A Life (1955 - 2019)
There's not many left now.
I didn't think I was someone who had heroes. It seems so adolescent - looking up to someone and thinking they're cool just because they're good at doing something, usually just one thing. That's why so many people are coming unstuck now as their heroes are revealed to have been flawed and clay-footed, often to the point of being stripped of a knighthood or having their grave concreted over. I've never liked sport of any stripe - I find it genuinely baffling and consider it a social evil - and most of my favourite historical and artistic figures did amazing things but acted in ways that seem very foreign to the way we live now, because they lived in a place that wasn't here. The past was very strange: full of darkness and hardship and dirt and disease. And wars, absolutely jam-packed with wars. It was the past's solution to everything: gather up a load of poor people and get them to march slowly at another group of poor and watch them turn to mince as they meet. Top lark. That's how we'll settle this boundary dispute - the blood of poor people. The past was not a romantic place despite what Barbara Cartland tells you. And her testimony is moot anyway - she was from the past!
We should treat anybody born in the past as though they're suffering from PTSD. They have seen terrible things. They are brutalised. They don't even have deodorant. Nevertheless people older than me lived valuable brilliant lives and serve as examples to other human beings. I won't name them - that would be embarrassing and no doubt they'll be outed as monsters at some point in the future.
But I liked Mark Hollis and his band Talk Talk. He died yesterday at the age of 64. He aged on the sly - he was younger than me when he released his last, eponymous album in 1998. For the last twenty odd years he maintained the silence that his work had long threatened. It was as if noise and silence continually warred in his his head and ultimately silence won. He preferred it. "Before you play two notes learn to play one note," he said, "And don't play one note unless you've got a reason to play it." He ran out of reasons.
His reputation largely rests on three albums released in the mid-eighties: The Colour of Spring, Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock. I've been listening to The Colour of Spring all day. It was his hit record - it sold two million copies. Who to? Who bought this strange, murky, desperate music? His voice is always a tremulous, wraith-like thing, muttering and keening. When he sings "Gotta give it up!" what does he mean? Drugs, a failed relationship, the ghost? "You can't do it," he shrugs as the song fades into silence. "You can't do it." This record is up and down. "Happiness is easy" with its children's choir singing about sailing the sea to Galilee is jolly enough and "Life's what you make", despite the double-edged title, is emphatically jaunty, almost funky, with power guitar solos - the closest he ever came to his stated intention of making a record like Steve Winwood's "Arc of a Diver". "Living in another world" is huge, all forward momentum; its a rush, like you're walking through an explosion and nothing can touch you. But there's always that voice: fraught and frayed, crying out for some spiritual want, for something desperately out of reach; the artist as Tantalus. I haven't listened to this record for a while. It's brash and slightly proggy and you can guess that it hit home with the sort of people who bought Peter Gabriel albums around the same time. And these days I have a lot of time for those eighties Peter Gabriel albums. Well, the singles.
But I listen to Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock every week. The solo album, which I like as much, I listen to less. Its so quiet. Its so maddeningly gnomic. So much seems unspoken because its unspeakable. Its too intimate for comfort. It's confessional and yet tells you nothing. It makes me feel incredibly sad in a way that is unseemly for a middle-aged man - I want to wallow in it. It could lead to bad poetry.
The other two records - and for me they are the same record - are brighter and louder and warmer. They're are as satisfying as music gets and I don't just mean rock music: I mean all music. Its up there. The sheer beauty, the sheer certainty of the choices, the knowledge, the rightness. The music here is like Picasso drawing a line - it knows exactly where it is going. The legend tells us that Hollis ditched 80% of the music recorded for these albums. He kept the right 20% percent: every noise, blip, or second of amplifier hiss is perfect. These records are like Platonic solids. They shouldn't really exist. But they do even while the man who made them doesn't.
I still don't think you should have heroes, really. I have nothing in common with this wingnut from Tottenham and we wouldn't have been friends. I'm a people pleaser, a suck up: I want people to like me ( a strategy that rarely pays off). I'm so far from single-minded that I can barely cope with just one head. There are many things I do quite well and there is nothing I do brilliantly.
Mark Hollis was a visionary: he made the records he wanted, he didn't give a shit about whether or not they were commercial and he stopped when he decided that he didn't want to do it any more and never made any more. I'm nothing like him. But I would dearly like to be a bit more like that man. Check out my belt-buckle: "W.W.M.H.D."
"What Would Mark Hollis Do?"
I didn't think I was someone who had heroes. It seems so adolescent - looking up to someone and thinking they're cool just because they're good at doing something, usually just one thing. That's why so many people are coming unstuck now as their heroes are revealed to have been flawed and clay-footed, often to the point of being stripped of a knighthood or having their grave concreted over. I've never liked sport of any stripe - I find it genuinely baffling and consider it a social evil - and most of my favourite historical and artistic figures did amazing things but acted in ways that seem very foreign to the way we live now, because they lived in a place that wasn't here. The past was very strange: full of darkness and hardship and dirt and disease. And wars, absolutely jam-packed with wars. It was the past's solution to everything: gather up a load of poor people and get them to march slowly at another group of poor and watch them turn to mince as they meet. Top lark. That's how we'll settle this boundary dispute - the blood of poor people. The past was not a romantic place despite what Barbara Cartland tells you. And her testimony is moot anyway - she was from the past!
We should treat anybody born in the past as though they're suffering from PTSD. They have seen terrible things. They are brutalised. They don't even have deodorant. Nevertheless people older than me lived valuable brilliant lives and serve as examples to other human beings. I won't name them - that would be embarrassing and no doubt they'll be outed as monsters at some point in the future.
But I liked Mark Hollis and his band Talk Talk. He died yesterday at the age of 64. He aged on the sly - he was younger than me when he released his last, eponymous album in 1998. For the last twenty odd years he maintained the silence that his work had long threatened. It was as if noise and silence continually warred in his his head and ultimately silence won. He preferred it. "Before you play two notes learn to play one note," he said, "And don't play one note unless you've got a reason to play it." He ran out of reasons.
His reputation largely rests on three albums released in the mid-eighties: The Colour of Spring, Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock. I've been listening to The Colour of Spring all day. It was his hit record - it sold two million copies. Who to? Who bought this strange, murky, desperate music? His voice is always a tremulous, wraith-like thing, muttering and keening. When he sings "Gotta give it up!" what does he mean? Drugs, a failed relationship, the ghost? "You can't do it," he shrugs as the song fades into silence. "You can't do it." This record is up and down. "Happiness is easy" with its children's choir singing about sailing the sea to Galilee is jolly enough and "Life's what you make", despite the double-edged title, is emphatically jaunty, almost funky, with power guitar solos - the closest he ever came to his stated intention of making a record like Steve Winwood's "Arc of a Diver". "Living in another world" is huge, all forward momentum; its a rush, like you're walking through an explosion and nothing can touch you. But there's always that voice: fraught and frayed, crying out for some spiritual want, for something desperately out of reach; the artist as Tantalus. I haven't listened to this record for a while. It's brash and slightly proggy and you can guess that it hit home with the sort of people who bought Peter Gabriel albums around the same time. And these days I have a lot of time for those eighties Peter Gabriel albums. Well, the singles.
But I listen to Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock every week. The solo album, which I like as much, I listen to less. Its so quiet. Its so maddeningly gnomic. So much seems unspoken because its unspeakable. Its too intimate for comfort. It's confessional and yet tells you nothing. It makes me feel incredibly sad in a way that is unseemly for a middle-aged man - I want to wallow in it. It could lead to bad poetry.
The other two records - and for me they are the same record - are brighter and louder and warmer. They're are as satisfying as music gets and I don't just mean rock music: I mean all music. Its up there. The sheer beauty, the sheer certainty of the choices, the knowledge, the rightness. The music here is like Picasso drawing a line - it knows exactly where it is going. The legend tells us that Hollis ditched 80% of the music recorded for these albums. He kept the right 20% percent: every noise, blip, or second of amplifier hiss is perfect. These records are like Platonic solids. They shouldn't really exist. But they do even while the man who made them doesn't.
I still don't think you should have heroes, really. I have nothing in common with this wingnut from Tottenham and we wouldn't have been friends. I'm a people pleaser, a suck up: I want people to like me ( a strategy that rarely pays off). I'm so far from single-minded that I can barely cope with just one head. There are many things I do quite well and there is nothing I do brilliantly.
Mark Hollis was a visionary: he made the records he wanted, he didn't give a shit about whether or not they were commercial and he stopped when he decided that he didn't want to do it any more and never made any more. I'm nothing like him. But I would dearly like to be a bit more like that man. Check out my belt-buckle: "W.W.M.H.D."
"What Would Mark Hollis Do?"
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