A different world by Benjamin Yazdan

Published in Klassekampen (Oslo), August 14, 2026

A new book argues that virtues and good values are the common thread in Talk Talk's groundbreaking experiments.

I almost thought I was alone in thinking that Talk Talk's "New Grass", the penultimate track on the band's swan song "Laughing Stock", is so emotionally complex and overwhelming that it's actually a bit difficult to listen to. Then it turns out that British music journalist Graeme Thomson devotes an entire chapter to the possibility of listening too frequently to "New Grass" in his recent chronicle of the band's last four albums, "In Another World: The Four Seasons of Talk Talk".

This is not the first biography of Mark Hollis' inimitable urge to create, and the story is well known: After conventional and somewhat contourless, Duran Duran-mimicking synthpop on his debut album and better, but not yet fully liberated synthpop on "It's My Life" (1984), the more expansive and experimental masterpiece "The Colour of Spring" (1986) ushered in a period that culminated in "Spirit of Eden" (1989), "Laughing Stock" (1991) and finally the immensely quiet, ascetic solo album "Mark Hollis" (1998), before the frontman said goodbye for good and lived the last 21 years in almost complete withdrawal from the industry, until he died in 2019.

Imagination and reality

In line with Hollis' texts, the gap between reality and an ideal image is the common thread in Thomson's book. However, the self-examination in Talk Talk's last period takes on very different forms. On the desperate "Living in Another World" in 1986, it is completely secular, inspired by Jean-Paul Sartre and existentialism. Starting with the "Spirit of Eden" album a couple of years later, it enters into a dialogue with an explicitly Christian worldview, both lyrically and musically.

In the mid-80s, Hollis was still fiddling with fixed song structures and said in interviews (which he despised doing) that he considered the band to be a kind of jazz quartet. Gradually, Arnold Schoenberg, György Ligeti, Morton Feldman and Albert Ayler became not only convincing references, but very precise designations of the sound experiments. The intense effort, the dream of a different world, persisted anyway. Also in the legitimate disillusionment with the music industry.

The myth about the shocking and negative reception of "Spirit of Eden" in 1988 has been exaggerated, to say the least. Although the record company faltered, the British music press was panegyric. But even though the musical will to explore is also present on lingering, early songs such as "Tomorrow Started" and "Renée" in 1984, it is incredible to think that only four calendar years passed between this and, yes, the invention of what was later defined as post-rock. "Spirit of Eden" is not a prank of the type of Lou Reed's radical sidetrack "Metal Machine Music" from 1975 – this is a completely logical continuation of the interest in authentic spontaneity, silence and moments that cannot be repeated – but it is a break.

On a fantastic live recording from a concert at the jazz festival in Montreux in Switzerland in 1986, Hollis looks downright aggressive when he sings, sort of snarling and hateful. It was one of the very last concerts – the soundscape of "Spirit of Eden" could never be reproduced outside of the studio, and the main character was tired of touring life and everything that stood in the way of slow exploration of new musical textures.

Control and release

For me personally, it is probably only Kate Bush, Scott Walker, David Sylvian and Ryuichi Sakamoto who can measure up to Hollis in this area: world-building at the intersection of avant-garde and pop. Author Thomson is, to put it mildly, just as enthusiastic. His Talk Talk foundational event takes place in a teenage boy's room in 1989. In many ways, the "In Another World" book is an attempt to understand exactly what happened to both the senses and the intellect when his friend Dave fired up a joint in Bristol and put on "Spirit of Eden". However, Thomson has not been able to speak to either of the two surviving band members Lee Harris and Paul Webb, nor does Tim Friese-Greene, with whom Hollis developed a symbiotic working relationship from the mid-80s, want to speak.

Thus, we get an almost 350-page oral history replaced by private memories and magnificent second-by-second descriptions of the music. The partially fragmented structure brings to life the already mythologized studio anecdotes, but it also mirrors Hollis' kaleidoscopic approach to vastly different sound structures. In this way, Thomson also imitates the breaks between control and release that characterized the recordings, where dizzying planning met equally planned demands on studio musicians to renounce all learned "perfection".

Again and again Thomson returns to an urgent have I actually heard this before? feeling. It's a cliché, and not particularly new in respect of Talk Talk. But when I listen again, I suddenly notice microscopic tempo changes, surprising noises in passages I thought were completely silent, and become sacredly convinced that the last ninety seconds of "Desire" are a commentary on Roxy Music anno "For Your Pleasure" in 1973, when the tension between Brian Eno's willingness to experiment and Bryan Ferry's flair for hooks reached a climax. Thomson invokes Miles' flamenco-inspired "Sketches of Spain", but isn't it really "In a Silent Way" that is the obvious model for the meditative ambient parts on "Spirit of Eden"? Suddenly, I hear Robert Wyatt in a brief, dissonant part I don't know how I've managed to overlook during all my years of Talk Talk worship.

Wonder Chamber

You can go on like that indefinitely, and it's precisely this feeling of immersing yourself in an inexhaustible chamber of wonders that constantly points beyond itself that makes the albums of Talk Talk and Hollis so durable. Thomson is first and foremost a very good storyteller, and "In Another World" is told with infectious enthusiasm. He also illuminates, as when linking the textual universe to the proto-socialist and cultural-critical dimensions of British Romanticism – to a romantic anti-modernism that cares about universal salvation and ecology without veering over into nostalgia. The legacy of traditions as diverse as blues, gospel, and free jazz is also duly covered.

Hollis was in many ways a classical moralist. He sang incessantly about the conditions of charity, kindness, and forgiveness. There is an Old Testament struggle between good and evil, especially on the last records, but as Thomson argues, something as uncool (in the sense of rock history) as virtues and good values can be considered the common thread in Hollis' theology.

Now, I usually have resistance to describing music in therapeutic terms, but there is something radically empathetic and confident about these albums. It's not just the promise that heaven is waiting – someday Christendom may come – on "Laughing Stock", or the repeated, sore chant of spirit over droning gospel on "I Believe In You", a prayer to his brother Ed Hollis, who died of heroin addiction just a few years later. The smooth transition from the opening track "The Rainbow" to "Eden" on "Spirit of Eden" – the melody that lasts and lasts, which sort of steadfastly comes back again to hold on to something – is in itself a form of soul-searching.

Fragile issues

The last two albums in particular are fragile, courageous exercises in incorporating the radically different. The cult of personality around Hollis grew massive in the years after he stopped making music, and has never really waned. The fact that he both reinvented his own sound, invented a whole new genre and lived much of his life as a reclusive family man with a penchant for the Premier League, Guinness and tuning motorcycles, has somehow only cemented the image of a mysterious and incomprehensible genius.

But all the sonic dynamics between explosive and quiet parts did not contradict each other – they were rather small seasons in coexistence, and an invitation to the listener to indulge in contradictory sonic frontiers. Perhaps "New Grass" – which is at once insistently melancholic, longingly utopian, bottomlessly sorrowful and deeply comforting – is simply the very sound of a great effort to come to terms with the irreconcilable.