Talk Talk (RIP Mark Hollis)

"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

Barely anyone I heard take direct influence from TT managed to capture the dynamic, the energy, the chaos, the dissonance. They mostly just made lovely (and boring) quiet, sparse, spacious music. For me the exciting bits came from the push-me-pull-you dynamics, the way a groove would be so luscious and inviting but there'd be distorted elements. That's where the catharsis and excitement comes from. Otherwise it's just ambient. That's why the solo album, as much as I like it and as lovely as it is, never did it for me as much as the band albums, because it didn't have that volume and dissonance.

The music and the voice are absolutely as important as each other, for me.

Hollis's voice is a big part of it, for sure. But those copycat bands also tend to lack his (and Friese-Greene's) profound understanding of composition. I doubt it's the kind of music that can be replicated anyway, you have to betray it on some level if you wish to approximate its secrets.

i didn't like his voice in the beginning but now i love it, without it the music would be incomplete. i find it sounds like the cry of a shot deer. not that i know how that sounds...

Yeah, to the extent post-rock albums imitated him, many approximated at best. I think a lot of them lack not only the compositional understanding, but the emotional depth and the sincerity of intent. Spirit of Eden, Laughing Stock and the solo feel like records Hollis needed to make, as though he had musical ideas and feelings he had been frustrated he couldn't express in a more pop setting.

Then there are guys like Jim O'Rourke (who I like a lot, tbc), who have the compositional understanding but sometimes feel hampered by a need to constantly be clever and to not risk vulnerability.

i think the thing with his voice is that it's someone a showing a great deal of control and sensitivity with what seems at first to be quite a rough and unschooled instrument. sometimes he reminds me of weller at his gentlist but thank god he mostly avoids that horrible barkiness that PW inevitably slips into

(Weller, fwiw, another big Traffic fan!)

come to think of it, winwood played on both stanley road and colour of spring

anyone know where mh was living btw? there's a comment under this piece in the guardian that's been bugging me all day but i can't work it out at all:

I’d love to know which bit of W he lived. I’m from RP - I’d love it if it was there x

Barely anyone I heard take direct influence from TT managed to capture the dynamic, the energy, the chaos, the dissonance. They mostly just made lovely (and boring) quiet, sparse, spacious music. For me the exciting bits came from the push-me-pull-you dynamics, the way a groove would be so luscious and inviting but there'd be distorted elements. That's where the catharsis and excitement comes from. Otherwise it's just ambient. That's why the solo album, as much as I like it and as lovely as it is, never did it for me as much as the band albums, because it didn't have that volume and dissonance.

The music and the voice are absolutely as important as each other, for me.

― Hey Bob (Scik Mouthy), Wednesday, February 27, 2019 11:11 AM (thirty-six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Quite fucking true - my otm was re: the idea that sheer character of vocals is one of the biggest things sinking the aspirant TT hommager before they even start. They can get closer on the timbral/compositional front, are at least not prevented by their gross physical bodies from getting closer on that front, but there too no one has come within a league of what MH/TF-G achieved. The thing that knocked my head off about laughing stock when it came out was the sheer PROFILE of it - this was music with a real skyline to it. A skyline which has then been artfully ruined in the most astonishing way. For years i hunted for more things anywhere in rock and its mutations that could give me that sense of horizontal profile. That was the main thing that drove me into classical music really, I couldn't find more than crumbs of it anywhere else.

agree that the solo album does not have as much of this quality despite its wonders.

W = Wimbledon
RP = Raynes Park

xp

That was the main thing that drove me into classical music really, I couldn't find more than crumbs of it anywhere else.

Great post, Jon; cosign (the whole thing, but this bit in particular).

ah, i guessed it was something park! thanks anag.

At the risk of being fairly obvious, if you compare Hollis's solo record with the contemporary Orang releases it's fairly easy to make the case that they demonstrated in different ways how the members apparently -- emphasis on apparently, the truth is likely more muddled -- showed which members brought which sounds and approach to the fore.

I feel like tagging Talk Talk as a post rock band is like tagging MBV as shoegazers: neither of them had anything to do with those things. Sure, their influence on those genres is felt, but they are light years apart from it.

there are multiple strains of post-rock and multiple ideas of what post-rock is and was, it is much foggier than "shoegaze"

completely ridiculous to suggest mbv had nothing to do with shoegaze btw

post-rock is just a loose, after-the-fact term that was applied to a wide range of bands that in some way or other use rock instrumentation and some element of a "rock ethos" in combination with modern compositional influences (modern classical, jazz, minimalism, musique concrete, etc.) I think it fits Talk Talk just fine.

fits can too

To me, shoegaze bands all came up in the wake of MBV. MBV themselves had nothing to do with it.

Mentioned earlier, but wasn't the term "post-rock" originally devised to describe TT specifically?

I thought it was for Disco Inferno

reynolds used it to describe DI and bark psychosis and moonshake and laika and seefeel and all those bands, but specifically mentioned talk talk and the cocteaus as antecedents

So really DI and Bark and Moonshake/Laika is ... Post-Post-Rock.