Have you heard the news? I went to “New Grass” first, when I heard the news. It benefits, I think, greatly from context, from following the slow, stark, creeping loneliness of “Taphead”, which can feel like a purgatory before the new rays of sunlight break through. Even played directly, without that journey to it, without earning that pay off, it still sounds more hopeful, more beautiful, than almost anything else I’ve ever heard. “Versed in Christ should strength desert me.” Not theist, but searching, desperately, for the divinity in humanity.
I was in my very early 20s when I ‘discovered’ Talk Talk for myself. Familiar with the big radio moments but never tempted to look beneath, I remember a growing sense of their influence as I researched music online – at I Love Music, and AllMusic, and anywhere else were I could debate and read and discover – that eventually reached critical mass to inspire a purchase. I remember that sense of having found secret directions to something, not knowing what it would sound like, but hoovering up descriptions and explications before I finally took a copy home. Spirit of Eden was, of course, first. I wish I’d been 14 when The Colour Of Spring came out (instead of 7) and a fan, so I could have travelled with them. They were long gone, though, even Mark’s solo album in the past by the time I got there. I wanted to write a book about their music. Pitched a book, even, to a publisher (along with a hundred other people).
Spirit of Eden is, of course, the one that gets the attention, the one that I wanted to write a book about (well, I wanted to write a book about all their music, and use that record as the hook to do so), the one that I wrote an article about (that I was baffled and pleased to see being shared online even today, a lifetime later), but it’s the one I turn to least this last decade or so; The Colour of Spring is just as impressive – maybe more so for being a pop album, with pop songs, that you can sing along to – and so much easier to actually listen to; the darkened room and unwavering attention being increasingly difficult to achieve as you add things to the mix of your life. Mark himself didn’t seem to have much room for (making) music these last 20+ years of family life. And that’s OK.
And then there’s Laughing Stock. In the darkest, loneliest moments of my life, when all other music has felt trivial, inconsequential, I’ve turned to Laughing Stock. It’s been the only thing that felt like it had any profundity left. I’m not really a believer in profundity, as a rule. But sometimes you need it.
They were still, in their way, a pop band, even at the end; “After The Flood” has a chorus, of a sort. They didn’t eschew songwriting structures the way so many people suggest, but rather stretched them out and removed elements until it was difficult to see the pattern in the music for the space around it.
With grim inevitability I am expecting Mark Hollis’ cause of death – if we are ever told anything beyond it being a ‘short illness’ – to be cancer. Because everything is cancer right now.
Everyone talks about the gestalt, but it’s always moments that come to mind. The strings in the coda of “Myrrhman”, so slow, so simple, the most mournful sound I might have ever heard. The slow-motion drum roll at the end of “John Cope”, a b-side (to “I Believe In You”) lost to obscurity but every bit as affecting – maybe more so for its lack of attention – as Spirit of Eden itself.
The squalling, unkempt guitars in “Pictures of Bernadette”, another b-side (“Give It Up”). The plaintive, powerful cry of the titular line in “Why Is It So Hard?”, a song as good as anything from their first three albums but which barely anyone has heard. The choir – of course – in “I Believe In You”, and that mellifluous rhythm beneath it. So many others. So many.
Rest in peace, Mark Hollis. “Lifted up / reflected in returning love you sing” indeed.
Sick Mouthy 