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Stuart Stawman Part Three

 

OK, so I’ll paste the SOE instalment below. I would have sent it sooner but I was trying to write something about the ‘edgy’ humour that infused the sessions and I failed, it’s too tricky and loaded to try and describe so I’ll leave it out. I can do a very short follow up on Laughing Stock if you like, but I’d actually left Wessex when that was recorded so I don’t imagine I’ll get much past a paragraph, maybe two; ‘the view from the outside’. Please correct any typos if you spot any. Thanks!

Spirit of Eden

The first tell-tale sign that planet Talk Talk was now installed in Studio 1 was the sight of the two ‘4-wheel drives’ parked next to each other outside the reception of Wessex Studios, one being Tim’s, the other Mark’s. Joyce the studio manager had previously told me of Tim’s adventures driving a complete circuit of Africa in his Toyota Land Cruiser. Unfortunately, I can’t remember with confidence which species of animal it was that had surrounded his vehicle one night while he slept on the roof. But I do remember Tim telling me about how Toyota had provided him with a brand-new engine at the halfway mark of his trip.

I didn’t work consistently on Spirit of Eden as I was chief engineer at Wessex and was generally working on other projects but every now and then I was called on to stand in for a few days. There wasn’t a great deal for me to do, the core team that comprised the band, Tim Friese-Green and Phill Brown was a well-oiled machine so, as mentioned previously, I was left to enjoy a fly-on-the-wall view of the album unfolding over time. It soon became very clear that this was going to be a VERY different album to Colours of Spring

The control room and recording room of Studio 1 did not have any windows so the entire recording process took place divorced from sunlight. Apart from Phill making trips to the maintenance room upstairs none of my memories of the others are in daylight! Sometimes all the lights were on full and the place was as indeed as bright as day, while at other times the place was thrown into darkness save for a few coloured spotlights and the infamous oil wheel. But these shifting atmospheres had no relationship to the actual time of day outside. As has been well-documented, they spent the best part of a year living in this ‘altered reality’.

The studio’s Bösendorfer grand piano and Hammond Organ with Leslie cabinet had been joined by two harmoniums for the sessions. I became fascinated by the fluid way in which Mark and Tim would take it in turns at the keyboards trying to work out what a particular part should be. There was no possessiveness at all over who would eventually record the part, everything was done in the service of the song. In fact, I think there were probably some parts that combined both of their playing. It was the same with guitar parts, either one might try out ideas and record a part.

Alla asked me for any memories of the recording process. Phill Brown, who is the star witness for all things Talk Talk, captures the nuts and bolts of their process brilliantly in his book ‘Are We Still Rolling?’ For example, the way they would record several takes of a guest musician and cherry-pick the choice sound bytes, which might be one note or the sound of someone tripping over a guitar lead, and erase the rest. Sometimes they erased it all.

If it hasn’t already been covered elsewhere I think the bit that I can bring to the conversation is my recall of what I think we can refer to as their ‘Give It Back’ principle.

If something they were recording started to remind them of another artist, Tim would adopt a shrill, high-pitched voice (think Monty Python doing the Piston Engine sketch) and yell out that they should ‘give it back’ to whoever the artist was.

“Give it back to Miles Davis!!”

“Give it back to Aretha Franklin!!”

“Give it back to The Andrews Sisters!!”

The list was long.

Sometimes the references were made tongue-in-cheek, and at other times they were entirely literal. Mark and Tim shared a dogged insistence on not being reminded of other people’s work. It’s a fine line to walk, if the principle is applied to its extreme there is a danger of ending up with silence. But, applied as a general attitude, it beautifully encapsulates their insistence on breaking new ground and defining their own sound. Creating something genuinely ‘new’.

In Phill’s book he recalls the time they first recorded a choir on the track ‘I Believe In You’. I wasn’t working with them that day, but I happened to be upstairs near the large red wooden door that lead to the recording room of Studio 1. I could hear the choir and was transfixed. I very carefully opened the door a few millimetres so that I could hear them better. Because I was upstairs I couldn’t hear the backing track that was being played in the control room and through the headphones of the choir. I was just hearing an ‘a Cappella performance of a choir singing ‘How long, spirit of illusion?’ in an old church hall. The hair was standing up on my arms. It was beautiful.

I was down to work with Talk Talk the next day and Phill and I were in the control room discussing how wonderful the choir had been when Mark and Tim arrived and directed Phill to erase it! Phill remembers Mark saying “It sounds too good – like The Cliff Adams Singers.”

My memory from that day is of Tim shrieking “Give it back to the King Singers!!”

This incident really consolidated something for me around ‘strength of conviction’. It doesn’t matter how long it takes to record a particular part, or even a whole section of a song. In many respects, it’s also best (though not always possible!) if it doesn’t matter how much it cost It doesn’t even matter how great it is! If it doesn’t fit the overall project, you have to get rid of it. I often think of that time as I hit delete . .

And the second choir they recorded for that track was even better.

It would have been around that time that Kate Bush released her first single since her epic album ‘Hounds of Love’. I can remember that we’d somehow got hold of a pre-release copy and played it for the first time through the main monitors in the control room. I can still remember the bated breath of a room full of respect for Kate Bush as the church bells that open the track ’Sensual World’ started playing.

Speaking of female musical icons, there are two in my world; Kate and Joni. So I was extremely pleased to be parked in fly-on-the-wall mode on the couch toward the back of the control room the day they had Larry Klein (Joni Mitchell’s husband) come in to do bass overdubs. The conversation was polite, I remember him likening his current home in California to a French vineyard, and then they got down to the business of working out some bass parts. The session was wrapped up and he left. I think his parts were deleted before he’d been gone an hour. He was clearly an excellent musician, but his parts didn’t fit what they were looking for.

They gave him back to Joni Mitchell.

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Stuart Stawman‘s Talk Talk memories Part 1

 

“When Talk Talk worked at Wessex they brought their own engineer, the mighty Phill Brown who I had already known for some time (check out his autobiography ‘Are We Still Rolling?’). So all they really required from the studio was someone to ‘babysit’ their sessions in case they needed anything technical setting up from time to time. That means, in effect, when I worked on the Spirit of Eden sessions my job was literally to be a fly-on-the-wall, just sitting at the back of the room watching.

There was one other job. Occasionally they needed me to be the 4th player so that the band could play doubles table tennis in the studio when Phil and Tim Friese-Greene were busy in the control room.

I remember the first day I worked with them on Spirit (I had done a few days at the very end of COS) they were doing bass overdubs. Mark Hollis and Lee Harris set off some kind of smoke bomb/machine device behind Paul Webb ‘for a laugh’ while he was recording. That set the tone for the edgy humour I would watch unfold over the coming year.

My fondest memory is of seeing percussionist Martin Ditcham asked if he had anything ‘more unusual’ than his usual instruments. He proceeded to surround himself on the floor with all sorts of strange objects, many of them were kid’s toys. Mark and Tim got very excited when he started ‘playing’ a large mortar and pestle on the intro of ‘The Rainbow’. He scrapes it very slowly across the first couple of minutes and then you hear him speed up an about 1:52. I didn’t get it at first but I can’t imagine that track without it now, it sounds like the dawn of time.

I also remember the many days that Mark spent playing that guitar part that comes in straight after. He seemed to want a perfect blend of playing it ‘roughly’ and ‘perfectly’. At the time I was working with another band in Studio 2. The guitarist of that band could hear Mark’s playing, we all could, and worked the part out himself. He then rang Studio 1 offering to play it for them! They didn’t accept his offer and, a couple of days later, they had what they wanted on tape.”

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Stuart Stawman’s Talk Talk memories Part 2

“The first time I worked with Talk Talk and Tim Friese-Greene was when I was asked to fill in as tape-op on the last day of recording for Colour of Spring, which must have been late 1985. I can’t remember who the engineer was, or even if there was one that day, I have a feeling someone was ill or unavailable and Tim was doing it himself. And, to be honest, all I knew about the band at that stage was their single Talk Talk from a few years earlier.
They were recording the piano for ‘Life’s What You Make It’ and I immediately fell in love with the track. However, Mark and Tim were not finding a happy place with the groove of the piano against the drums. Mark was playing on the studio’s Bösendorfer Grand and they were both lost in thought. I don’t think they’d even registered my arrival on the session. I decided to pipe up and suggested that they use the sampling function of the AMS DMX Delay unit to lock the piano in with the bass drum. Tim stared at me (and seemingly straight through me!) for what seemed like minutes and then suddenly snapped out of it, declaring “Let’s try that!” And that’s how the piano groove was finalised.
Once that was done, Mark said he’d go and play the piano solo (2:19 – 2:36) and wandered off into the studio. He played it once, said something like “Yeah, that’ll do,” and came back into the control room.
It is a beautifully simple, even child-like solo but, with the exception of a saxophone solo I’d once recorded with Mel Collins, it was the only time I saw anyone record anything, let alone a solo, in a single take.
And this was not something I would ever see Talk Talk do again!
Towards the end of that day Mark and Tim needed to check through all the other songs on the album to make sure they had everything recorded.
So imagine this; my job was to keep changing the 24-track tape reels over for the next song and then watch Tim bring up the faders on the desk. We were listening to the whole of ‘Colour of Spring’ for the first time.
The ‘tape op’ would normally sit diligently next to the remote control of the tape machine but after I changed each reel I would go and stand on the speaker side of the desk in between the speakers so I could get the full stereo effect as I watched Tim creating a mix of the next song.
The room was full of smiles. I particularly remember being ‘introduced’ to Mark’s sparkling grin for the first time. The guys were on a (totally natural) high, enjoying the fruits of their work. Everyone in the room knew this was special.
They’d just recorded a classic album.”

 

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Hi-Fi World, April 2005

On ‘Today’, from ‘The Party’s Over’, the Consonance rendered the warm and harmonious synths with soul, minimising the generic and compressed early ‘new Romantic’ leanings. It concentrated on the burgeoning enigma and colour of the group’s compositions. What was further exposed compared to the Denon is the plentiful (echo) reverb used on the first two discs around Mark Hollis’s vocals. This is no bad thing, as the Consonance always presented Hollis’s voice skillfully, revealing his at times fragile intonations that turn to radiant high-ceilinged epics.

The Denon, however, reproduced a slightly nasal presentation, which is easy to do with a vocal like Hollis’s. The title track illustrated the Consonance’s adept handling of delicate melodies from the first half, while managing the second half’s more saturated oriental structure with an unflappable dexterity, expressing the full body of the crashing synths, being velvety but not over smooth and doing so with authority. With ‘It’s My Life’ the Consonance revealed extra detail with excellent timing, the melodic breaks having real definition this time compared to the Denon, without the midrange compressing into distortion when certain tracks within this song have been compressed for extra emphasis.

The ‘Colour Of Spring’ SACD containing strings, two choirs and electric guitars produced a more complex musical envelope. ‘Happiness Is Easy’ has Paul Webb’s genius bass playing [Oops! no Paul on this track – APW], both subtle and melodic but which can suddenly attack, emphasising a different shift in the song. The Dennon displayed these qualities, but without the stunning conviction of the Consonance, which expressed the harmoniously melodic parts and striking extended elements with spine-tingling aplomb. The Consonance also surprises on this song with an eerie rendition of the children’s choir, arriving ghost-like to form one of the key melodies; it appeared with stealthy subtlety. While the lead guitar melody on ‘Life’s What You Make It’ is normally aggressive, this time however it had body, the Consonance sensitively conveying excellent skill with fast decaying notes, preventing coloration.

The ‘Spirit Of Eden’ SACD is a masterpiece. Stripped to the bone with only six long-form tracks, it remains a brooding work and probably the most beautiful piece of music I own. It is initially a difficult listen compared to the accessibility of its predecessors but with an assured player like the Consonance, it was simply sublime. The composition of ‘Spirit Of Eden’ is almost exclusively enigmatic, however, esoteric (jazz, rock and classical) sensibilities from the likes of Ornette Coleman, Can and Eric Satie can be discerned. It contains long meandering atmospheric pieces, which the Consonance picked out with a forensic surgeon’s skill, whilst adeptly painting them with the craft of an artist.
‘Desire’ contains low level percussion with a blues chord sequence that suddenly psychedelically explodes, then quietens, while ‘Rainbow’ has a multi-layered opening with shifting echoing ambient noises and hauntingly affecting vocal delivery by Hollis both of which the Consonance handled with a shimmering beauty.

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WE FOUND MARK HOLLIS (BY GUILLAUME MAZEL). October 24, 2016

– There he was, curled up my sergeant, buried between two old rugs, it was I who found him!

– We always find someone lost in the souk of Fez, this is not great news, it is commonplace.

– But it’s Mark Hollis, Mohamed, it’s Mark Hollis, shouf Mohamed it’s Mark Hollis !!!!

– And who is Mark Hollis, a king, a rich man, the son of Muhammad?

– I don’t know, sergeant, but he said ‘I’m Mark Hollis’, and that seemed very important to me.

– He’s got a rat’s face, doesn’t he?

– Well he says he’s 62 and he’s English.

– Yeah, well, with a name like that, he’s not from our area, what worries me is that he has a pimply teenage face, 62 years old, I can’t believe it. Whatever a nearly transparent white guy with a woolen cap and mittens in the middle of the Moroccan market in August, that’s enough to keep us worried for a while, let’s take it to the Rabat police station.

The being between two rugs was indeed all of the shy teenager, shivering as if he had been stolen a kiss and only realized it a few years later, smooth and disheveled hair escaped from the red cap of coarse wool, he had an innate gift for hiding his chin in his neck and his neck in his back. A big black flannel jacket gave a semblance of volume to his body but in fact served as a ballast for the lack of flesh that turned him into air. Along the way he said nothing, his ear listening to the clarinets and tribal rhythms, and sometimes uttering almost sung moans, like ovarian pains, like heretic’s complaints at the stake. A brief smile lit her face like a scene from The Shining, a touch of violent madness that choked on a nervous twitch in the back of the neck. At no time did he resist the orders of oriental accents, knowing in any case no vocable of this North African dialect. He was well treated, drunk, ate, cleaned and emptied, and finally lay down in cell 34 of the Rabat police station, wearing ridiculous short pants the stripes of which seemed to extend the thickness of his shins, of an old shirt. orange where a Hindu elephant was trying to survive despite its extinct red color by gesturing with its eight arms. He had asked for butterflies, here is the pachyderm.

We then found a translator at random in the adjacent street, named Rêda Allali, well known to the local police for saying no to everything, even to the annual jackpot, a rebel of himself what, but a rebel “With studies” and impeccable English from the Czech point of view.

It was useless, Hollis said nothing, burying himself in his thick, doggy-style overcoat on the folding bed of his tiny cell, falling asleep in twisted dreams like seventies posters between Hendricks and Nepal.

Upstairs, in a small office, poorly painted but equipped with good air conditioning, the modernity of which made a cruel contrast with the Arab posters and rugs, the two amiable law enforcement officers reported on the facts. and gestures to their superior, a chubby little man whose only intelligence seemed to lie in wearing glasses and a dozen feathers placed on the desk around an empty inkwell, an abandoned witness to the former tenants.

– How is it written Marc Hauliss? Don’t tell me you haven’t Google searched yet, shit then, I’m surrounded by useless people at the end, if one day we are lucky enough to have a good big case of serial murder, what what will you do, follow the series on tv?

– We didn’t have time, and then the computers, there are only homicides that they have, and then you boss, we know that you like computers, you are there all day , Khaled says you’re there at night too, even without a light, like a pro.

– Yes well… well, let’s see who it is this Mar Kholisse, he had papers on him? – We found sheet music and copyright, Carambar wrappers with puzzles, Kleenex and stamps with the head of the Queen of England, but we don’t know which one.

– And, he was armed?

– A very small Opinel, of those with the colored handle, Farid kept it.

– Mohamed, you’re a scale.

– Calm down, at least I know he didn’t come by plane …

The two men stood there dazed and surprised.

– Logically, these days, taking a plane to the Arab states with a penknife is impossible even for Houdini, and then he probably comes from the south of France, where these porcini knives are made.

– By boat no, chief, impossible!

– And why ?

– Well, we crossed a stream on the way and he was nauseous.

– But he didn’t arrive with wax wings anyway

– Maybe he’s a superhero?

– You stupid Farid, but what are you stupid!

“Silence,” the chief muttered, opening his computer as one would open Ali-Baba’s cellar.

He patted a moment, moaning often, in the frantic search for the perfect spelling of the name. After half an hour without success …

– Chef, chef …

– What ?

– Well his name …

– What ?

– It’s copyright on paper.

– Couldn’t you say it earlier?

– Well I thought you wrote to your wife, you always complain when you write to her.

– That’s why I’m a chef and why you never will, Farid, the art of deduction, give me these papers.

M.A.R.K H.O.L.L.I.S

…

Wikipedia:

Mark David Hollis (born January 4, 1955, London) is a British songwriter, singer and musician best known for having first served as a singer and songwriter in the group Talk Talk in February 1982 (release of the single Mirror Man ) in October 1991 (release of the single New Grass) before embarking on a solo career with the release, in January 1998, of an album: Mark Hollis (Polydor). He and his group were part of the new wave or pop wave in their early days, before gradually moving away in favor of more refined music sometimes referred to as post-rock or experimental. No news in 2000, some accounts point to a possible interstellar abduction in early January while he was picking porcini mushrooms in the Haut-Tarn.

– The photo, chouf, the photo, it’s him, it’s him, but twenty years ago… He’s the same, he… He hasn’t aged !!!

– This is witchcraft, he must be let go, he must go, by Muhammad, it is not good, no, no.

– This is not witchcraft, let’s calm down, we have in front of us the living proof of the existence of UFOs, we have hit the jackpot… I mean, I have won the jackpot.

Rising up with a good footing, although his smallness leaves him lower than seated, he suddenly came alive, his eyes shining and, bringing his deer to pace, he made his way at full speed to the lower cells, the urge burning. to interview this bewildering Mark Hollis first, and to know the extent of the treasure.

Mark slept humming rather than snoring, choppy sounds like a shy, cold Jane Birkin, a wounded dog whose voice kills with fatigue. His sleep was rudely shaken by the creaking sound of the door opening, and then the reality was violent, in the harsh blow the incandescence of tungsten struck his retina.

– Dear, dear Mark, I can talk to you, eh, dear Mark? said the chef in English worthy of the best Portuguese translator. Well, first of all, express how sorry I am for the treatment my subordinates have given you, beg your pardon from them, and offer you some tea.

– I don’t like tea, I want milk.

He’s going to be boring this one, thought the little chef.

– Okay, okay, milk, I have some… routine… let’s say, questions for you, if you don’t mind.

– I slept there, there were butterflies everywhere, the weather was nice, it smelled of the countryside around Scarborough, there was a painted duck playing the trumpet. He’s gonna be really boring.

– Yes, sorry again, but the jet lag must have jostled you here, it’s a typical time for interrogation … questions. Speaking of jet lag, where are you from?

Mark twisted his neck and fixed his gaze on the bulb, offering a drunken Jack Nicholson look. Smiling he pointed to the light.

– From there …

A sigh, akin to the breath of a locomotive, came out of the chef’s mouth and created crevices in the walls. The nervous leader posed his portrait of twenty years ago in front of the old teenager. Hollis ran her fingers over the picture along her chin, a slight joy filling her face.

– Me, before them, is me.

– Before who?

– Do you really want to know?

– We will have to explain our salaries to the people.

– Farid and I are used to overtime.

– I wanted to retire from the scenes, tired, can be jaded by success, I wanted to stop, my head was playing jazz and my hands rocking, I was tearing myself, so I wanted to disappear, I went south from France, because the south had nothing to do with me. Strangely, I was picking up sounds from walls, fabrics, herbs, a curse and creating symphonies almost without realizing it, my head was exploding in solfeggio, my mouth froze in words, the south was not enough. So I wanted to disappear even more, but I didn’t have the strength to leave myself, I locked myself in my past, in my Renees and my colorful springs, autistic of me. I learned to shut up my life. One day, in a thick wood, while I was hallucinating on my mushrooms, a clear blue light landed on my shoulder, its sudden sting froze me in place, a golden light then came on my forehead, and my heaviness vanished. suddenly, and I floated to a 33 rpm record which flew over me, and merged me in one of its grooves. On a parallel furrow I saw other worn-out singers melt away, their faces exuded peace, their faces exuded fear. I slept in the hollow of a record for too many years, sometimes people came to take snatches of songs from my soul to try best-of from me, then from so many others, from an era, from a time, for any reason, for any party, my memory was ripped out. However, I remained lively, anxious to preserve my life beyond singing, anxious to one day become an ordinary human again. And then three days ago, I was composing an experimental title on the piano, screams were heard everywhere, my one hit wonder neighbors tore their ears, they came then, finally visible, staggering and as if drunk. – Who, who were they?

Silence followed.

– Chief !

– What Mohamed?

– Chief, he fell asleep …

– But what is this guy, a wreck, does he fall asleep when the story gets interesting, is he not that sahib?

– Maybe he’s sick, there are guys who unwittingly fall asleep, I saw a documentary on that.

– Yes, there are some who don’t realize they’re awake like you Farid.

They took the time to go to the toilet, stocking up on tea and Christian smother, as if a commercial break was it. When they returned to their seats, the film had already resumed.

They were both elongated and fat, tanned skinned and dressed in suits and gold, from their pockets emanated papers that begged for signatures and sold as autographs. They told me about their land, called Messinia, told me about sales and events in a language that weighed heavily on me. Their anger was blatant, my composition seemed to have weakened their weapons. When I understood this weakness, I discovered the possibility of an escape, I began to grind all that seemed to be music, without standards, without eras, without feelings, the chaos, the chaos, the impossible listening, the decadence of the ‘hearing. Their costumes cracked, their papers got wet, their heights sagged, their perpetrators escaped. It was when they were trying to kidnap Cheb Khaled in order to spruce up their coats of arms after my lack of success, that I took advantage of their disinterest and let myself fall like a vulgar subway singer in those soft carpets where you found me.

– What a story, eh?

– Is everything recorded Mohamed? We should not lose this opportunity to make ourselves rich, we are the first to have living proof of the existence of other lives.

– Think again !

– How, your story offers no doubt, and the fact that you have not aged is indisputable

– Here you may find it unreal, but on my side, it has nothing irrational or supernatural, with me, we call it marketing, economy or even, business, we do not get rich by showing them with your finger, today you have nothing more and nothing less than before. Go to bed, dream, sing in the shower, duck, squawk, run away from hits, and then let me sleep.

The next day, Farid went to feed Mark Hollis lunch, but the missing man, who was found, had passed out to a song.