Talk Talk musician broke mould

Mark Hollis made music one critic labelled 'unashamed art rock'. Photo / Getty Images

Mark Hollis, a singer and songwriter who led the critically acclaimed British band Talk Talk, which veered from synthesiser-heavy pop to a haunting and influential medley of new wave, punk rock, free jazz, classical, blues, folk and ambient music, has died. He was 64.

The death was confirmed by his long-time manager, Keith Aspden, who said Hollis "died after a short illness" but did not provide additional details.

Formed in 1981 by Hollis, bassist Paul Webb, drummer Lee Harris and keyboardist Simon Brenner, Talk Talk was initially viewed as a potential rival to Duran Duran, the clean-cut British group with a buoyant, synth-based sound.

But under Hollis, a plaintive-voiced singer who counted free-jazz artist Ornette Coleman and bluesman John Lee Hooker as major influences, Talk Talk became a genre-blurring band like few other acts in pop music. His former bandmate Webb, who performs under the name Rustin Man, wrote in an Instagram post that Hollis "knew how to create depth of feeling with sound and space like no other".

As the group's principal songwriter, Hollis infused early electronic hits like Talk Talk, Such a Shame and Life's What You Make It with hints of anxiety and gloom, singing of "the dice behind my fate" and "this eagerness to change" while backed by throbbing bass lines and soaring melodies on the synthesiser.

The band sold millions of records and broke into the US Top 40 in 1984 with It's My Life, later covered by singer Gwen Stefani's band No Doubt. And with the release of its third album, an adventurous pop record titled The Colour of Spring, Talk Talk seemed on the verge of becoming an international phenomenon. They effectively received free rein from their record label, EMI, to make their next album.

Decamping to a former church in London, Hollis and his bandmates spent a year crafting the six-song Spirit of Eden, a record that sounded so different from their previous work that EMI sued the artists, arguing that the album was insufficiently commercial. (The case was thrown out, according to the Guardian.)

Hollis announced that because of its complex production, the album would not be supported by a tour. He also planned to release no singles. Still, he and his songwriting partner, Tim Friese-Greene, a producer and multi-instrumentalist who served as an unofficial fourth member of Talk Talk, expected that the record would sell millions of copies.

The album sold a relatively meagre 500,000 copies and was described by a magazine reviewer as "the kind of record which encourages marketing men to commit suicide."

But Spirit of Eden and its follow-up — the similarly experimental Laughing Stock — have since acquired the status of rock masterpieces. The records are often credited with paving the way for experimental post-rock groups such as Sigur Ros, Radiohead, Spiritualized and Explosions in the Sky.

Talk Talk fractured amid the intense recording process of those albums, with Webb and the band folding for good after Laughing Stock.

Hollis released a solo album titled with his name in 1998, with songs that built on the spare acoustic sound he had developed with Talk Talk, before effectively retiring from the music business.

Hollis was married and had two children, and after releasing the solo album, Mark Hollis, he announced that he was retiring from music to focus on his family.