‘In Another World: The Four Seasons of Talk Talk’ Guest Blog by Graeme Thomson

Big thanks to Graeme Thomson for sharing this edited extract from his brilliant new book, In Another World: The Four Seasons of Talk Talk

Graeme reflects on Mark Hollis’s 1998 solo record – the last music of any note Hollis released, followed by 21 years of almost complete silence.

Mark Hollis was released on 26 January 1998. The blunt, joyless butt of winter. The eternal three a.m. of the night shift, seasonally speaking. And the floor scrapings of the bazaar, from a commercial point of view.

Exactly twenty-five years later in Edinburgh, the January skies are bleached out, coloured the same shade of grey-white-nothing as the record cover.

I have spent the past short while listening to ‘Westward Bound’, the sixth track on the album – playing it through, then picking up the needle and dropping it carefully back at the start. I’m hovering around the record player, crouching over it every few minutes to replay the song before sitting, stiffly, cross-legged to listen to it once more. The album sleeve is on my lap. I keep looking at it, flipping it from front to back, as though doing so will yield some secrets about the music playing. I’m sure it will, in time. That is its job, after all. For now, the photograph of what looks like a small, squished woodland creature being prepared as a sacrificial offering isn’t helping much.

This was how I spent much of my teens, communing with the holy trinity of stylus, vinyl and a square foot of cardboard. Now, as then, I’m looking for clues. I’m trying to hear what Mark Hollis heard, or at least what he was searching for, when he wrote and recorded this song – and, by extension, the album that comprises the last significant musical statement he ever made.

What does the record sound like? There’s a question. It’s fair to say that we are now fully outside the realms of what could plausibly be classed as popular music. The dynamics lean to minimalist jazz, the instrumentation to deconstructed pan-tonal chamber music. The sound is woody, entirely acoustic and yet rarely comfortable. It clicks and creaks, breaks and flutters, thin as the wind. There is no whump, no clatter. Everything is brushed. We can feel the room, but the microphones bring us even closer than that. I imagine I can hear the musicians holding their breath as they play. When ‘Westward Bound’ ends, I realise I have been listening in the same way. On the final note comes an exhalation.

On this track, no attempt is made to separate the body of the musician and the body of the guitar. The strings squeak and the belly of the instrument groans. Hollis’s voice might be the smallest, least there sound I have ever heard, which means, somewhat contradictorily, that it is startlingly present. The force of his quietude is almost shocking. Listen closely and we can track the infinitesimal movements of his head via the minute shifts in the cadence of his voice. We hear his lips part on the word ‘child’. Many of the lyrics are often impossible to discern – which seems at least half the point. Throughout much of the album, the vocals are often rendered as simply one more acoustic instrument, his singing a quiver in the grain, a tonal blip, a quavering incantation.

‘Westward Bound’ is a track which takes time to form. Listen to it once and it sounds as though it is surely the product of improvisation; a first take, an exploration gamely ventured upon without a map. Hesitant. Almost empty. Listen to it a few more times and … well, patterns emerge, yet still it struggles to come into focus. The beautiful opening guitar motif and Hollis’s tumbling scrap of melody seem to arrive, only to lose their bearings and scatter shyly out of view.

The finished track might be the scribbled outline of some undefined shape, a beautifully crooked branch in search of its trunk. But no. ‘Westward Bound’ is an idea which has been pursued fully to its final destination. The music took a year to write, each part scrupulously annotated. The lyrics were sweated over for a further three months. It was recorded with absolute precision. The hesitancy is the point. This can be frustrating until you realise it is actually a gift: a song that sounds new every time you play it.

To help understand, I spoke with Dominic Miller, co-writer of the track, who also plays that gorgeous nylon-string guitar part. A sought after session guitarist who has recorded and toured extensively with Simply Red and Sting, Miller, it turns out, is almost as baffled as I am. ‘When you hear that song, it sort of sounds like we just made it up on the spot,’ he tells me. I nod. ‘But, actually, it is incredibly detailed and every single detail is considered. It’s not a jam. It’s very, very carefully constructed. Although it sounds incredibly simple, it wasn’t to us. I urge you to listen to it and bear in mind that it took nearly a year to write and it just doesn’t sound like it at all. I mean, genius!’

It is tempting to brand anything we can’t easily or immediately digest with the stamp of genius, as though inaccessibility or complexity is somehow a grander prize than instant connection. Is the act of taking two years to write and meticulously map out a song that sounds improvised evidence of genius? Or of something else?

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It is understandable sometimes to wonder whether Hollis treated music-making as a puzzle, an academic pursuit; then you hear the results and realise all he wanted to do was create music that was, emotionally speaking, absolutely true. As Talk Talk bassist Paul Webb put it, in a warm statement following Hollis’s death in February 2019, ‘he knew how to create depth of feeling with sound and space like no other’. Warne Livesey, who has sufficient cause, perhaps, to feel a little sore about the solo album after being removed from the project and losing his co-producer credit, is instead generous and perceptive. ‘Mark had a magical ability to spend a huge amount of time working on music in a very intense and exacting way, but come up with something that sounds fresh, simple, economic and emotionally powerful, and as if it was effortless.’

The highwire sense of lightness, extreme quiet and fragility on ‘Westward Bound’ is characteristic of the album, though not entirely defining. There are songs that kick up a fuss, where the drums click-clack, trumpets flare and harmonicas warp and wail. (As a sidenote, we would all do well in life to find someone who loves us the way Mark Hollis loved Mark Feltham’s harmonica playing.) But the dynamics defer to silence.

We will never know whether Mark Hollis was consciously conceived as a final statement – whether something profound was being resolved in these clear, airy, alternately restful and disjointed, determinedly ludic songs. In interviews to promote the record, he spoke in qualified terms about the future: ‘if I make another album…’; ‘any album I might make…’ Dominic Miller says Hollis ‘told me after we did that record that he wasn’t going to do any more’.

There is certainly plenty of meat here for those who wish to read his last work as the parable of a man who had struggled to make meaningful and lasting art in the face of many trials and indignities. There are many lines on the record which seem to explicitly reference the hard bargains struck over the years in order for Hollis to commercialise the music he had been compelled to create. The virtue/disgust binary is boiled down to a series of stark professional epitaphs.

‘Set up to sell my soul.’

‘A song asale / Sold heart.’

‘So sold out.’

‘Left no life no more.’

‘Sown my money / Sold my shirt.’

‘Sun eclipsed to shame.’

Sale, sell, sold. The transactional blues. The bare bones of flogging your art. And now? As he declared during the beatific simplicity of the album’s opening track, ‘The Colour of Spring’, it seemed Hollis was ready to ‘soar the bridges that I burned.’

In Another World is out now in hardback and eBook, published by New Modern