‘We can’t all retire because someone died’: the new bands honouring the spirit of old ones, from Talk Talk to Thin Lizzy

Unlike tribute acts or bands still going with no original members, the likes of Held By Trees and House of All are leveraging time spent in their former groups to make music that looks forward as well as back

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?”