On the death of Mark Hollis: The man who needed no role models
by Sebastian Zabel 02/26/2019
He sang in a gesture of desperation, which one could find romantic. The record company also believed Talk Talk could be New Romantics. In the end he pushed his music into the open, genres dissolved in a sound of great freedom. An obituary for Mark Hollis.
A thin man with a long parting in the middle, straggly hair falling over his face, ears sticking out to the left and right, eyes behind dark wire-rimmed glasses. Mark Hollis wasn’t a pop star, he was the opposite of a pop star. A shy artist who refused the constraints and demands of the music industry, who gave up everything at the peak of his success, or rather: did what he and his band were headed for with unprecedented consistency, in the end alone with his producer and a piece of music of disappearance. Now Mark Hollis is dead.
His band was called Talk Talk, after a song the London musician wrote early on. The song “Talk Talk” had already set the tone that would make Hollis’ band unique: a perfunctory synth-pop track with lava flowing beneath its shell. Mark Hollis sang with an air of desperation, which could be considered romantic, and his record company thought the young band, which also included Hollis on bassist Paul Webb, drummer Lee Harris and keyboardist Simon Brenner, would do well to sway into the early ’80s To be able to fit in with the new romance wave. The Party’s Over was the name of their first album, a statement that was lost in the roar of its contemporaries Duran Duran and Depeche Mode.
Hollis could write hits. “It’s My Life”, “Such A Shame”, “Dum Dum Girl” – British pop music of the mid-80s had few better. And nobody could combine euphoria and depression more convincingly. “Funny, how I find myself in love with you?/ If I could buy my reasoning, I’d pay to lose,” Hollis sang emphatically, “It’s my life/ Don’t you forget/It never ends.”
That wasn’t true.
But of course, when 1986’s third album, The Color Of Spring, was released, there was no telling how Hollis would take his fellow musicians to the fringes of popular pop schemes and beyond. “Life’s What You Make It” is yet another unlikely and irresistible scream propelled by a powerful piano riff. A desperate celebration of life, baby.
After that, Mark Hollis and Talk Talk destroyed her career. Sprit Of Eden was released in 1988. They isolated themselves to the recordings in a church, ignored several of their label’s deadlines and far exceeded the budget. The album consisted of six pieces and knew no role models. At least not in the pop context it should have fit into. Hollis and producer Tim Friese-Greene, who had increasingly become Hollis’ closest musical partner, pushed their music into the open, genres dissolved in a sound of great freedom.
There were no more singles and nothing commercially to get. The label turned off the juice. And Hollis recorded a final talk-talk album with Friese-Greene called Laughing Stock, which is breathtaking in its soaring, meandering sonority. It was released on the jazz label Verve. A ghost piano gropes its way through “Taphead”, a trumpet finds a melody, Hollis whimpers from afar. The six pieces gyrate and flow into one another, like blues, jazz, trace elements of classical pop music and romantic classical music flow into one another. Mark Hollis’s desperation seemed to have given way to concentrated absorption.
Once again, twenty years ago, Mark Hollis gave a sign of life. He released a self-titled solo album, his first and only, a work of dissolution, music that seemed to stand in mid-air like a dragonfly, a sound against which Laughing Stock seemed heavy and voluminous. It was to be Hollis’ final departure from music.
What has Mark Hollis been up to for the past twenty years? One does not know. He remains hidden from the public. The few confidants he kept in touch with reported that he leads a modest life, made possible by the accomplishments of his hits, that he has an interest in football and shows no intention whatsoever of returning to music. A New Wave Syd Barrett.
He died on Monday February 18th.