welcome to www.marksound dot com preface The early days ... 1985 ...way back when I was at school I was pretty good at all the academic stuff ... you know the three R's .. Reading ... wRiting and aRithmetic ... top groups for most things until in my final year I discovered rock music, cigarettes and alcohol ... I started skipping school to hang out at a local record shop called Vinyleyes ... this place is a lynchpin in the direction my life took ... a signpost on my journey ... it was here I started my musical edification ... listening to it and even selling it ... and I got paid in vinyl ... my decampment from school was akin to escaping from Colditz ... crawling under windows and hiding behind bins ... one time even wading through a river ... I remember it like it was yesterday ... the risk of getting caught was an exciting undertaking ... smoking the cheapest nastiest cigarettes and drinking the cheapest nastiest booze ... and with my new love of rock'n'roll ... better than the best ever ... I lost complete interest with my education... not knowing what I wanted to do with my life ... eventually I moved from the small Devonshire market town of Tavistock to the big city of Plymouth ... I integrated more with the music scene and started an alternative rock DJ night in local club The Academy ... conveniently I was dating a girl from a record shop called Rival Records ... those staff discounts were particularly beneficial ... unfortunately that record shop now sells pine furniture and the girlfriend disappeared off with the guy she was shagging behind my back ... but with my love of live music I started to hitch hike around the country to see lots of bands including every date on the Nirvana Nevermind UK tour ... I saw others bands like Jane's Addiction Mordred The Atom Seed and even Fields Of The Nephilim ... I loved it ... and I ended up auditioning as lead singer with Plymouth metal band Die Laughing ... formally of the superbly named The Psycho Dirt Perps ... the song I destroyed on vocals in their rehearsal room was the Metallica classic ... Fade To Black ... from the Ride The Lightning album ... my singing ... flat ... out of key ... out of time ... it was an abomination ... and not being able to play any instrument meant being in a band wasn't my path ... but I couldn't leave it alone and always knew somehow live music was my destiny ... I started hanging out with another Plymouth metal band called Psychastorm ... to increase their opportunities of success they moved to Nottingham in late 1991 ... in February 1992 I followed ... we all got a big house together ... it was a party house ... we wrecked it ... I designed and sold their merch ... soon after the move they had a line-up change with the addition of a new drummer who had his own PA so I started to learn to mix sound for the band live ... and then the tours began ... and so did my adventures ...