“The timescale referred to in the album’s incredible centrepiece, “A Life (1895-1915)”, spans the turn of the century 20 years in which the Victorian Age got trampled into the mud of the trenches. “The dates were taken from … it is the First World War and it’s just that at the time I read a few books about that period, like All Quiet On The Western Front, Testament of Youth; and I think those dates – I might be wrong, but I’ve got a feeling they were Vera Brittain’s boyfriend. It was more that idea that you’re only one year into it and then you’re topped.”
I haven’t read Testament of Youth but I did watch the movie ‘1917’ recently and I could not stop thinking about “A Life (1895-1915)”. If you haven’t seen it, ‘1917’ is a stunning piece of filmmaking about the First World War, and if you haven’t heard it, “ A Life” is a stunning piece of music about the First World War. It doesn’t seem right to call it a song. It is more than that. It’s the longest track on ‘Mark Hollis : Mark Hollis’, with the least lyrics. Like the rest of the album, it is beautiful, haunting and startling. I recall that on first listen I was surprised, maybe even taken aback, by the sound of a woman’s voice. Being so surprised by that made me realise what a singularly blokey musical world Talk Talk and Mark Hollis inhabit. It’s not that I think they don’t like women, but aside from the very occasional session musician and some female choristers, there just aren’t many chicks in the mix are there? Perhaps because Mark Hollis sings so extremely quietly across the entire album, even though the girly vocal is hushed it feels like a duet, two people murmuring at each other about the human tragedy of war. People wonder what she is saying, I’ve seen it described on lyric sites as “(woman speaking French)” but I’ve also seen Phill Brown say “it was sposed to sound like whispering” and he would know. Although, if she is whispering in French, that would certainly be in context.
“A Life” is such an evocative and desolate piece of music – you just know that if Mark Hollis’s score for Peacock (ARB Section 1 is a fragment of it) had ever been used it would have been absolutely devastating.