One is finally speaking without restraint, the other is definitely silent. As the Aussie crooner embarks on a tour of meeting and chatting with his fans, the visionary Talk Talk frontman, evaporated for twenty years, has left this world for good.
The recent announcement of a European tour (which unfortunately does not go through France) by Nick Cave in “talk” mode, where the Australian, alone on stage, would engage in the game of questions and answers with the public, was greeted by a number of grunts about the rather prohibitive price of seats. Certainly, the case, with its device at a lower cost, offered at a grand concert rate, is very beneficial to the interested party. It’s not Al Pacino who will say otherwise. But when you love, you don’t count, do you? Especially since, in the case of Cave, there is something really new about the proposal, quite exceptional even. Because this time it is a real exchange, without a net, between the public and him. Without taboos, he assures us. Which is already quite extraordinary, even more so from the brooding crooner. At least until recently.
Nick Cave, devious artist, as somber and restless as the spasmodic rock of his early recordings, was for a long time, for journalists, the least convenient of customers. Blame it on his extreme and assertive drug addiction, coupled with a frenzied refusal to deliver his emotions other than in his epic songs, with often encrypted images. Even calm, he still said to me a few years ago: “At Bad Seeds, empathy is not the first quality. We’re just a bunch of guys who get together to work together. Everything else, the worries, the heartache or even the overdoses, is in our free time. A ruthless boy club, in short. Until one day tragedy befell this hard worker, as hard on himself as on others.
On July 14, 2015, Cave’s world and certainties collapsed. Arthur, one of her twins, under the influence of LSD, fell off a cliff to instant death. The Australian, for whom the sky or the horizon seemed to have no limit on Push the sky away, a prodigious 2013 album, had to change. To share his pain and his pain, finally. He, who rocked dangerously on stage in a messianic boasting number à la Bono while touching the hands of his disciples during scheduled crowd baths, suddenly found in this carnal contact a comfort, a warmth, which he once seemed to mock. The tour that accompanied Skeleton Tree, shattering work of mourning, revealed a transformed singer, now feeding, disdain evaporated, greedily, on the love of his fans. In an interview at his home in Brighton in May 2017, I discovered a troubled man, more fragile and, above all, more attentive. In the grip of doubt for the first time. The preacher had turned into a real interlocutor.
He went further. In the wake of a meeting tour with his audience in Australia last year, he started a dialogue last November on his site The Red Hand Files (www.theredhandfiles.com), where he strives to respond with sincerity in the questions asked. An exercise in which he deploys a rare frankness, depth and humor. And that the man, long stingy with confessions, who recorded for more than thirty years on the Mute label (“silent”), should manifest just as fully during his next public performances. As he speaks, 61-year-old Nick Cave progresses, finds the strength and inspiration to keep creating.
Talk Talk. It was the name of the group of Mark Hollis, who was very silent before the Lord. An immense artist who passed away last Monday, at 64 years old. Twenty years after having sunk into silence, stopping the music in 1998, after his splendid and unique solo album. What killed him? Mystery … But we can say to ourselves that he was happy to have taken the tangent, to live peacefully with wife and children, how can we not believe that he did not succumb to wounds that had never healed? My memory of Hollis, beyond his precious records, is disturbing. Because he’s not the happiest. It was at the time of the Children of Rock, and of Rockline, with Bernard Lenoir, in the spring of 1986. To welcome the release of the exciting Color of Spring, an album which already announced the deep stylistic break to come from the group after the cumbersome popular triumph of It’s my life, we received the trio at the Le Martial club, rue Fontaine, in Paris, to film them playing Life’s what you make it and Living in another world. In playback.
Mark Hollis, the awesome Talk Talk singer, is dead
Disappearance
Frédéric Péguillan
The shoot, with its multiple takes, dragged on, especially as the musicians clamored for beer for beer throughout the session, with the corpses of cans numbering in the dozens. It wasn’t the first time that we had dealt with a group of rowdy thirsty people (if only our Cure chouhous). Except that they, Mark Hollis, haggard and not very helpful, at the head, reached heights of ill will in their behavior turning to sabotage. This provoked the exasperation of the technicians and consequently the tension of Lenoir. The show was hell to wrap up and then edit, and the memory of Talk Talk, from a human perspective, far from imperishable.
It’s hard to imagine back then that those who suffered the most that day were them. The leader in particular, we understood later, already plagued by his (understandable) allergy to the laws and rules of the promotion. Talk Talk wanted only one thing: to flee the futile world of pop with which it was associated in order to flourish in total artistic freedom. What Hollis will accomplish beyond all expectations with the following discs, freed from any commercial imperative, opening an infinite field of exploration to progressive pop, between folk, jazz, classical and ambient of a sensitivity and a richness supreme. When Spirit of Eden appeared in 1988, without an obvious single, to the chagrin of the record company but also of many critics who considered the work pretentious (especially across the Channel), Hollis let go, bitter: “At the beginning of the 70s, a time when innovation was celebrated, such an album would have been received carefree. But in the face of the mercantile crap that is coming out today … “
The man who values silence, including in his music, at the expense of unnecessary noises and notes, will eventually surrender. Disgusted for good? Will we ever know? An “illness” would have taken him. Let us salute the immense and upright artist who had the courage to leave a world he hated, against which he found it impossible to fight. And let us regret, by listening to it more and better than before, that we could not or knew how to support it more.
