Mark Hollis And Talk Talk's Brilliant, Nuanced, Stubborn Visions
The typical trajectory for a rock artist goes like this: Start out raw, risk-taking, totally true to yourself, then gradually get ground down by the industry into making ever more spirit-sapped and radio-ingratiating records. Far less common is the reverse: a career whose public story commences at the showbiz heart of mainstream pop, then torpedoes fame and fortune by embarking on a series of increasingly weird adventures in sound. The paradigm for this unlikely career shape is Scott Walker's journey from The Walker Brothers' epic melodrama to an ever-more harrowing avant-garde solo career. But if anyone has ever rivaled Walker's willed self-exile from pop, that would be Talk Talk, the British group led by Mark Hollis.
The singer's death earlier this week at the age of 64 — according to his manager Keith Aspden, due to "a short illness from which he never recovered" — has stirred up a smaller-scale version of the dazed grief and gushing tributes triggered by David Bowie's departure a little over three years ago. Where there are many different Bowies to revere, with Hollis, the basis of the legend is more compact: it's mostly based on the pair of remarkable albums, (1988) and (1991) that form the pinnacle of Talk Talk's five-album
