Mark Hollis

Mark Hollis was released on Polydor on 26 January 1998, as part of the same two-album contract as Laughing Stock. At one point it was to be called Mountains of the Moon and released under the Talk Talk name. The multitracks for each song were recorded on analog tape with a pair of Neumann M49 microphones, then digitally composited and overdubbed on a ProDigi X-850 tape recorder before being mixed back onto analog tape. At Hollis's insistence the faders were all kept at the same level, and each instrument's level was set by its distance from the microphone. Phill Brown, the engineer, found it "open, restful and at times fantastically beautiful."

A Life (1895 - 1915) is about Roland Leighton, the fiance of Vera Brittain, who was born before the turn of the century. Westward Bound was written with the guitarist Dominic Miller in jam sessions at Hollis's home studio in the mid-1990s. Hollis said at the time: "There won't be any gig, not even at home in the living room." The cover photograph by Stephen Lovell-Davis shows southern Italian Easter bread. The album was reissued on vinyl by Ba Da Bing in 2011 and by UMC/Polydor in October 2019.