Laughing Stock – The Road to Mark Hollis

I came of age in the horrible, tragic nightmare of the eighties. My partner in crime for the most influential of my formative years was none other than the man himself, Mike Gunn. Everyone take out their Awkward White Doofus manuals and flip straight to the High School chapter, in case you are unfamiliar with our particularly pathological fauna. Being like I was back then — which is to say, painfully shy, gawky, lonely, and bored stupid — didn’t do much to help my inability to comfortably assimilate into suburban Houston teen life. In fact, on the contrary, Texas holds the dubious honor of being the place in which I found out just how mean kids were capable of being.

I spent five years living in a northwest Houston suburb called Jersey Village before my parents finally made their mutual hatred for one another official, and my mother moved the rest of us way south of town to the Clear Lake area. The school I walked into in the fall of 1983 was also the school for about 3000 other kids, and it was this fact coupled with my personal foibles that made my fitting in a near impossibility. I languished in this setting for a full school year before I really made any friends. My first real friend was a guy named Reese who was a true-to-heart Texas cowboy. He had the whole get-up: the ridiculous accent, big truck, critter he raised for his Future Farmers of America class, affinity for guns, and burgeoning love for the Dead Kennedys and the Sex Pistols. I can only take credit for the last part. He was a really great guy, and for the record, I really wish I could locate him and say hello today.

In the lunchroom, Reese and I would sit around, bored, thinking up ways to be a nuisance to the people around us. Since sitting at a cool-person table was out of the question, we were relegated to the dork quadrant of the lunchroom. To amuse ourselves, we would waste lots of time and lunch money flicking boiled vegetables at those geeks that we found to be beneath us on the totem pole of dorkdom. Of course it’s all relative, since flicking veggies on your peers in eleventh grade isn’t exactly going to thrust you into the arms of popularity.

Our most frequent and most pliant target in the veg toss — was Mike Gunn.

I guess you should know that all of this happened before Mike and I actually got to know each other. That event came about through the interloping of my friend, Clinton.

Clinton and I were well versed in the joys of excessive beer drinking, but I was hell bent on as much negation as I could get my hands on, and knowing that Clinton was friends with a guy who could take care of this little desire of mine was an attractive prospect. It didn’t matter that I had, just months before, made a practice of flinging boiled carrots into Mike’s own carrot-hued mane. He probably forgot that anyway, I surmised (I was wrong).

Mike’s implement of choice at the time was a tiny green plastic bong, and once we were done smoking it I knew what would become my best friend for the foreseeable future. Dope.

In our cerebral travels, Mike and I visited many states of altered consciousness, all well known to other explorers of the inner world. And as any stoner will tell you, listening to music while being high is about as good as it gets. It was in this frame of mind that I discovered the music of Mark Hollis and his band, Talk Talk.

There were so many good reasons to do drugs with Mike over at his mom’s house. The pot was almost always free. Mike’s mom was notoriously lax in her enforcement of anything vaguely resembling discipline, not to mention the fact that she was almost never home. Mike had a killer stereo and a growing selection of good vinyl. The fridge was always stocked with stoner munchies. The Gunn’s had MTV.

MTV was a great way to burn away your baked hours. In retrospect, watching as many videos for songs we both hated was a real exercise in masochism, but at the time it was more like a slightly annoying diversion. So, nestled among the Bryan Adams, and Phil Collins, and MC Hammer, and Whitney Houston, was Peter Gabriel’s inventive and somewhat trippy videos, and the occasional Camper Van Beethoven, Sonic Youth, or other token hipsters, and that made you feel like things were getting more interesting when they really weren’t.

On top of that, there were the times when you would be watching MTV at like three in the morning, already convinced that aliens were running the earth, and that we were pawns in some sort of extraterrestrial cattle-wrangling ploy. Often during these nights, we would be somewhere in the ether, fried on acid, thinking our way through great circles of sophistic garble, thinking we were approaching the absolute, when all the while we were simply chasing our tails. At these times would come up the artifacts of the eighties that were actually worth a shit, things like the movie, Fandango, or the Coen brother’s first feature, Blood Simple, or Apocalypse Now, or the stray Talk Talk video.

When you have slipped the surly bonds of sanity, and left this world for another, there are often the slightest tendrils that tether you to reality that make the whole adventure one upon which to return to this world with a new understanding. This sort of revelation often comes to me cloaked in the guise of song.

One night, while roasting our synapses – I on one of my improvised piano excursions, and Mike no doubt lost in his dungeon master fantasies – we paused our travels to take a small sojourn into the bowels of MTV. We caught the video for the Talk Talk song Life’s What You Make It. For those who are unfamiliar with Mark Hollis, he has an incredible unique voice, and his music is as good an example as any of the very best in eighties pop. Talk Talk, while still plying the pop trade, was very much catchy, smart, melodic, mature, and slightly more formal than your average new romantic pop band. There is an unforced anthemic quality to Talk Talk that always takes them out of the dated quagmire and into a more timeless space. Life’s What You Make It revolves around a little four or five note melody played on the piano. The video for the song repeatedly shows a hand playing the piano part, and this image is still stuck in my mind these thousand years later. For the rest of that night I was the bitch of this song, which in some undoubtedly perverse way had become my guide through not just the night’s activities, but the untended overgrowth of the eighties. And though it has a certain Dr Phil ring to it, the passage “life’s what you make it. Celebrate it,” is really not a bad way to approach things.

So, several years later all I knew of Talk Talk was their greatest hits CD (buy it). On it was a decent selection of what made them so adept at writing pop songs for their era. In my opinion, it really is unmatched in its quality. Eventually I began to catch snippets of information about a little known “difficult” Talk Talk album that had come out and how no one knew about it but that it was a slice of multi-dimensional genius. I knew I had to hear it, so I eventually hunted it down online. Actually what I got was probably not the one I was looking for. That honor is saved for the album Spirit of Eden (which I have yet to inexplicably hear). What I got was Laughing Stock. Without reviewing it in too much depth I’ll just say that you need to check out the album, it’s beautiful.

I spent a growing amount of time wondering what the story was behind this wildly diverse band, and in particular, I wondered what the story was behind its main creative force, Mark Hollis.

To be honest, there isn’t a ton of pertinent information about Mark Hollis out there. There’s the usual biographical data, but there is little depth to what you can stumble across beyond the basic data. Hollis is someone who falls into my favorite category of artist: the uncompromising, exploratory outsider. Pegged (probably fairly), for his bristling façade, Mark Hollis is really a bit of an English treasure. Even when Talk Talk was at its most accessible peak, Hollis’ individuality and intelligence kept them from ever being another cookie-cutter eighties outfit. If you go back and listen to their output from their relatively brief tenure, you will hear a band that is constantly pushing against the boundaries of rock/pop, and occasionally jazz/ambient to arrive at something truly unique. Starting out, Hollis quickly displayed an adept ear for melody and catchy yet elaborate pop. This gave the band an early measure of financial success. As Talk Talk’s music began to leave the accessible and obvious behind, so did they leave behind their charting ability. This meant that in the depth fearing eighties, Talk Talk was bound to clash with their label, and that’s exactly what happened following the release of their seminal album The Colour of Spring. When Hollis brought his cohorts into the studio to record the follow-up, it took them an unexpectedly long 14 months to complete the project. To make matters worse, the label had no clue what they were about to hear, and in fact fully expected more along the lines of Colour. What they got was Spirit of Eden, an exploratory, heavily instrumental album that abandons the short termed concision of the pop song for the more fertile, but less commercial, fields of experimental rock and jazz-tinged ambient meandering. The controlled orchestrations of the past gave way to a much more organic and fluid sound. As you can imagine, EMI was not amused. In fact, the story goes that once one of the thugs at EMI heard the final mixes he actually cried. The album set in motion a legal battle that effectively ended both the classic line-up of the band and their time with their label. And while Spirit of Eden was widely loved by critics and a new, smaller contingent of fans, sales were poor.

Landing on Polydor after the legal wrangling with EMI, Hollis began work on his next release. By now, Hollis was working almost entirely with guest musicians, and the recordings were, by most accounts, a strange and strained series of events. There were reports of working in total darkness, of never actually seeing Hollis in person, of incredibly difficult demands placed on all involved, and ultimately of a generally high level of peculiarity surrounding Hollis’ behavior. Whatever the circumstances, Laughing Stock is a masterpiece and a creative breakthrough for a man who was soon to completely extricate himself from the public eye.

After the release of Laughing Stock, and following the refusal from Hollis to tour, citing the impossibility of reproducing his dense work in a live setting, Talk Talk finally made it official and called it a day. In 1998, Mark Hollis released his first and only solo album to more critical acclaim and more poor album sales. By now he had cemented his image as the impossible and crazy loner, which no doubt is a mix of truth and exaggeration. If you go back and read the available interviews, you can see for yourself how he is almost painfully, and quite deliberately, removing himself from the world around him. His bandmates tell of great difficulties getting through the idiosyncrasies of his demeanor. I would imagine that he is simply a man who decided that going with the flow was simply no longer an option, and that listening to your inner voice is sometimes the only way to go in order to preserve some measure of sanity in an otherwise totally insane world. What is known about him now is that Hollis lives at home with his wife and children, is a loving father, and is not sad about retreating from the public eye. He still plays and records music at home, but none of it will probably ever see the light of day. Clearly I am drawn to people like this. My best friends share these traits and so do I. And I think that Hollis going out in a blaze of glory is the ultimate “fuck you” to the shallow, vampiric vagaries of popular culture. And while I can certainly relate to his desire to make a quiet exit, as a fan, it is a shame to lose a talent as strong as his.

Picking up on Talk Talk in the way that I did those years back reminds me of the ways in which I tie narrative threads to the screenplay of my life. I have learned to define myself through the perception of that which I find important. While I share the common practice of paying less attention to the undesirable influences on my life, I am also a total whore for the exultation of my heroes (in my own internal, and practically private way). I use the story of guys like Hollis, or Paul Nelson, or Florain Fricke, or John Coltrane, or Werner Herzog, or Jandek, or Tom Carter, or any of a whole endless list of others to help shape where I want myself to be as a person. And while I can’t actually dream of approaching the genius of these people, they serve well as a guidepost in the murk that always lies ahead. As for the forced imposition of your standard fireman, or cop, or priest, father, and typical macho hero types, you can have them all. I’ll just stick with my own personal brand of expressive and highly emotive heroics. Life, after all, has to have some mystery and magic, and god knows there’s sometimes so little of it just lying around.

And for the record, I’m sorry for flicking peas at Mike Gunn.