Month: March 2019

Mark Hollis has died. Apparently he battled a short illness and did not recover.  He was 64.  Hollis had more or less vanished from the public eye in the late 90s, retiring from music after his phenomenal solo album came out in 1998.  With his band Talk Talk, Hollis (along with drummer Lee Harris and bassist Paul Webb, who goes under the name Rustin Man as a solo artist, he released a new one a couple of weeks ago), Hollis delivered a series of Top 10 pop hits in the early part of the decades.  Talk Talk is perhaps most famous for ‘It’s My Life,’ a song later butchered by No Doubt. But towards the end of the 1980s, Hollis took Talk Talk in a different direction.  This really began with their 1986 album, The Colour of Spring, which was also their best-selling, most successful album of their career.  But by 1988’s Spirit of Eden, Talk Talk had become a more experimental, deeper band.  Spirit of Eden confounded critics and the public, though it is generally regarded as a classic now.  Webb left after Spirit of Eden, leaving just Harris and Hollis to carry on. And carry on they did, delivering one of the greatest albums of all-time in 1991, with Laughing Stock.  Hollis is generally regarded as the inventor of post-rock, a music form that became immensely popular in the early aughts, most notably...