ALSO FILMING
…Hoppy – Underground Head documents the life and times of JOHN ‘HOPPY’ HOPKINS, whose remarkable countercultural agitations in photography, the International Times and the 14 Hour Technicolor Dream remain comparatively untold. Filmmaker Malcolm Boyle promises “exclusive interviews blended with unseen archive”
…Paul Dugdale continues to work on his PRODIGY documentary. In a statement, Liam Howlett and Maxim swore, “THIS FILM WILL BE MADE WITH THE SAME INTEGRITY THAT OUR MUSIC IS” (capital letters artistes’ own) …Kenneth Branagh will direct a biopic of the BEE GEES. Scripted by Ben Elton and executively produced by Barry Gibb, it’s co-produced by Bohemian Rhapsody producer Graham King …directed
by Estevan Oriol, CYPRESS HILL doc Hits From The Bong will premiere on the Showtime network …Martin Scorsese will direct a GRATEFUL DEAD biopic, with Jonah Hill as Jerry Garcia …high on the success of Summer Of Soul, Questlove continues to work on his SLY STONE (left) documentary …Baz Luhrmann’s ELVIS is scheduled for release in summer. Tom Hanks plays Colonel Tom Parker while Austin Butler takes the title role …Orian Williams
(Control; England Is Mine) is working on a SINÉAD O’CONNOR (left) documentary …Brett Morgen, who directed Kurt Cobain: Montage Of Heck, is to make a DAVID BOWIE film which, reported Variety, will be “neither documentary nor biography, but an immersive cinematic experience with thousands of hours of never-before-seen material…”
“People dismissed it as an impossible task.” BEN WARDLE
WRITER, BROADCASTER and teacher Ben Wardle likens Talk Talk’s out-of-time 1988 masterwork Spirit Of Eden to the “post-rock equivalent of the Sex Pistols at the Manchester Free Trade Hall – everyone who bought it went off and started telling everyone else about it.”
This mix of reverence and evangelism will also be present in Wardle’s book A Perfect Silence. Out in 2022, its ambitious aim is to capture the life of Talk Talk’s genius/mystic Mark Hollis and the spiritual-classical music he dreamt up. “[Bassist] Paul Webb was famously quoted as saying, ‘I’d hate to say I ever knew him,’” says Wardle of his elusive subject. “I spoke to a number of people who dismissed it as an impossible task, and to a certain extent, it was.”
Only to a certain extent. Starting the hunt in Southend with a friend of Hollis’s brother Ed, who managed Eddie And The Hot Rods, Wardle began working in earnest at the beginning of the Covid era.
Almost two years on he’d spoken to interviewees including early
Talk Talk member Simon Brenner, manager Keith Aspden and sleeve artist James Marsh, plus numerous studio collaborators.
Also on the record are A&R men, schoolfriends and even those who only knew Hollis after he retired from music in 1998. The members of Talk Talk were, however, not involved.
“I respect the people from the story who want to respect Mark’s silence as it were,” says Wardle. “But I spoke with all the musicians who worked with him on the Talk Talk records and the solo record, on the live tour – pretty much everyone who worked with him or knew him in any meaningful way.”
The story takes in mysterious, leap-of-faith recording sessions followed by pub visits to play a Blockbusters-themed fruit machine, Hollis’s post-1998 activities (“he was definitely playing music [but] anything he did never really left the house”) and the 4AD label’s attempt to sign him. Rumours of heroin use are also addressed. “Hard drug use was exclusively his brother Ed’s area, and not his,” states Wardle.
Other aspects of the Hollis myth will, it seems, be gently busted. “A lot of books tend to mystify the record company-versus-artist thing,” says Wardle. “In many ways that story of Mark Hollis annoys me, partly because I’ve got a bit of baggage left over from being an A&R man and knowing that record companies aren’t entirely made up of cunts. The patience and the investment and the lack of interference was admirable, I think, from EMI, even though they did let him down in the end. I didn’t want to de-mystify Mark Hollis, but I did want to remove all of the claggy bullshit which has attached itself to the story in the last 30 years.”
Consequently, he says, a real person with a family who played golf and rode motorbikes emerges. “I hope after reading this you’ll feel like he was a human being rather than just this sort of, symbol of post-rock,” says the author, “but also, like Bob Dylan, that what makes him tick and why he does things is just a mystery. I wanted to make him familiar, but also keep that mystery.”