Talk Talk

Beginnings

Mark Hollis was born in Tottenham in January 1955. His older brother Ed, a DJ and the manager of Eddie and the Hot Rods, steered him toward everything from free jazz to prog and American garage rock. Mark studied child psychology at the University of Sussex, dropped out, worked as a lab technician and wrote songs in the evenings; his first band, The Reaction, made one single for Island in 1978. In 1981 Island's publishing arm paid for demos, and Ed found him a rhythm section from the Southend area, the drummer Lee Harris and bassist Paul Webb. With Simon Brenner on keyboards they became Talk Talk, a name Hollis said he chose because it was laughable: it means chatter, and they were all very quiet.

EMI signed them in 1982 and put them with the producer Colin Thurston, who had worked with Bowie and Duran Duran. The comparisons were inevitable. They supported Duran Duran, had a top-twenty British hit with Today, and released The Party's Over that July. Brenner left in 1983, and the producer Tim Friese-Greene came in. He was never officially a member, but from then on he was Hollis's co-writer and the band's fourth mind.

The pop years

It's My Life (1984) was a hit across continental Europe, especially in the Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland, and its title song became their only American top-forty single. Britain was slower to notice. The Colour of Spring (1986) was the turn: Hollis declared that he hated synthesizers, which had only ever been an economy, and the album was made with piano, Hammond organ, Steve Winwood, a children's choir and a long list of session players. Life's What You Make It took it to number eight in Britain, the band's peak there, and it went gold in several countries.

Their last tour ran from April to September 1986. Its London show at Hammersmith Odeon and its Montreux set were later released. After the final dates in Spain, Hollis said he was finished with playing live: the music they were about to make could not be reproduced on stage, and he had no wish to try.

Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock

With an open budget and complete control from EMI, Hollis, Friese-Greene and the engineer Phill Brown spent ten months in Wessex Studios in a blacked-out room lit by an oil projector, a strobe and a few lamps, recording hours of improvisation by Harris, Webb and some eighteen other musicians, then editing the best seconds into music. Brown said every note on the record was placed where it is, and that the album was an illusion. Spirit of Eden, released in September 1988, has no obvious singles, uses silence as an instrument, and ranges from near-silence to violent noise. EMI asked for re-recordings; Hollis refused. The band would not tour it. The dispute that followed went to the Court of Appeal, which found for the band in 1989.

Webb left in 1988. Talk Talk signed to Polydor's jazz imprint Verve, which guaranteed funding without interference, and went back to Wessex with Brown for Laughing Stock (1991). The method was taken further: about fifty musicians played, eighteen made the record, there were no clocks and no demos, and Brown said the discipline lay in erasing eighty percent of what was recorded. Hollis called it arranged spontaneity and named the jazz ethic and Can's Tago Mago as touchstones. It sold modestly and is now ranked among the best albums of the 1990s. Soon after, the band dissolved; Hollis said he wanted to concentrate on his family.

After

Hollis made one solo album, Mark Hollis (1998), recorded acoustically with two microphones, then withdrew from music almost entirely. Webb and Harris formed .O.rang, and Webb later made Out of Season with Portishead's Beth Gibbons as Rustin Man; Friese-Greene recorded as Heligoland. EMI's compilation Natural History reached number three in Britain in 1990 and sent It's My Life back up the chart, while an unauthorized remix album the next year drew a lawsuit from Hollis. Mark Hollis died in February 2019, aged 64. A celebration concert at the Royal Festival Hall followed that November, and in 2026 former players marked the fortieth anniversary of The Colour of Spring at Kentish Town.

Legacy

The last two albums are now credited, alongside Slint, with inventing post-rock, and cited by Radiohead, Elbow, Bon Iver, Doves, M83, Steven Wilson and Marillion's Steve Hogarth among many others. Pitchfork gave both ten out of ten. Alan Wilder of Recoil produced a tribute album in 2012, and there are biographies by Ben Wardle and Graeme Thomson, the memoir of Phill Brown, and a Belgian documentary, In a Silent Way, made without the band's music. Hollis's own statement of method has become one of the most quoted lines in modern music.

I would rather hear one note than I would two, and I would rather hear silence than I would one note.

Mark Hollis, 1991