Here’s a bit of information about me, Spaceship Mark.
My various musical projects include Spaceship and Microscope Wilson and I am a former member of the rock band Minions.
I started making music as Spaceship somewhere around 1994, a combination of a 4-track portastudio, a new echo box and a cheap Yamaha keyboard that could be perverted into making interesting sounds lead me to begin to attempt to make my own brand of Krautrock. Thing was, I’d never heard any Krautrock. Undaunted I just recorded whatever unusual noises I could create, without fear of using my old Casiotone MT-40, or singing the Mellotron lines as I had no access to a Mellotron.
I sent these initial forays off to Julian Cope on a tape and, many moons later, was promised that one day he’d put some of this stuff out.
The project sporadically reared it’s head on and off over the years but living abroad, in a tent, was not to condusive. I whiled away my time writing songs about cooking oil and trying to learn to play ‘Ground Control to Major Tom’ until, out of the blue, I was asked to contribute to the, as yet unreleased, second LAMF album. The pieces I came up with them re-energised me and, as the years have passed the world of Spaceship has returned.
In 2008 I made my live debut in the Spaceship guise at London’s Club Dune and in Autumn that year plans were made to release a Spaceship album on Julian Cope’s Fuck Off & Di label. These plans came to fruition in January 2009, when the self-titled debut was unleashed…
With just two long tracks, the Cope and Stephen O’Malley featuring ‘The Drowning of Ys’ and the epic drone-a-thon ‘The Long Walk West’, the Spaceship had, as it were, arrived.
The rest of 2009 saw a number of gigs, including a couple more performances at Club Dune and a headlining appearance at the first ever apollolaan recordings night, a set captured in its entirety and posted on YouTube.
The latter part of the year saw the beginnings of the Missing Robots project, before 2010 brought the first ever Spaceship performance in my hometown of Blackpool. Just a few weeks later saw the release of the second Spaceship album, Out of Time’s Abyss. Named after an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel the limited edition album sold out at source within 24 hours and within a week was completely sold out from all outlets. The album is now available to download.
April 2011 saw the release of ‘Compendium Obscura: Archive Recordings 1994-2009′, featuring the orignal 1994 Spaceship tracks, the contributions to the aborted LAMF album and the live live performance from the Apollolaan night in Bournemouth, this sprawling 3CD set has emptied the vaults, leaving the future unwritten…
