“And it feels like I’ve been crying in the rain.
And it looks like I’ve been crying in the rain.”
There is a famous Everly Brothers song called Crying in the Rain. The subject cries in the rain so that no one will see his tears. Boys don’t cry, right?
The Mark Hollis song of the same name, recorded in that apparently magic and creative time between the end of The ReAction and the start of Talk Talk, takes that premise and pulls it into a darker place. What does crying in the rain feel like? What does crying in the rain look like? Nothing. It doesn’t look like anything at all – just rain. Where the Everly Brothers are actually crying in the rain, in the Hollis song it is metaphorical. “It looks LIKE I’ve been crying in the rain” – I’m heartbroken and no one can see it; I might as well be crying in the rain, my pain is invisible to the world.
When this demo was rediscovered and shared with Talk Talk fans on the interwebs, Mark Hollis claimed copyright and had it taken down. But too late, it was in the world. You might speculate as to why he didn’t ever officially release it. Maybe he thought it was shit.
It’s not shit.
Just check out the comments sections on the many You Tube uploads. Hollis fans discover it and their minds are blown. What is this? When was it made? Why is it so beautiful? Why can’t I stop listening to it?
It goes like this: one minute you are marvelling that Mark Hollis wrote the saddest song ever written – I Believe in You – but then you find out that he wrote a tune that is somehow even more devastating. Ten years earlier. And he never recorded it beyond a demo, never released it, didn’t seem to want anyone to even hear it.
It’s the ultimate lost classic. I hear entire genres of downbeat slowcore miserable-ism kicking off with this tune. It’s slow – maybe even slower than Nick Cave’s version of By The Time I Get To Phoenix – with a fairy-dusting of keyboards and faraway harmonies backing Hollis’s lonesome voice, singing in a slightly higher key than usual but still somehow so, so, low. There are hints of Pink Floyd in the guitar break, so it’s no surprise when the algorithm offers Pink Floyd next.
But instead I hit ‘Replay’.