Talk Talk (RIP Mark Hollis)

hollis solo, comsat angels first two, the sound's first two, junior boys' first... all very ilx records to me. sure there are others

anecdotal story on that album: my friend was in Piano Magic at the time that came out and they were on tour with Low in England. And he and Zak Sally went to half a dozen record shops looking for that CD and apparently couldn't find it.

I found it fairly easily in the bay area on release.

talk talk is definitely a band i discovered thanks to ilx, back in the mid-00s. i couldn't find any of their stuff anywhere in my city -- i remember having to order laughing stock at borders.

Slight derail but for MANY reasons there’s no more ILX release than Disco Infernos 5 eps compilation.

That and the homemade bob seger comp

the live at montreux 1986 is awesome, what a groove, what a performance:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNIIOr3g8lQ

Slight derail but for MANY reasons there’s no more ILX release than Disco Infernos 5 eps compilation.

Ha, probably true, I guess.

I have the Ba Da Bing reissues and they're fine? I think? I really love the Mark Hollis solo album more than anything else though, really incredible.

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.

― Let's have sensible centrist armageddon (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, February 26, 2019 11:09 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Thank you. It did jump out at me as if you were implying that, but I never read your writing in bad faith.

I do think it's entirely possible he got by on royalties, and that that was a steady source of income. According to discogs Talk Talk appear on 1150 compilations, mixes and albums alone, and No Doubt's version.

If Slade can live off one xmas single for the rest of their lives (Merry Christmas Everybody supposedly generates 500.000 pounds, annually) I'm pretty sure Hollis could have earned a half-decent income from it.

The No Doubt hit alone would have netted him a lot of money, bar a really bad deal.

Obv. the band's early stuff is much less obscure, from a new wave hits of the '80s standpoint alone. Did "Colour" have the impact in the States that it had at home? Regardless, the next two records had next to no commercial impact anywhere, not least because of the arrangements that Hollis (iirc) fought to keep them from truncating for single release. And I'd argue that the Talk Talk mythos, as cool as much of the early stuff and esp. "Colour" is, stems from those last two albums, which are weird and challenging and magical and need to be sought out to be heard. And at least for the longest time his solo album takes things down a notch further in terms of literal accessibility.

I think we're spoiled in terms of available music, but twas not always the case. For example, it wasn't until the '80s that stuff like the VU (first reissues in 1985?) and Big Star records (outside of bootlegs) were more readily available, iirc, and even then I think a lot of people were driven to them by bands that name-dropped them, like REM. But later (which is to say, not commercial) Talk Talk was more elusive because Hollis himself was so reclusive. Like I said, it was strictly word of mouth, not Rolling Stone think-pieces and whatnot, that got those albums what little exposure that they got. And even now the group's influence is more of a conceptual one. There is lots of music that is Talk Talk-like, but not much like Talk Talk, not even quite Bark Psychosis or These New Puritans or whatever.

Oh I remember it was literally impossible to find Neu! anywhere in 1999, even the bootlegs were hard to come by and $30 each

But yes there is the mythos. I used to complain (and still kind of do) that I felt the mythos, including the monstrous budget and immense amount of time required to make those two last albums, were detrimental to my enjoyment of them, as I felt that their quality was overrated as a result of the backstory. I argued that In A Silent Way effectively did the same thing as Laughing Stock compositionally and was recorded in a single day. I argued that the influence of Laughing Stock on Radiohead led them to similarly make "hunker down for infinite time and fuck around until we come up with something" albums instead of, you know, doing pre-production. But never mind I still really think they're both excellent

I have the Ba Da Bing reissues and they're fine? I think? I really love the Mark Hollis solo album more than anything else though, really incredible.

― flamboyant goon tie included, Tuesday, 26 February 2019 23:21 (thirty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Happy to read this. I listen to it less but when I do it feels more.

absolutely love the atmosphere of it. you hear the room, the chair (or floorboards) creaking. everything feel so special and delicate. it's overwhelming, the intimacy of it.

It's truly a one of a kind album. Overwhelming intimacy nails it. It's so fragile and delicate. Right up there with Paul Buchanan's album (another ilxest album)

<3 fgti

There was a WIRE interview around the time of the release of the solo where he talked about Morton Feldman being a huge influence.

iirc he was on the cover.

If you listen to Inside Looking Out the Feldman influence is right there. It's also the one where you can hear the creaking of the room.

...and now I'm on to the next track, The Gift, and the influence is there in the horns too.

fuck it, this is his Morton Feldman tribute record. It's all over it.

>I argued that In A Silent Way effectively did the same thing as Laughing Stock compositionally and was recorded in a single day

In A Silent Way certainly didn't take as long to edit as Laughing Stock, but if your point was to pick an example of a spontaneous creation then you definitely picked something that nearly illustrates the opposite -- the real revolution of IASW is in Teo's edit, not the live take. it's a complete foreshadowing of how Hollis used cutting and pasting of improvisations to compose; he cut away 95% of the pre-composed piece and left only the one chord vamp & the solos. I would agree with you that now DAWs nearly mandate this approach and the influence has become like death

respectfully pulled out my 30 year old copy of Spirit of Eden today. definitely a good record. favorite still probably the solo album; even if every one of those little intimate sounds are almost annoyingly carved out and poised, there's something special about the sounds, they're really good ones

xpost yr right, evocative room creaks are in and of themselves a total hallmark of Feldman recordings

I'm thinking his older brother, with his amazing record collection and eclectic tastes, as mentioned in the article posted somewhere in this thread, must have had quite an influence on him.

When Gerry Rafferty died his obituary in The Guardian (I think) mentioned that Baker St brought him GBP80k a year in royalites - this is the figure I remember when wondering how "retired" musicians live.

I would have thought he would have earned more than that from "Baker Street" tbh. But, yes, there's potentially a good living to be had if you have even one hit record.

"Such a Shame" from that Montreux show is always a good Youtube watch. In live footage Mark always seems to be wrenching the words out.

Rowland S. Howard's end-of-life cover of "Life is What You Make it" is a noisy and elegant interpretation, gets inside the song the way only a fellow introvert could.

I do remember glowing and surprised reviews for Color of Spring, and even a conversation with someone telling me to put aside expectations because he did and was entranced. But it's hard to make forceful arguments for unforcful records, and in the US they had just enough of a profile to be typecast as synthpop throwaways. The Howard Joneses and Eurthymics and Tomas Dolbys of the world were all making their second moves around 1986, to limited success.

When Gerry Rafferty died his obituary in The Guardian (I think) mentioned that Baker St brought him GBP80k a year in royalites - this is the figure I remember when wondering how "retired" musicians live.

― fetter, Wednesday, February 27, 2019 3:04 AM (

I read that too, but I wonder how that income would have diminished in the streaming era.

xpost Was Japan among the first wave of these synth-y new wave acts to take a big left turn?

OMD

>I argued that In A Silent Way effectively did the same thing as Laughing Stock compositionally and was recorded in a single day

In A Silent Way certainly didn't take as long to edit as Laughing Stock, but if your point was to pick an example of a spontaneous creation then you definitely picked something that nearly illustrates the opposite -- the real revolution of IASW is in Teo's edit, not the live take. it's a complete foreshadowing of how Hollis used cutting and pasting of improvisations to compose; he cut away 95% of the pre-composed piece and left only the one chord vamp & the solos. I would agree with you that now DAWs nearly mandate this approach and the influence has become like death

respectfully pulled out my 30 year old copy of Spirit of Eden today. definitely a good record. favorite still probably the solo album; even if every one of those little intimate sounds are almost annoyingly carved out and poised, there's something special about the sounds, they're really good ones

xpost yr right, evocative room creaks are in and of themselves a total hallmark of Feldman recordings

Good post, Jon. I will never forget when I heard the unedited recording of “Shh/Peaceful” on the IaSW box – that was literally shocking to me as even knowing how much editing Teo did I had never considered that the entire 16+ min could be derived from a 14 second fragment.

I’ve had a hard time with Talk Talk since their canonization in the early aughts. I hadn’t known these records for that long—probably was introduced to them in 1997 or so—and had loved them quite intensely since that time. But the amount of ink spilled praising them—and the preciously rockist admiration saved for Laughing Talk in particular—really made my stomach turn and seemed grossly out of proportion to the beauty of the records themselves.

Listening back to them now, SoE still resonates for me ... in hindsight, it almost seems a transitional album, albeit a rather extreme one for its time. Where the ST feels like the Feldman ode it is, and Laughing Talk has been thoroughly pillaged by the post rock brigade, on [i]SoE/i] there are still plenty of moments--the Hammond swirls on the chorus of "Desire," the entirety of "Wealth"--that firmly exist in a mid-80s soul context. Which, actually, is one of the things I like most about it.

There was a WIRE interview around the time of the release of the solo where he talked about Morton Feldman being a huge influence.

― Acting Crazy (Instrumental) (jed_),

that interview can be found here: http://www.snowinberlin.com/markhollis.html#the-wire-1998-01-00

the preciously rockist admiration saved for Laughing Talk in particular

What?

xpost Dazzle Ships, you mean? I think that came out after Tin Drum.

Laughing Talk

lmao that'd be a great title for an album

"Dazzle Ships" idk if that really is part of the conversation here, that seemed to be more of a frustrated accident than a pivot. Sylvian and Hollis went further out, OMD then pivoted further in

Also great posts by Milton and NTI

Weirdly enough I think the dissonance between "the ink spilled" and "the reality of these records" is less because the records aren't amazing, and more because people dwell on The Silences! The Ambience! The Pivot! And So On! instead of just correctly identifying that the reason Talk Talk are so beloved are because Mark Hollis's voice is fucking amazing to listen to.

So many friends of mine who idolize Talk Talk have attempted to create music in the same vein as their latter-day albums and they never succeed, as nice as the results are, because nobody sings as good as Hollis did

xpost I think that's fair, kind of like ABC's "Beauty Stab?"

xpost OTM. His voice is incredible. So plaintive.

A lot of the arty guys from that time went more for cold/alienation, but Hollis (like Buchanan I guess) went a different direction. Gabriel eventually went that direction, too.

Controversial music opinion coming up: his voice is the thing I least like about Talk Talk.

Huh. Would you listen to it if it were instrumental a la Tortoise or whatever? Honest question, I don't know if I would.

No, it's needs vocals, I'm just not a fan of his voice.

Hollis' vocal were not amazing to listen to at first! The band attracted me.

Later I learned I had to go to him, not vice versa.

*vocals

I like his voice, but I could see the same singing/vocal melodies seeming a bit trite in a more conventional instrumental setting.

I like the way his vocals interact with the instrumental parts in particular -- it sounds like his band was a ship that was destroyed in a storm and now he's mourning over the broken pieces of it that washed up on shore.

that's how I learned to listen

Laughing Talk

LOL, that's a dumb mistake on my part.

I thought the part about 'preciously rockist admiration' was the bigger mistake.

Unless Morton Feldman was the ultimate rockist, in which case, my mind is blown to smithereens.

So many friends of mine who idolize Talk Talk have attempted to create music in the same vein as their latter-day albums and they never succeed, as nice as the results are, because nobody sings as good as Hollis did

super otm