Mark Hollis

Mark Hollis made his name fronting Talk Talk, a band whose work frequently explored beyond the traditional, limiting structures of pop music. Hollis pushed the band to increasingly experimental efforts and his debut solo album continues this approach. It is a completely acoustic work, recorded using only microphones placed around double bass, drums, guitar, piano and woodwind instruments. Sometimes he just sings accompanied by piano. In some ways it’s a very polite record which wipes its feet and sits timidly in the corner, begging you to uncover its special qualities. In others, it’s bold and assured. Comparisons are hard to make: Miles’ Davis’s In A Silent Way (‘The Daily Planet’) and Chopin’s Nocturnes(‘The Colour of Spring’) come to mind. Tastefully minimal without being cold. 7/10

Review by Mike Pattenden

London 86

Despite the recent eighties revival, it’s still fashionable to view the music of Thatcher’s decade with blanket disdain. It’s a shame because among the flimsy pop there were true mavericks who have never found a home in the renegade nineties. Singer Mark Hollis guided Talk Talk from new romanticism to jazz-rock experimentalism and this, a record of their last live show, finds them at the half-way house. There’s a taste of what’s to come in the exquisite piano prelude to ‘Tomorrow Started’ and in the extrapolation of ‘Does Caroline Know?’ to a languid seven minutes. But listen to the close of ‘Living In Another World’ and the deceptively simple ‘Life’s What You Make It’ and realise that only a band who had mastered the pop/rock idiom could retreat from it so magnificently. 9/10

Review by David Peschek

Laughing Stock (2000 re-release)

Wherever people rail against the incompetence of corporate music industry or catalogue the injustices meted out to bands of quality, it is quite likely that Talk Talk will be used as a cautionary tale. In the first stage of their career, EMI took one look at their synthesizers and the choppy pop of their eponymous early single and dressed this elegant, literate band in white silken box-jackets to fill their support slot on the road with Duran Duran.

Later successes with ‘It’s My Life’ and ‘Life’s What You Make It’ forced them into the wildly inappropriate role of hit factory, and by the time they released their fourth album, the jazz-inflected pop experimentation of Spirit of Eden in 1988, singer Mark Hollis and song-writing partner Tim Friese-Greene were refusing to let executives have either advance tapes or singles. Needles to say, amid a legal storm, Talk Talk were dropped and turned to Polydor to put out their final album Laughing Stock.

Originally released in 1991, you can imagine the label managers’ despair when they discovered they had been handed 45 minutes and six tracks of freeform ambience. The album was deleted after three months.

Grandly speaking, then – and after exposure to this record’s measured melancholy, everything seems grand – Laughing Stock is an album produced from artistic struggle, the work of men fighting to claim the peripheries of their pop remit. Untouched by contemporary trends – you will find no indie-dance, grunge or shoe-gazing here – Talk Talk were quite simply doing their own thing, following dark paths that will surprise anyone who remembers them merely for their brush with chart fame and the long-coated appearances on Saturday Superstore’s Video Vote.

This reissue on Pondlife chimes unexpectedly with many recent developments in today’s rock landscape. In the instrumental richness and exploratory dynamics, it is not fanciful to see connections with the world of post-rock, from Ariel M’s pastoral to the oblique jazz of Tortoise. However, it is still very sad music, a sense of dislocation eloquently expressed by Hollis’s fragile vocals and his lyrics of sin and redemption.

From the opening ‘Myrrhman’ – a haze of strings and guitar – to the improvisatory squall and swell of ‘After the Flood’, it’s clear that the singer’s concerns stretch beyond mere love and into the spiritual realm. You could see it as the deconstruction of the relatively conventional hook-driven ‘Life’s What You Make It’. Tracks such as ‘Taphead’, the soulful ‘Ascension Day’ and ‘New Grass’, with its string flurries, rise slowly from a mist of instrumentation, but the emotional heat here stops Laughing Stock from being mere academic indulgence.

Most vitally, though, this is music brimming with ideas, unafraid to turn from populism to musical libertarianism. Simon Le Bon might not have had too much to worry about, but the rest of us should feel humble – and in certain cases ashamed – that such music could slip through the net. 8/10. (Album of the Week)

Review by Victoria Segal

Best Records of 1998: Mark Hollis

The former Talk Talk singer’s intense solo debut is the first record I’ve heard that truly merits being described as ‘post-rock’. Full of longing and ravishing musicianship, this is a timelessly beautiful record, a stunning achievement.

Review by Andrew Smith

Cult Albums: Spirit Of Eden (No. 92)

After the success of 1986’s Colour of Spring, Talk Talk, led by Mark Hollis and Tim Friese-Greene, retreated to an abandoned church for 14 months and, bizarrely, resurfaced as an ambient jazz ensemble. The result was truly audacious, at various points recalling the modern classicism of Debussy, musique concrete of Eric Satie and gentle whisperings of Brian Eno. Their record company, EMI, were horrified, but time has vindicated the transformation.