“If you asked me about which picture I’d look at while listening to the record, I’d say something along the lines of an image with only two colors, such as purple on black, black on red. It would be something extremely simple to look at, with no narrative content, and yet possess plenty of configurations.[…] At first glance, the immediate picture seems little more than two colors. But the more people work on it, or listen to the music, the more you get back.” Mark Hollis quoted in Gaffa, February 1998
“Black Angel’s Death Song” was my first introduction to the sound of the Velvet Underground.
“If Epiphany’s terror
reduced you
to shame
have your head
bobbed and weaved,
choose a side to be on.”
I was instantly hooked.
I read somewhere (where? I don’t remember) that Mark Hollis’s introduction to the Velvet Underground was The Gift. Apparently he loved it.
If you haven’t heard it, on first listen you may become enamoured by John Cale’s darkly funny storytelling, and not really notice the music coming from the other speaker, but listen again and you’ll enjoy a hypnotising unchanging beat overlaid with the discordant but not entirely tuneless squeaking and squawking of Lou Reed’s guitar.
The Gift, the track produced for the Mark Hollis album, also boasts a steady hypnotic beat. Acoustic guitars are plucked discordantly but not entirely tunelessly amid the squeaks and squawks of Mark Feltham’s harmonica.
The Velvet Underground play games with our ears, running vocals and music through separate channels. Mark Hollis plays games with our ears, recording the air in the room, mixing separate performances into something that sounds like four musicians gathered together sketching a tune into a pair of perfectly placed microphones.
“Gone
And now the shade
Sun eclipsed to shame”
Lyrically, Mark Hollis’s The Gift vibes with the darkness of VU’s Black Angel’s Death Song more than the kookiness of The Gift. It is a stretch, I know, to even say these two songs have anything in common beside the title, to insinuate that the latter was in any way inspired by the former. But they both shift your thinking like a minimalist black and purple painting and the more you work on it, the more you listen, the more you get back.
The Gift – Mark Hollis https://youtu.be/B7H9m0irTh0?si=ZwZdiZaicmSNLglq
The Gift – The Velvet Underground https://youtu.be/_Gwth0jfdfc?si=okGHszk_yXTrZr8X