the scratch of fingers on strings, someone setting down a tambourine, the breathing. The music at times has the feel of something on the verge of falling apart but not quite doing it, other times it is strongly driven; but overall the album, much like Talk Talk’s previous two, is a singular journey.
It’s been eight years since Mark Hollis released his solo album, he has shown up a few places but I can’t find out much about what he might be planning.
You can sample at least one later Talk Talk song here. |
