In November 1991, I was eighteen and had just started studying literature at the University of York. I bought a few vinyl LPs from a friend who was beginning to replace his extensive collection with CDs, among which were two Talk Talk records: Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock. The first album was the one which the young men of my acquaintance professed to love (during long evenings of chewing the fat and skinning up), but Laughing Stock was the one which I preferred. It was just one of those albums which cast a powerful spell on me, conjuring up a sonic world that drew me in, and demanded that I listen. In Laughing Stock I discovered an immersive soundscape that was strange and spare and very beautiful. Veering as it did from swirling, layered, vast expanses to quiet moments of raw intimacy, I quickly found that while Laughing Stock was very poorly suited to being a backdrop for student socialising, it was an album that was incredibly rewarding to listen to alone. And when I listened to Laughing Stock carefully and attentively in my room, I immediately felt myself transported to another different room, another very particular moment in which this music was actively being made. Laughing Stock had the same effect on me, in other words, as many of the small-ensemble jazz or classical recordings which I loved: recordings in which you could actually hear musicians breathing, sense the shapes that were being cast in air by a group of human bodies with profound emotional connections to their instruments, or feel the warm materiality of the old wood from which a cello or clarinet had been formed. With such music, you could really feel the instruments, you could feel the space around the instruments, and sometimes, with the right ears and the right kind of attention, it could seem as if you, the listener, might be transformed into one of those instruments yourself.
For the listener, this vertiginous sensation of immersion and connection begins from Laughing Stock’s unusual opening moments, in which the only thing you hear for the first 18 seconds is a distant rhythmic hum like that of a fridge in an empty house. After a sparse chord and a brushed cymbal break the silence, a few notes form a scattered soundscape, as if the members of an orchestra are shifting into their places and beginning to tune the instruments which they hold in their hands. These uneven sounds then slowly build into a harmonic framework so skeletal it is barely there, before Mark Hollis’ tremulous voice appears, reluctantly preparing to play its part in the strange scene that’s being set. The music judders onward and forward, a sketched-out prologue or an overture, with quietly swelling anticipation. The loose phrases of a muted trumpet are underlain with drawn-out strings, before the music eventually coalesces into something almost recognisable as a rising movement, which finally gathers enough momentum to draw a pair of dusty curtains back from the stage. And what do we see now? A fairground show? A scaffold? “Step right up,” the voice of Mark Hollis murmurs “something’s happening here.”
Myrrhrman—a track in which there is no familiar verse / chorus structure, little repetition, and no refrain—sets the mood for the five remaining “songs” on an album for whose creative geography it is still hard to find comparison. Listening to Laughing Stock back in 1991, my eighteen-year old ears found themselves in a state of continual surprise and bewilderment. I was aware that the overall sound of the album was completely amazing—so rich, so clear, so deeply textured—but I discerned that its sonic landscape was also somehow deeply odd. The album’s space and sense of presence often resembled that of the three albums Miles Davis made with Gil Evans (of which I knew Mark Hollis was a fan) but the instruments were grouped in strange combinations which set the warm, round organic notes of an upright bass alongside unearthly whale-like screeching, or paired a Hammond organ’s soulful vamp with the perfectly pitched, bent and outstretched notes of Klesmer-style clarinet.
The more I listened to Laughing Stock, the more I seemed to hear: watery noises, hissing sounds, the music of an ebb tide drawing back across the shingle, electronic feedback, clinks and whirrs that seemed to emerge from familiar/ unfamiliar household objects. Every time I played the album I discovered something different, and yet each listen also built a growing sense of recognition, as I encountered anew its distinctive—and deeply human—sensibility. I was struck not just by how emotional an experience listening to Laughing Stock was, but by the sheer range and depth of that emotion. In this music there was a lot of rage and grief, but there was also kindness and compassion, alongside a kind of restless seeking, and a briefly glimpsed but extraordinarily vital happiness. There was one track which eighteen-year-old-me found incredibly joyous and uplifting, and which, every time I heard it, somehow managed to bestow on me a most unusual combination of energy and comfort. This track was New Grass and for a long time it was my favourite thing on Laughing Stock: the place to which I continually returned the record player’s needle at the moments when I needed to re-experience its very particular kind of benediction. But gradually, over time, it was After the Flood, the album’s mesmeric centrepiece, which began to vie with New Grass for my attention. As this song grew on me, I found it was very much a thing to think with, an aesthetic object, just like a poem by Robert Duncan, or a Cy Twombly canvas, a modern human artwork to inspire, illuminate, console.
Like the majority of tracks on Laughing Stock, After the Flood fades in, as a soundscape and a scene gradually begin to shape themselves out of the album’s surrounding silence. A piano’s lightly skimming notes and a repeated melodic phrase (reminiscent of a seabird’s haunting cry) are joined by the Hammond organ’s big, round, soulful sound, before a rumbling bass and pulsating drum begin to beat out a slow groove from which a rhythmic march eventually forms. The feeling is that of a group of weary human figures all moving in step together, emerging out of darkness or mist, into the the-morning-after-the-disaster’s stark reality. Mark Hollis’s tender vocal weaves itself in and out of this post-apocalyptic landscape, bearing witness to the gathered “Cain in number” whose exile might eventually requite the wrongs of previous generations. Hollis’ words are much less a sung narrative, in any conventional sense, than they are a series of allusive fragments: burnt scraps of writing discovered in the ashes of a long-abandoned hearth.
While After the Flood’s sonic geography feels like something out of Samuel Beckett, the position occupied by the singer is comparable to that of one of the guardians in Geoffrey Hill’s wonderful poem of the same name:
The young, having risen early, had gone,
Some with excursions beyond the bay mouth,
Some toward lakes, a fragile reflected sun.
Thunder-heads drift, awkwardly, from the south;
The old watch them. They have watched the safe
Packed harbours topple under sudden gales,
Great tides irrupt, yachts burn at the wharf
That on clean seas pitched their effective sails.
There are silences. These, too, they endure:
Soft comings-on; soft after-shocks of calm.
Quietly they wade the disturbed shore;
Gather the dead as the first dead scrape home.
"The Guardians" from Geoffrey Hill, For the Unfallen (1959).
There are definitely moments when After the Flood feels like one of Hill’s poems: a gnarly, knotty, extended keening or lament. Nowhere is this more apparent than during the weird solo that occurs four minutes into the track, when a seventy-five second primal scream flickers back and forth between two faltering notes that seem to emerge from somewhere deep inside each other. In a conversation about Laughing Stock, Mark Hollis later claimed to have “dreamt” of this solo “for years,” “I had a picture in my head of Roland Kirk,” he said, “I love those tracks where he’s playing two instruments at the same time. Two saxophones. That’s where he’s at. So that section is Roland Kirk. That’s the image I had in my mind.” Hollis achieved the effect of Kirk’s simultaneous saxophones with a variophon, an unusual combination of clarinet and keyboard invented in 1975, with whose distinctive, whale-like wavering sound he (as an inveterate collector of musical instruments) was clearly obsessed. “They were the most unreliable machines ever made,” Laughing Stock’s producer, Tim Friese-Greene, said of the variophon:
“Originally, Mark had a part for the solo which spanned the whole section and was just two notes. He played it through a very large amplifier and the variophon was clearly malfunctioning, jumping between octaves randomly and producing all sorts of internal feedback. We listened back to it and thought, this is too much. . . I was out in the studio tweaking the amplifier and I heard this one note roaring back through the amp and I remember thinking, this is the end. This is as far as we can go. After one note there are no notes.”
Sound engineer, Phill Brown was later to describe After the Flood as “probably the best engineering for me in the past forty years . . . drums were miked far from the kit, sounds were allowed to echo through the studio space, mistakes were an integral part of the performance, and the album’s dynamics are entirely genuine, the live feel of a jazz record.” The live feel, perhaps, but what was going on during the recording of Laughing Stock was very far away indeed from live performance. In jazz recordings (such as the three Gil Evans / Miles Davis collaborations which Mark Hollis so revered), musicians are always able to respond both to the moment and to each other with improvisation occurring against the backdrop of a sound that’s collectively produced. But during the recording of Laughing Stock—to which more than fifty talented session musicians contributed—each added her or his part individually while improvising over a spartan drum track or framework of chords in the darkened studio (which Hollis and Friese-Greene regarded as essential to the album’s atmosphere) without ever getting to respond to the contributions of other musicians, let alone hear anything like a complete mix. Hollis discarded more than 80% of the recordings that were created for him during these sessions by musicians of wide experience and enormous skill, and could be notoriously uncompromising regarding the contribution of anyone he regarded as not having quite the right sound or “feel.” Selecting a few bars from each improvised track that he liked, and layering up individual moments into something that resembled a sonic landscape much more than it did any recognisable musical narrative, Hollis built up each Laughing Stock song as a sampled collage whose improvisatory origins might well convey a strong impression of musical spontaneity, but which were, in terms of the meticulous nature of their arrangement, as well as the precision and control demanded from everyone involved in the album’s production, the complete opposite of that.
Only after each musical collage was complete would Hollis write a song’s lyric and—finally—record his vocal. Just as the piecemeal layering of Laughing Stock’s individual contributions were to eventually generate music of unusual continuity and cohesion, so Hollis’s elliptical utterances also possess a very distinctive and consistent aesthetic character (which connects him to several other deeply English writers from William Blake and George Elliot to Geoffrey Hill). Hollis also professed an admiration for Stéphane Mallarmé—a poet who lived to conjure ideal aesthetic forms out of the empty void. In Laughing Stock, Hollis’ phonetic fragments often have a similar effect to that of a figure in a Mallarmé poem, transforming its surrounding emptiness into a shimmering universe of stars.
The sound of Laughing Stock is perhaps more than anything, then, the sound of contradiction: its appearance of improvisatory spontaneity formed under conditions of absolute control, its fragmentary forms coalescing into a work of very distinctive aesthetic unity. But perhaps this album’s strangest contradiction is that this music, which has so often been described by critics as “dark” “bleak” or “difficult”, manages to have such a profound emotional effect on so many listeners like myself, who all tend to describe the immediacy of the album’s impact in terms of feeling joyous, comforted or uplifted as well as somewhere close to tears. Similar combinations of feeling are also evoked, perhaps, by the album’s gorgeous cover artwork (created by long-term Talk Talk collaborator, James Marsh), in which the fragile, colourful forms of the world’s endangered bird species gather themselves into the familiar shapes of the continents of the earth.
In the depth of feeling it evokes, in the extent of consolation it affords, I regard Laughing Stock as the very best kind of soul music: righteous, heartfelt, and with the uncompromising moral compass which seemed to be the defining characteristic of Mark Hollis, the man who envisioned, shaped, and sung it all into being. I have now lived alongside this album for thirty-five years, and I still find more to hear, every time I listen to it. If I was asked to choose my seven desert island discs, Laughing Stock would definitely be among them, and if pressed to select a single album to save from the rising waters of the end times’ coming tide, you can guess which one I’d choose.
Kate Davies
Further reading / listening
James Marsh, Spirit of Talk Talk (2019
Graeme Thomson, In Another World: The Four Seasons of Talk Talk (2026)
Ben Wardle, Mark Hollis: A Perfect Silence (2024)
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