Mark Hollis: A Perfect Silence

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Two years before he died from cancer, at the age of 64 in February 2019, Mark Hollis and his wife moved from west London to the East Sussex market town of Heathfield, where they bought a house at the end of a secluded track.

A Perfect Silence includes interviews with many people who worked closely with Mark and helps us get as close as possible to understanding the man who walked away from music (and public life) almost 25 years ago and never resurfaced. Wardle’s biography addresses and clarifies all these sources, but the book’s aim is not so much on who Hollis was. Outside of Britain they had more success, notably in Germany, Italy, France and the Netherlands following the release of their second album in 1984. Talk Talk would push their methods to radical heights to achieve this sonic and spiritual ascension.

Hollis was close to his brother, who became addicted to heroin and died in his thirties, and in those early interviews he cited the influence of John Coltrane and Miles Davis as well as the classical composers Béla Bartók and Claude Debussy and experimental rock and blues bands. Mark Hollis was so much more than the hits ‘It’s My Life’ or ‘Life’s What You Make It’, and A Perfect Silence enjoyably and meticulously gives us that insight.

Despite being released as a solo album by Hollis, it was originally intended to be credited to Talk Talk, under the name ‘Mountains of the Moon’. Silence was always the end journey for Mark Hollis and Talk Talk: silence was the final step on their evolutionary ladder. The book begins, predictably, at the beginning, with the parents, the Essex childhood, the year spent studying child psychology at Sussex University where Hollis met Flick, and so on. In 1998 he’d released his first, and what turned out to be his last, solo album, Mark Hollis, after which he retired. After that, a seven year gap before his last work, a self titled solo effort originally intended to be a Talk Talk album titled Mountains of the Moon, and that was that – twenty years of silence was its only follow up.Ed Hollis, Mark’s elder brother, was manager of the Canvey Island punks Eddie and the Hot Rods and had an eclectic, wide-ranging record collection, which he shared with Mark. Growing up amid the Punk movement, Hollis would take their modus operandi of DIY to heart, follow the sounds in his head, and form Talk Talk in 1981. Ben Wardle, a lecturer in music business at the University of Gloucestershire, has set himself the challenge of getting behind or going over the wall and telling Hollis’ story. Using only acoustic instrumentation and recorded with just two microphones, the album is an exercise in how low you can go without amplification, how subtle you can play and sing.

We learn Mark was into golf and motorcycles, but never strayed from that fiercely independent streak.Sofia Coppola got him started on an attempt to compose music that would more or less fit the period depicted in "Marie-Antoinette", then she had a complete change of mind and decided instead to use modern pop music, and Hollis was out at this point, so it never went any further.