Master of silence

Mark Hollis, taken around the time of his 1998 eponymously-titled album

A SYNTH pop footnote is how most people remember Talk Talk. Those chin strokers who know their music a little better will enter into a (usually brief) conversation about the band with an observation on how far they came in such a short time, and of their amazement that it could be done from such an marginal musical position.

Yet the signs were there from the beginning, even back in the days when it was hoped by EMI – which would go on to spectacularly mismanage Talk Talk – that the group would develop into Duran Duran clones. Of course, unintelligible, haunted lyrics were the order of the day at the outset of the 1980s. But Hollis sung them as if he meant them, rather than sung them to get girls.

In addition, he didn’t interview well, and spoke of an admiration for jazz pioneers like Miles Davis and John Coltrane, and 20th Century composers such as Bartok and Debussy, rather than staple New Romantic influences such as Roxy Music, David Bowie and the Velvet Underground, from whose long shadow none of Talk Talk’s contemporaries save them would ultimately escape.

But evidence of Hollis’ – and, by extension, the rest of the band’s – inflexibility and wilful willingness to burn bridges as they saw fit came with the video for Such a Shame in 1984. Ordered by an unimpressed EMI into a reshoot following Hollis’ inertia in front of the cameras first time around, the group decided to royally rip the (George) Michael out of the rampant lip synching, and Andrew Ridgeley-pioneered faux guitar strumming, of the era.

However, Talk Talk were a hit – in Europe. Brisk sales of It’s My Life, the album from which Such a Shame was taken, encouraged EMI to overlook their troublesome wards’ surly behaviour. The band followed it up with The Colour of Spring in 1986. This spawned an international hit in Life’s What You Make It. It remains to this day the song by which Talk Talk are most widely and fondly remembered.

Presumably Hollis had said something, and managed to fully take advantage of EMI’s delight , because he headed back into the studio with an unlimited budget, finally “given the keys to the kingdom and returning with art”, as Alan McGee, founder of Creation records, would later say. The band spent one-and-a-half years there, an enormous length of time back then, often recording in total darkness, improvising songs out of long, long jamming sessions, and banning their manager and record company execs from stepping foot inside the studio.

The result was Spirit of Eden, these days regarded as a modern classic, and often cited as an enormous influence – if not the seminal influence – on post rock and bands such as Radiohead and The Verve. Afforded the luxury of perspective, it is possible to see to some degree how Talk Talk evolved from The Colour of Spring into Spirit of Eden, rather than the year zero moment critics have suggested. But in all of the album’s six songs, not a single note is wasted, and it remains nothing short of remarkable, even 22 years after its release.

EMI did not agree. Once recording was complete, a tape of Spirit of Eden was sent to the record company. Executives were horrified by what they heard, guessing – almost correctly, as it turned out – that the band had committed commercial seppuku. They asked Talk Talk, along with long-term producer Tim Friese-Greene, to re-record or replace some of its material. Hollis and the rest of the band, clearly not concerned about its sales viability, said no.

Eventually, the record company backed down, but the experience left Talk Talk unsettled. When EMI told them shortly afterwards that it wanted to exercise its option to extend the recording contract, the band refused, fearful that the unlimited budget had swiftly become a thing of the past. The matter ended up in court. Talk Talk argued that EMI hadn’t given them enough notice about the contract extension and eventually won the case on appeal.

They left and went on to sign for Polydor, which would revive its Verve label for Talk Talk. But the dispute with EMI didn’t end there. The record company re-released It’s My Life, which became a massive worldwide hit and, irony of ironies, earned the group a Brit award. Natural History, a greatest hits retrospective on which it was included, made more money for EMI. But when it remixed the album, Talk Talk sued, and won. EMI had to pull and destroy the copies it retained. It retaliated by attempting to counter-sue the band for failing to produce commercially viable music. Although it lost, it set a dangerous precedent which record companies can still use to their advantage.

Laughing Stock's cover was produced by James Marsh, responsible for nearly all of Talk Talk's album artwork

The two-album deal with Polydor would yield just one: Laughing Stock. Although just prior to its recording, bass player Paul Webb had followed Simon Brenner and Lee Harris out of the band, leaving just Hollis and Friese-Greene, it proved to be Talk Talk’s finest and most accomplished recording. There was less of the leap from Spirit of Eden as from The Colour of Spring, more consolidation than revolution, a more seamless blending of genres. Again widely hailed, again it sold slowly. As if such things matter to Hollis anymore.

In 1992, a year after Laughing Stock, Talk Talk officially disbanded. They had been working on a sixth, provisionally called Mountains of the Moon, and it would be another six years before we heard anything from Hollis. There has been speculation that some of material recorded for that last Talk Talk album ended up on Mark Hollis, but then that is slightly confused by the issuing of Missing Pieces, thought to be a series of out takes from Laughing Stock, which came three years after Hollis’ solo album, in 2001. It doesn’t help that by this point Hollis had taken to bothering hardly to change the names of his songs (The first song on Mark Hollis is called The Colour of Spring), although he of course may have simply seen similarly-titled pieces as continuations.

Nevertheless, his solo album is Hollis’ greatest work. Even harder to access, yet more minimal and utterly uncompromising, it moved Julian Cope – another Eighties maverick – to remark: “This record was the end of a trip began in the mid 1980s, a record that floors me each time I listen. Maybe these are all just one song. Maybe Mark Hollis said everything with Mark Hollis?” That appears to be the popular theory. McGee says: “It’s a shame that there was no real fanfare for his retirement, but that’s probably the way he liked it. With a legacy that includes Spirit of Eden, perhaps there was nothing more he had to prove.”

Hollis did surface a couple of times, last of all on Anja Garbarek’s 2001 album Smiling and Waving. But since then, nothing. The trouble is, listening to his music, which is shot through with melancholy and loss, it is difficult to avoid mourning Hollis’ departure, and a sadness that this quiet talent isn’t making music for us anymore.

If Hollis’ music grew better and better, he managed to achieve it by becoming more accomplished at controlling the quiet within it, allowing the listener to pour their own thoughts and emotions into the space between the notes. Perhaps this was his abiding preoccupation. And perhaps, in the end, Hollis decided that the best way to master the silence was to say nothing at all.