OUT OF THE DECADE THAT TASTE FORGOT CAME A WORK OF TIMELESS BEAUTY: TALK TALK’S SPIRIT OF EDEN. FROM A NEW BOOK ABOUT THE BAND AND THEIR ENIGMATIC FRONTMAN MARK HOLLIS, AUTHOR BEN WARDLE TELLS HOW DARK SARCASM, FAMILY TR AGEDY AND AN ALMOST FANATIC AL MINIMALISM GAVE RISE TO A LEGEND…

PORTRAIT: TOM SHEEHAN

Tom Sheehan, Getty

PROLOGUE

IT BEGAN IN RAYLEIGH, ESSEX, AND FROM THE START it was about obsession: an obsession with music shared by Mark Hollis and his older brother Ed, new wave scenester, producer and manager of Eddie & The Hot Rods. Ed encouraged Mark’s bands – the Mod-esque The Reaction, then Talk Talk, an intense, anguished entity unjustly lumped in with the New Romantics. But by mid-1986, Ed Hollis was a junkie and Talk Talk – Mark, drummer Lee Harris and bassist Paul Webb, plus producer Tim Friese-Green – viewed the pop industry with disgust. A fourth album due, a voyage beyond the realm of contemporary music had begun, but not all would survive the passage…

Man out of time: Talk Talk’s Mark Hollis was “like a polite anarchist”, London, 1991.

ON SEPTEMBER 5, 1986, A CHANCE meeting took place in Highbury, London.

Tim Friese-Greene was in Wessex studio that afternoon. He was sitting at the Bösendorfer piano when Phill Brown sauntered in. Brown was killing time, waiting to collect some tape copies of Hand Of Fate by Paul Roberts, what he suspected would be the last single he would ever record. “I was about to leave the business,” he remembers, “I was r unning market stalls and things.”

Up to that point, Brown’s track record in the ’60s and ’70s had served him well. As a teenage tape op at Olympic Studios, he’d worked with ever yone from Jimi Hendrix to The Rolling Stones, before going on to engineer artists including John Martyn and Roxy Music. He had continued to do well in the ’80s, working with artists including China Crisis, but he was losing interest, and work was dr ying up. “I hated most of the music in the ’80s,” he says, “this kind of new digital sound, sampling drums bigger than they could ever be in life… I just hated all that.”

The conversation between Friese-Green and Brown was short. The pair had briefly worked together on Tight Fit in 1982 but had not seen each other since. Having loved Talk Talk at their recent Hammersmith show, Brown remembers praising Friese-Greene for his success. “I was just being honest really. I congratulated him on [Talk Talk’s 1986 album] The Colour Of Spring and also said, ‘Man, that’s the kind of band I should work with!’ I was almost thinking out loud.”

When Talk Talk got back from touring in mid-September, Brown got a call from the producer asking if he wanted to meet Mark Hollis. A date was set for November 6 in a pub near Friese-Greene’s house in Stanmore, north London. In his book Are We Still Rolling?, Brown describes this first meeting in some detail: “Mark was about 5 feet 9 inches tall – thin with an angular face and shoulder length, light brown hair. He was dressed in jeans and a white shirt. He looked like a ver y regular guy, polite and softly spoken, with a sardonic humour that I warmed to immediately.”

Hollis ended up cadging a lift back from the engineer and it was in the late afternoon rush hour traffic that the real conversation occurred, as if Hollis had premeditated it to happen this way. “Mark was just sitting there asking me questions that was in a way much more the inter view than what we’d had in the pub,” says Brown.

As they circled London on the A406 ring road, Hollis pointed out a convenient tube station and Brown pulled up. Climbing out of the car, he turned to the engineer: “He said, ‘So what sums up Olympic for you?’ and I said, ‘It’s got to be 1am, November 1967… Traffic.’ He just smiled, said ‘Bye’ and went. I didn’t know then, but it turned out that Traffic was one of his hero bands.”