Talk Talk’s Mark Hollis To Be Celebrated At Special Media Events
The author of the recent Mark Hollis biography A Perfect Silence has announced three unique evenings in July which will celebrate the life and work of the late Talk Talk singer, who died in 2020.
Ben Wardle, a former A&R man who signed Sleeper and The Lilac Time’s Stephen Duffy and who is now a writer and lecturer in music business at The University of Gloucestershire, will feature in conversation with host and journalist Duncan Steer, as he introduces a new edition of A Perfect Silence, through Rocket 88 books.
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These will take place at the George IV pub in Chiswick, London on 3 July, the Trades Club in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire on 7 July and Sidney & Matilda in Sheffield on 8 July. Tickets are now available for the events.
The evening in Chiswick will also feature Phill Brown, who engineered Talk Talk’s last two albums, Spirit Of Eden and Laughing Stock and also worked with Hollis on his lone, self-titled solo album.
The evening will include a playback of Spirit of Eden, recreating the studio atmosphere in which it was recorded – in darkness with the room lit only by abstract images from an oil projector.
“Twelve hours a day in the dark listening to the same six songs for eight months became pretty intense,” Phill Brown later told The Guardian in a retrospective interview about the making of the album. “There was very little communication with musicians who came in to play. They were led to a studio in darkness and a track would be played down the headphones.”
Percussionist Martin Ditcham also detailed the sessions in the book Spirit Of Talk Talk, by James Marsh, Chris Roberts and Toby Benjamin. “Although Wessex was a church, the studio was a large soundproofed room built within it, so it wasn’t unlike a lot of studios of that size at the time,” he said. “The space wasn’t particularly special, but Phill’s knowledge of mic placement, along with the space available to him, made the recordings that much more special.”
Buy Talk Talk vinyl at the Dig! store.