Category: Hollis Songs

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Taphead

“When do you know you know you know you learn do you die in sin born again”

This is the opening lyric of Taphead.

I had no idea what the words were when I first heard them, I didn’t even recognise them as words. Not words in English anyway. Just sounds, sounds that seemed to come from a place impossibly far away, impossibly lonely, impossibly dark.

I believe the opening to Taphead is when the strange and shadowy heart of Laughing Stock first properly revealed itself to me. It’s when the penny dropped that this album was something much more than Spirit of Eden part 2. Those lyrics that are nothing, and maybe everything, not quite sung, just whispered really – murmured like a prayer, one review said.

Mark Hollis said he was impressed by the way Malcolm Mooney of Can could sing nonsense lyrics and it ‘didn’t sound stupid’. The beginning of Taphead is his Malcom Mooney moment. Voice as instrument.Yes, there are lyrics, not nonsense; no need to enunciate though. Just enunciate the feeling is all.

“In any case, my lyrics are written about a character who is not myself. He is the one who feels the feelings, who expresses them. And curiously, when I sing these lyrics, when I close my eyes, I feel exactly the same things that he does.” – Mark Hollis quoted in Les Inrockuptibles, September 1991

Taphead is also the name of my blog, hosted on a kiwi blog site called Blogtown, and if I should suddenly disappear from Social Media for the transgression of being a human who cares about other humans and dares to say so, that’s where you’ll find me.

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Living In Another World

“On the new album they include the wonderful Steve Winwood (organ) ex Nine Below Zero man Mark Feltham (Harmonica), acoustic bassist Danny Thompson (John Mayall etc) and ex-Random Hold and Peter Gabriel guitarist David Rhodes.

Did you learn much from Winwood?

“Not really” says Mark.”

That job interview Phill Brown had with Mark Hollis, where they met at the pub, talked about football, drove across town, talked about football, and then as Mark leaves to catch his train home he asks Phill what his favourite session at Olympic Studios was and Phill says ‘1am, 1967, Traffic’ which not only guaranteed Phill the job but set the vibe for the recording of Spirit of Eden – mostly feeling like 1 AM, the microphones mostly from 1967 or earlier. So, given the apparent esteem that Steve Winwood was held in, you might find the brief dismissal above curious. I totally get it. Sometimes people – your heroes – mean so much to you that can’t express it, you have so many thoughts that you would rather not even try to talk about it. Coz it’s personal, right? Mark Hollis didn’t really do personal; not in interviews with the English music press anyway.

My favourite live recording of Living In Another World is the one from the London 1986 CD released on Keith Apsden’s Pond Life label years after the gig, in 1999 to be precise, recorded superbly and then perfected with a marvellous mix by our man Phill Brown. It does sound absolutely stonking. And even tho Steve Winwood wasn’t present at the gig to recreate his studio sound, Mark Feltham was right there and he takes a star turn. That’s where the London version has it all over Montreux – the Montreux band are smoking hot but a guitar can’t do what that harmonica does. Mark Feltham was on stage at Salamanca too and although he is amazing, throughout that last ever gig the massive weariness that emanates from the singer can’t be overcome by the harper, no matter how brilliantly he plays.

So, Living In Another World, London 1986: it’s a banger. It’s the best. Have a listen yourself and see if you think there is any chance of changing my mind about that.

Dance if you must, and you must.

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Carolyn

“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.