Making music that people still want to hear twenty years later: Mark Hollis, singer of Talk Talk
Foto: imago/United Archives
It is often said about the British band Talk Talk that they were ahead of their time. But that’s nonsense. “Ahead of its time” is a judgment that looks back from the present and, for reasons of glorification, retrospectively interprets red threads in the course of things that never existed. Common threads arise from the influence that a band or artist has on pop culture. When pop musicians later referred to Talk Talk, it wasn’t so much about the music. It was about the attitude of consistently developing and creating your own sound universe. For that matter, Talk Talk certainly had a big influence on bands like Radiohead and Blur. Talk Talk’s music was an attempt to counter the rather artificial pop of the 80s with its own, more introverted and organic vision.
But while bands like the Housemartins or the Smiths did this with a clear reference to the 60s, with Talk Talk it was only a reference to themselves. At the time, singer Mark Hollis was quoted in the women’s magazine “Frau im Spiegel” with the golden words, that his group wanted to make music that people could still hear in twenty years. And that’s actually the core of the Talk Talk project: the search for a sound that doesn’t follow fashion and therefore can’t collect dust.
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In 1984 Talk Talk released their second album “It’s my Life”. The first album “The Party’s Over” sold very slowly in 1982. And now the new thing on the island was going even worse. But the album was better received in mainland Europe and produced three hits that are still known today: “Such a Shame”, “It’s my Life” and “Dum Dum Girl”.
While the debut was heavily influenced by the synth pop of the early 80s, the music on the second album sounded completely different. The band had developed a completely unique sound that, strangely enough, despite all the strangeness, was 100 percent catchy pop music. Talk Talk was no longer synth pop, but it wasn’t rock music either. And although the exactly one-minute intro to their hit “Such a Shame” sounded like the theme music to an animal documentary, they weren’t making Krautrock.
The songwriting partnership between the band’s singer and composer Mark Hollis and the producer and musician Tim Friese-Greene, who was hired as a sound engineer and producer for “It’s my Life”, was probably crucial for the further development of their sound. Over time he became the unofficial fourth member of the band. It was he who programmed the drum machines and contributed the strange synth sounds. And it was he who understood what sound the band was looking for. In addition to Mark Hollis, the band included the brilliant bassist Paul Webb and drummer Lee Harris. Together with Friese-Greene, they decided to invite half a dozen professional studio musicians to the recordings.
Trumpeter Henry Lowther makes a particularly striking appearance, adding a jazzy touch to the songs “Renee” and “Tomorrow Started” with his performances. Together the musicians created a closed sound horizon beyond everything that was popular in the 80s. Hollis and Friese-Green probably began their search for the “perfect silence” here, for the gap between the tones, by increasingly filtering out pop song structures and sounds. A journey of discovery that they continued with the next three Talk Talk albums and completed with the purest Talk Talk distillate “Laughing Stock”.
Perhaps it is this journey of discovery that the designer and artist James Marsh wanted to express with the cover of the album? In front of a red sky, the painting “The Boyhood of Sir Walter Raleigh”, broken down into a puzzle, passes by over a purple sea. The sailor in the painting points to the horizon, while the future adventurer Raleigh is still a child and listens spellbound with his knees drawn up. By the way, Marsh designed the cover for every Talk Talk album. And he always knew how to capture the enigmatic clarity of the band’s sound with his style based on surrealism.
“It’s my Life” does not yet reach the quiet acoustic depth of the follow-up album “The Color of Spring”, on which the songs became longer, more improvised and more demanding in 1986. But it’s the first step. “The Color of Spring” became the band’s best-selling album, and they were then given carte blanche by their record company EMI. Talk Talk were now allowed to do whatever they wanted in the studio and sounded both avant-garde and uncommercial on their fourth album “Spirit of Eden” in 1988 and got into a lot of trouble with EMI.
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