Mark Hollis

Year 1998: “The Mountain Of The Moon”, the new album by Talk Talk, is ready for release, promo copies are already circulating on cassette and CD-R. Then something goes wrong. Bassist Paul Webb (today Rustin Man) had already jumped ship before the previous album, “Laughing Stock” (1991); Lee Harris, a skilled architect of percussive hives, did so afterwards (he would resurface on “Codename: Dustsucker” by the never-praised-enough Bark Psychosis). On “The Mountain Of The Moon”, the one figure still firmly at the helm is Mark Hollis, the band's emblem: singer, guitarist and composer. Mark thinks it over and decides it no longer makes sense to keep the band's name; the new album must come out under his own name, simply his first and last name.

Mark Hollis is no more. He left us on a sad day last February, at just 64 years old, plunging into grief legions of fans scattered across the world, most of them still remembering the string of successes he racked up almost forty years ago.

Born, like so many others, under the banner of the synth-pop that was raging across Albion in the early '80s, Talk Talk quickly freed themselves from any reductive label, simply offering music of remarkable depth. Pop, sure, but composed and arranged with exquisite refinement; acoustic and electronic, romantic and restless. Presiding over it all was Hollis's strange voice and his stooped, shy bearing, his gaze always hidden behind a pair of mirrored glasses. Despite this, Mark became a public figure, especially here in Italy, at a time when so much rubbish was said to be circulating, while intelligent pop could still reach large audiences. And how!

The graceful “It's My Life” and the anguished “Such A Shame” were the two hits of summer 1984, complete with the video for the latter: a dazed-looking Mark, wearing a little hat, filmed from behind as he's bent by the wind. British discomfort. A world apart from contemporaries like Simon Le Bon or Tony Hadley. An alien who breaks through the screen almost against his will.

Then something changed: “The Colour Of Spring”, 1986, showed us the band was something more than what already seemed good. The music became more introspective, at times chamber-like. The pop songs were stripped of any electronic gleam and breathed the clear air of spring. It seemed the perfect balance, and one wondered what the next record would bring. No one, truly no one, could have expected, just two years later, “Spirit Of Eden”. What band of madmen could throw fame and money into the nettles in favour of an album that took the previous record's most introverted moments and expanded them into long suites hovering between silence and something else indefinable? That was it: Talk Talk the pop band was gone, leaving only an ensemble that from then on would earn enormous respect but precious little success; you can count on the fingers of one hand the musicians who choose, at the peak of their career, to abandon easy money in favour of Art. And Art it was, also with the aforementioned follow-up, “Laughing Stock”, which refined the ideas of its predecessor, effectively creating what would soon be dubbed “post-rock”.

We thus arrive at the aborted (in name only) “The Mountain Of The Moon”, which became “Mark Hollis”, and the game becomes clear. If Mark's aim was to keep whittling down his sound ever further, then his album is, at once, both endpoint and point of no return. We spoke of silence: it is the absolute protagonist of a record that stages a fanfare of seven wind instruments (two bassoons, two clarinets, English horn, trumpet, flute) that could bring down walls, yet instead blow shapeless in faint dissonances, like gusts of icy wind on an autumn day. Here and there a harmonica peeks through, sounding like a mouth of shattered teeth; the double bass and brushed drums instill jazz moods born of abstract suspensions, like the Davis-esque “He Loved Him Madly”; the guitars carry no effects, rattling harshly between one silence and the next. Binding it all together is a harmonium and the ever-present piano: a chord, then stillness, then a chord. And the voice, purged of any pop ambition. A sigh that cracks but never breaks. What breaks is the listener's heart.

On the cover, a Lamb of God made of bread, photographed in Sicily, and eight tracks, a flow that nails you to the door of your own melancholy. The lyrics are misshapen, bruised, frayed: Così tutto esaurito/ Quanto sei cara/ Come sulla Terra/ Sei venuto a vivere da pagliaccio?/ Vicino / Chiuso/ Ed eccoti qui/ Sole e poi l’ombra/ Il sole eclissato per la vergogna/ In gioventù sei cresciuto/ Puro/ Puro/ Navigare su/ Freddo/ Bruciato/ E temere di essere/ Andato e ora l’ombra/ Il sole eclissato per la vergogna (“The Gift”).

Afterwards, as if merging with the silent, hushed spirit of his music, Mark disappeared from the scene for twenty years. On 25 February 2019, he disappeared for good.

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05/02/2026