The death of Mark Hollis has proved more upsetting than I expected. I've never considered writing anything about, or musically imitating his singular later works, versus, say, Kevin Shields' best stuff, because Talk Talk’s records so far exceed description or comprehension. I think a lot of musicians are sharing this same weird itch right now. Even a singular and self-directed artist, like Matt Johnson of The The...if you wanted to, you could do a kind of pub-grade impression of his voice, like so many have with Morrissey, and everyone would smile forgivingly and raise a pint and the evening would rise accordingly. And you can work out the guitar effects and tunings, the techniques in Kevin Shields' recipes. But you can't sing like Mark Hollis, and more pointedly, and oddly so, you can't really play guitar like him either.
Ultimately, I don't think you can hear like Mark Hollis, which is why nothing sounds like Spirit of Eden, or Laughing Stock, or his more balanced if liminal solo album. People who develop a passion for music usually experience a peace bordering on religion upon hearing this stuff. And none of us writers and extroverts will ever add to or subtract anything from their legacy.
I really expected Mark to come back around in his seventies as like a Gandalf figure for pop music. It's not writers that regale us in their old age, it's artists, artists who've closed their own book and ripened on the vine of everyday life, of doing the school run and making sandwiches with the crusts cut off. They're the only ones who can tell us what all of this really means, or amounts to. Mark didn't tell us anything, except in his music. Which is deafening.
As he lived so many lives as a musician, and was almost pathologically private in all other respects, Mark's footprint in this world is necessarily obscured. His manic, silly pop material struck a fashionable nerve, and success in this sphere was so hilarious to him that he was able to enjoy it for a few years.
The first thing to know in attempting to calculate Mark (again, as a musician), is that he had a Cool Older Brother, Ed (they also had a younger brother, but that relationship was never broached by Mark). Ed Hollis was a DJ and scene-maker during the heyday of punk, and like a lot of too-old-to-rock types, he fell in as a cut-rate producer of instamatic yobbo demos. He took a shine to and managed a deeply uncool, regressive pub-rock cover band called Eddie and the Hot Rods. "Wooly Bully," "96 Tears," and an atrocious medley of "Gloria" and "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" are among their early crimes, but the band found unpredictable redemption during the overripe second summer of punk, with the timeless and tender power-pop of “Do Anything You Wanna Do.” Of present relevance, Ed Hollis wrote it.
Under Ed's wing, Mark discovered he could sing, and they put together a fairly shit band just as the amphetamine rush of punk started to wear off. On the back of Ed's blag and contacts, they landed a slot on one of so many tossed-off "punk" compilations, Streets. Two odd things about this record, beyond the early version of Ed and Mark's “Talk Talk:” it's the first album Beggars Banquet ever released (BEGA1), and a lot of the groups on it are pub-rock acts from the Manchester scene that gave us Buzzcocks and Joy Division: Slaughter and the Dogs, the Drones, the Nosebleeds (famous for featuring Morrissey at one or two gigs), and poet-performer John Cooper Clarke (who, like Joy Division, hailed from Salford, which is close enough).
The Hollis family was maybe more-than-middle class down Tottenham, and it shows badly in Mark and Ed's first handful of songs as the Reaction, a sub-Jam Mod revival proposition that crested with one single, the forgotten “I Can't Resist” b/w “I’m a Case.” Island put it out, ‘cos Ed had written "Do Anything You Wanna Do," and that was a legitimate hit for the label. You don't need a Turing machine to figure out how his little brother got a record deal (or two).
As punk fractured into prim "new wave," grating art poses, and posh New Romanticism, Mark and Ed spent a year scheming. With talk of fame and fortune, and plenty of credibility to back it up, Ed blagged the rhythm section off a dire ska/reggae act busy dying in Essex (Paul Webb and Lee Harris). With Mark's initially eager participation, Talk Talk was meticulously crafted to sell a shitload of records, sharing record label, production team, and management – everything but the mousse – with a shameless bunch of poseurs from Birmingham called Duran Duran.
Talk Talk's first two records are all wrapped up in their proximity to double-Duran, the rise of "dance remixes," and the instant success of Tears for Fears, an act Talk Talk had much more in common with, musically. Tears for Fears' debut went to UK #1 its second week in the shops, which is Beatles territory. Their follow-up, Songs from the Big Chair, took over the planet in 1985. This period confused a lot of corporate types who were ready to fire the A&R guys who wouldn't shut up about Tears for Fears and Talk Talk and Echo and the Bunnymen. Far more than punk, the early-to-mid-'80s represents the true takeover of the music industry by "outsiders." While it's true much of the music quickly became sugar-sweet and harmless, Mark's experience lent him a more sardonic eye before Talk Talk had played its first gig. It took Wire years to get over their pretentious single-mindedness; likewise Echo and even New Order, who were really fucking heavy and from one angle dull as shit right through to "Confusion." Historic as "Blue Monday" is, it only took one dreadful Top of the Pops performance to set them back fully two years.
So Mark played a part, like a pop star twist on Mark E. Smith, and thought that was obvious, and that people were getting it, but instead it became clear that nobody was, and further that nobody ever would. What I suspect Mark came to understand is that the audience for meta-textual pop contrivance is pretty much himself, his friends, and the sort of people likely to read this far into an essay like this. The world wants Wham! with a smile, not a wink. When you realize that subtle cleverness and success are mutually exclusive, everything gets smaller. Your ambition shrinks, because that endless landscape stretching out in front of you, that you tried to fill up with everything inside you, it pales that little bit. You can still catch a whiff of sweet riverside air, and whatever pastoral pocket of nostalgia or genetics never leaves you, but things aren't going to work out the way you imagined, at least not at the scale you hoped. Mark refused to accept that.
It's embarrassing to project psychology on Mark Hollis, because he could've given a shit for anything I have to say. He never cared to make anyone understand what he went through, or why he did any of it, and that invites so much hysterical adoration. It's the kind of conduct and attitude that once made men saints, and we're talking about pop music. It's really not that grave, is it? Mark (and Ed) notched a couple of solid hits, then it was getting to be four years on, and music was getting really basic and formulaic, and Mark's not much to look at, and that whole nervy, skinny-tie energy was well past its sell-by date, and he was walking around in a fucking pea coat and watch cap, in some strange prayer to the working-class authenticity of the fishmonger...
“Talk Talk...yeh I remember that one ‘It's My Life,’ I got that and ‘Here Comes the Rain Again’ one Sunday after church, I was probably nine or ten. What was that, 1984?”
At the time, the derisive answer for how Mark Hollis shook off being indexed as an exemplar of disposable, off-kilter ‘80s pop to write The Colour of Spring was the success of Tears for Fears. That's certainly how EMI looked at things, and a lot of critics used the comparison to sell papers. This is largely forgotten today, especially in America, and I have to wonder if Mark hadn't felt like he couldn't win, even with a record as original and wondrous as The Colour of Spring. He couldn't make sure that only people like us, who would understand, would hear it. And he couldn't know that thirty years later it would sound almost ridiculous to compare “Life’s What You Make It” with “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” because of how Tears for Fears have been fixed in the annals of pop, and devolved into simpler things, rather than purer things.
So on the one hand I wonder if Mark felt that his music could never get a fair shake, and that caused the retreat into self that gave us Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock. But then I think about the success of Peter Gabriel's So, and how comparable to, and in some pockets perhaps inspired by Talk Talk a few of those tracks were. Gabriel is now on record with a Tweet-length eulogy for Mark, which isn't exactly as dramatic as Mark giving a eulogy for someone in 2019, but it counts for something. Maybe he became frustrated and dark in that bitter, recriminating way, but I like to remember how Mark Hollis felt on becoming a used-up pop star the first time around:
