Charlie Hollis – the son of the late Mark Hollis, the enigmatic creative force behind Talk Talk – is proceeding cautiously. “It’s so easy to be misconstrued,” says Hollis, who looks and sounds very much like his father, who died in 2019. “Lineage, DNA, influences, they’re all massively important for anyone making music. But I’d be very careful about using words like ‘tribute’, because it completely gives the wrong impression.”
Hollis is discussing his involvement in the group Held By Trees, described on their Bandcamp page as “an instrumental post-rock collaboration heavily inspired by Talk Talk/Mark Hollis, and working with musicians that played for them”. The band is a passion project of multi-instrumentalist/producer David Joseph, a 40-year-old Church of England minister from Bournemouth, who wondered: “What would it be like if a bunch of the musicians that worked on Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock, as well as Mark Hollis’s solo record, worked on new music?”
