The Only Note Left Is Silence

Is it better to burn out than fade away? I suspect Mark Hollis, singer with the band Talk Talk, would have profoundly disagreed. Talk Talk were a band who used every note until all that was left was silence. That it seems was the perfect way to go.

Talk Talk came from Essex. They were a band who were local to me. But also not local to me, because they seemed to live in their own world. In their early days they had hits with a sound not dissimilar to other synthesiser led pop acts of their time, chief among these I suppose being Duran Duran. (The repeated word element in both band names is pure coincidence).

At that point in their career I was probably barely aware they existed. The hits were catchy and in later life I grew a fondness for them, but at the time my musical compass was directing me elsewhere.

I only discovered them for myself on their awkward second album. The moment between adolescence and adulthood. I’m not sure why I became so obsessed at that point. The songs were quite dry. They sounded rather pretentious. The singer had a distinctive but slightly over expressive voice. They could’ve been part of the era that signalled in punk, not part of the world that had developed after punk, a world that made up so much of what defined my musical tastes at that time.

I think I’d borrowed that second album from the library. I had a taped copy I’d made for myself that skipped on a couple of the tracks due to the cheap record player I owned. The music was an outlier and I shouldn’t have liked it, but somehow I kept coming back to it, imperfections and all. (I probably wouldn’t have revealed my love for it at the time, as though it were best kept as some secret shame. But thankfully I’ve since outgrown the need for such pointless euphemisms as ‘guilty pleasure’.)

Talk Talk achieved adulthood with their third album, The Colour of Spring. They sounded more organic now, although still a bit off kilter from where my tastes lay. But this record had hits. Big hits. What had sometimes seemed bombastic on their second album worked better in the new musical stylings of their third.

In 1986 music had moved on from the likes of Duran Duran. There had been a few years of what I’ve termed ‘the plastic age’ and will write about elsewhere, but bands like The Smiths had broken out from that. Guitars were back in fashion. Kitchen sink dramas and real life usurped the jet setting lifestyles and cocaine vibe of earlier Thatcherite 80s pop music.

Talk Talk seem an odd beast in that 86 age of The Smiths and jangly indie pop and the iconic C-86 compilation. But they weren’t really outsiders. I was at university then and The Colour of Spring was a touchstone record among my circle of friends, alongside Soul Mining by The The (There’s that repeated word element again) and others. These were the tapes that were shared around and copied. I think Soul Mining was mine and The Colour of Spring belonged to either Ian or Dave who lived in the same block as me.

Even an egregious use of a choir of children singing on the opening track couldn’t turn me against that album. The songs were a mix of bold and reflective; the reflective, quieter ones pointing to where the band would be heading next. The hit songs chimed perfectly with my moods of introspection and a growing sense that I didn’t quite fit in. (Maybe they weren’t so different to The Smiths after all).

The now acknowledged masterpiece in the Talk Talk catalogue was to be their fourth album, Spirit of Eden. This was the record that broke the band in so many different ways. The album had no hit songs. Their record company hated it (because it had no hit songs). It took months and months to record. Lead singer Mark Hollis had set out to finally make the record he’d always wanted to make and to make it on his terms. It came out like jazz. The band had taken over a London studio and improvised their way through hours and hours and then many more hours of recordings. Guest musicians had come and gone. Time stood still. All the various participants, including collaborators, producers, engineers, had gone slowly mad. When it was released, few people bought it.

The record label wanted a return to the hits for the next record. The band – Mark Hollis by this point was the band in all but name – wanted out of their contract. Legal action ensued. Eventually the band won. There were still plenty of other labels out there happy to snap them up. They got a £2 million contract to produce two further albums. (Yes, that was the kind of money floating around in the music industry before the internet and streaming services knocked all that out of the water).

In time people came to recognise the greatness of Spirit of Eden. Nowadays you can find plenty of musicians who would cite that record as an influence. The follow up was called Laughing Stock and could superficially be considered more of the same. Improvised. Laboured over for nine or ten months of a year in the same studio as its predecessor. But one of the three surviving original members of Talk Talk had left by this time. And the drummer had been downgraded to just another session player – an odd decision, since his rhythms are so crucial to the album, but there you go. Many people see it as a darker and even more impenetrable cousin to Spirit of Eden. Personally I prefer it, but maybe that’s just because it’s less well known.

What Mark Hollis had come to understand was the value of silence. The less is more principle. The final Talk Talk albums are often very quiet affairs, although they can be noisy and discordant when they need to be. I’ve written a lot elsewhere about how I feel overengineering music is a bad move, how tinkering endlessly in search of perfection will suck the life out of everything. I stand firmly by that opinion and I happily cite these two albums as the exceptions that prove this rule.

The reason I’m writing about Talk Talk today is because I just watched a brilliant fan made documentary about Laughing Stock. Afterwards I went back and listened to the album again and loved it more than I ever had.

Mark Hollis made one further record, this time under his own name. I guess that fulfilled the contract of £2 million for two albums. The solo album is also worth a listen. It’s in the same universe as the better known records that preceded it. After that, the contract was complete and he’d used up all the notes he needed to play. What remained was only silence.

From then until his death some years later, he never recorded again.