Talk Talk (RIP Mark Hollis)

if this was any other thread that'd be much funnier

i have succumbed to listening. my choice was 'life's what you make it'. the later stuff....not now

Lex does not strike me as a fan.

Shit, I always thought that was who lex was for some reason.

I'm on Asides Besides now. John Cope is fantastic.

For once I'm glad lex isn't here to find out he's been confused with Petridish all this time.

Seems official now:

"Sadly it's true," said Mark Hollis' former manager Keith Aspden. "Mark has died after a short illness from which he never recovered."

News: @BBCNewsEnts report https://t.co/iMdcUlXksm#MarkHollis Obituary: https://t.co/nvrALusFY5 pic.twitter.com/q8Z7ygzDus

— BBC Radio 6 Music (@BBC6Music) February 26, 2019

That obit has some quotes and bits I’ve never heard before.

somehow i'd totally missed that he said he'd studied at sussex. if true, he would probably have been in the same year as billy idol (also born in 1955; he dropped out after just a year too). hillary benn and nigel planer would've been knocking around on campus at the same time. visions of them all sharing a house just like in the young ones...

Curious about him going to Southend Tech, as per the tweet below. Paul Webb also has photos from his "childhood stomping ground" Southend on his Instagram. Were they partly Essesx boys then? I always thought Norf London.

I've often recalled how #MarkHollis made us weep with laughter from the back of our maths class at Southend Tech. I've always found it kind of mind boggling that I was around someone for a short while who went on to make such achingly gorgeous music.

— jojo90 (@jonathanjo90) February 25, 2019

wilko johnson made an essex-y tweet about him yesterday, but it looks like it's deleted now

did enjoy looking looking at these pictures and imagining the life lived therein

Mark Hollis's piano room. pic.twitter.com/bMYL7rjKfJ

— Colour of Spring (@colourofspring) February 25, 2019

Mark Hollis's living room. #RIP Thanks to Mark Hollis for introducing me to Satie, Debussy and Can. pic.twitter.com/yMKrqGD9Qy

— Colour of Spring (@colourofspring) February 25, 2019

no idea as to their authenticity btw (were they published somewhere previously?)

Graham Sutton of Bark Psychosis:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BuWgmWgg5D6/

someone said something similar upthread but they are one of the most *ILX* bands to me, I vaguely knew who they were and knew "It's My Life" and "Life's What You Make It" but I guess I didn't really know them anymore than like Flock of Seagulls or The Call or any other band with a couple of new wave hits I dug...

ILX talk got me interested and I bought the reissue of Spirit of Eden and was hooked on that album for a couple of months...just staggering to me still

Though today I'm going through the early stuff and as Turrican said its' really good! It's My Life minus a couple of poppier numbers is actually kind of a strange new wave record...also the mournfulness in his voice couldn't really be contained, there's a sadness to it all to me, even the stuff that seems really dated --- and as new wave qua new wave they were really great songwriters and arrangers

Two other good Guardian pieces -- Jude Rogers on Hollis as withdrawn outsider:

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/feb/26/mark-hollis-talk-talk-singer

Graeme Thomson on Hollis as English gospel singer:

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/feb/26/a-sacred-voice-mark-hollis-sang-the-english-gospel

Three, I should say!

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/feb/26/talk-talk-mark-holliss-ambition-co-existed-with-commercial-success

where does the biographical bit about his brother and "I Believe in You" in the Petridis piece come from?

Here perhaps? https://onlyrockandroll.london/2017/03/15/too-much-too-soon-ed-hollis-and-speedball-records/

I just lost it when the coda appears on Time It's Time. And here I thought this would be a "safe" album for the office.

While of course I'd rather he be alive, I think his absence (now and for the past couple of decades) is key to the longevity of the last couple of albums. That is, they've been driven almost entirely by word of mouth, no marketing, no promotions, no reissues or reunion tour. If you discover them you do so more or less on purpose, and if and when they connect I imagine they do so as honestly as any music ever made. For years they have existed almost independent of anything, with a life of their own.

no reissues

this isn't strictly true [/sic]

OK, well, no expanded remastered box set campaign or whatever then.

some thoughtfulness in this:
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/feb/26/musicians-on-mark-hollis-he-found-hooks-in-places-im-still-trying-to-fathom

Bit of a myth this whole thing about the obscurity of the records, even aside from the No Doubt cover, every band of the last 10-20 years banged on about them til the cows came home, there's a big chunk of Elbow's South Bank Show that talks about them for example. I discovered them in 1989 via the (huge selling) TV advertised hits comp Natural History and that had 2 of the songs from Spirit Of Eden on it! It went Top 10. They were one of the most.. *compiled* bands ever, i mean dozens of Best Ofs and whatnot, Amazon currently lists 47 different albums for example. This was EMI making its money back i suppose. The albums seemed to be constantly in shops, written up in the press, re-issued on vinyl, remastered. They were on the Grand Theft Auto Vice City soundtrack!

there might be a UK/US divide here

yeah, if the average music fan in the US knows them (esp. in my generation), it's for it's my life and no doubt

they're not the type of band - outside of it's my life - that every normy knows about. on either side of the atlantic

talking of which, not one fucking word from dr alban so far

I was vaguely aware of them before but I too got into them via being given a cassette copy of Natural History as a kid. It was a big album at the time - peaked at No 3 in the charts.

I can tell you it was very very hard to find anyone who had heard and wanted to talk about laughing stock in Seattle in the first several years after its release. I was desperate for conversation about it!

I would say it was mid decade before it started gathering immanence. Newer artists praising it and SoE in The Wire etc.

Laughing Stock is still a bit obscure, though. Took a while before I found a copy, and it's not on any streaming services, affect. I will always connect it to Sick Mouthy and Stylus, btw.

It's on Apple Music

Finding good quality vinyl presses of the last two Talk Talk albums and the Mark Hollis solo album is nearly impossible unless you have $75-200 budget per album. The 2012 represses were perhaps not authorized (some are banned for sale on Discogs) or were done very poorly.

I came to LS first and SoE later as a further exploration from that, but as i recall no one wanted to talk about late talk talk back then at all. it does seem that SoE found a passionate group of listeners pretty fast in the UK.

https://sickmouthy.wordpress.com/2019/02/26/everybody-talk-talk/

i got a 2012 repress of laughing stock. sounds great imo

i got my copy of spirit of eden for £2.99 in a woolworths sale, probably 1989? they had loads of copies! then i sold it with a bunch of other stuff when i was in need of a bit of money for rent and bullshit like that ;_;

Mine: http://citypages.com/music/remembering-talk-talks-mark-hollis-it-was-his-lifedont-you-forget/506354021

bless you, scik. i was hoping you would write something

xpost already read yours alfred and it was wonderful

In the US they are probably a staple among a very narrow class of music fan, but overall def not well known -- even their hits don't seem to have much traction here in the 80s revival playlists compared to other new wave.

I heard "It's My Life" and to a lesser extent "Life's What You Make It" on '80s revival radio in the nineties, but that's it. "Talk Talk" made it to Night Shift in 1982.

Nice piece Alfred. One quip though:

Silence and exile he sought, with some cunning—when he needed money he composed a bit for a Kelsey Grammer TV series.

To my knowledge it's never been confirmed that he did this for the money. He might have, and he probably was paid for it, but money being the most important reason for him doing this isn't mentioned in the p4k hyperlink you put underneath it either.

Please correct me if I'm wrong though, obv

i really hope he did it because he sincerely loved the show "boss." that would add a fun wrinkle to his personality.

Struck again by the fact that the first three songs on Spirit are programmed on both my vinyl and CD copies as one piece. On vinyl as one side with no break; on CD as one track. Side two always feels like a breakthrough

I do wonder what he did for money though. I somehow doubt that a few hits in the 80s is enough to bankroll someone for the next three decades.

I wonder this about pretty much all musicians.

Worth remembering the No Doubt cover would have earned him some new coin at least. Alternately maybe he just quietly worked out of the public eye.

How musicians make their livelihoods fascinates me.

LBI, I didn't meant to imply that finances motivated him, not that this would be a venal reason for accepting the assignment. Maybe Hollis dug Kelsey Grammar as a comedian.

I can't imagine they came out of the EMI deal with much/any money. Didn't Spirit of Eden cost a crazy amount of money to make?

Maybe he was doing a square job all this time! Also maybe his wife has a lucrative job and he was able to be mr mom.

I do wonder.