“FIRST RECORD BOUGHT: ‘Everlasting Love’ The Love Affair
FIRST DISAPPOINTMENT: Buying the sheet music to ‘Everlasting Love’ and wondering where the horn arrangement was!”
By his own admission, Mark Hollis’s obsession with the sound of horns started early. The Love Affair’s Everlasting Love was released in 1967. He was 12.
He had to wait until he was, oh, I don’t know, maybe 24 or so before he finally got to record his own tune with a horn section – the cheerful but somehow also desperate Carolyn. Not to be confused with the 1983 electro-rave-up demo Caroline and the completely-different-again Does Caroline Know.
The horns in Carolyn wear their Arthur Lee influence proudly. I’m very fond of this song for all sorts of reasons but mostly I love that it sounds like Love.
Mark Hollis put two Love tracks on that perfect 1980 mixtape of his – the first, Seven and Seven Is, was covered live by the ReAction and the sound of the second, Alone Again Or, is all over the post-ReAction (and pre-Talk Talk, if it needs to be said) Carolyn.
It might have been the first Hollis horn section but it wasn’t the last. The Mark Hollis solo album makes the most obvious use of horns and woodwinds but there seemed to be plenty of room on Talk Talk albums for those instruments that depend on a rush of air to create music. Henry Lowther’s trumpet, Mark Feltham’s harmonica, massed recorders, busted variophons, melodicas, and Mark Hollis’s own voice – so much of the uniqueness of Talk Talk is the sound of talented people breathing.
Mark Hollis’s last publicly discussed musical obsession was the volume of clarinets – he thought they were too loud and, he said, he wanted to design a reed that would make them quieter. Did he succeed? Dunno. But he sure spent a lot of his life thinking about the sound of the most fundamental and essential function of life on earth.