Mark's new project has a number of people playing on it as well as him. As Mark explains...
I started collaborating with good friend Guy Vickers back in 2016 after I learned that he wrote lyrics. He helped me with the early arrangements of two of the songs and wrote a number of lyrics to music I shared with him.
Nothing much happened for a while until I invited my nephew Conal Kelly to play some guitar with me in late 2018. He worked with me on the ideas playing guitar and bass. In early 2019 another friend, Andrew Wildman recommended the singer Oliver Smith to me after reading that I was looking for a singer in the web magazine (so thanks for that).
I sent Ollie the music and lyrics for two whoppers. Amelia, a song about Amelia Earhart which clocks in at over ten minutes and 2051, a song in part about the difficult relationship between Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C Clarke and the movie 2001 and in part about what might really happen if it turned out we were not alone in the universe. This song clocks in at over fifteen minutes.
Ollie, who comes from a world of more 'normal' shorter songs was a little daunted by the task of coming up with melodies to sing with such long songs. He did brilliantly and we were off to the races. The three of us quickly realised we had a great writing team and wrote the rest of the album plus three songs for the next one in a few months.
We had a few days at the racket club in the summer of 2019 to demo the songs and I invited Pete 'Woody' Wood to join us on guitar while Conal played the bass for the session.
When Lockdown started in March we decided to record the entire album at home, each of us playing and singing our parts and then sharing them via Dropbox. My friend Henry Rogers agreed to play the drums which worked well as he was used to recording sessions from his home studio.
I invited another guitarist, John Cordy, who was recommended to me by Steve Rothery to also play on the album.
For further information and to join the mailing list check out www.marathonsounds.com and if you are on Facebook you can find the Mark Kelly's Marathon page here.
The album is being mixed by Andy Bradfield (who has remixed a number of the Marillion re-issues) and will be released in the autumn through Racket.
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I started collaborating with good friend Guy Vickers back in 2016 after I learned that he wrote lyrics. He helped me with the early arrangements of two of the songs and wrote a number of lyrics to music I shared with him.Nothing much happened for a while until I invited my nephew Conal Kelly to play some guitar with me in late 2018. He worked with me on the ideas playing guitar and bass. In early 2019 another friend, Andrew Wildman recommended the singer Oliver Smith to me after reading that I was looking for a singer in the web magazine (so thanks for that).
I sent Ollie the music and lyrics for two whoppers. Amelia, a song about Amelia Earhart which clocks in at over ten minutes and 2051, a song in part about the difficult relationship between Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C Clarke and the movie 2001 and in part about what might really happen if it turned out we were not alone in the universe. This song clocks in at over fifteen minutes.
Ollie, who comes from a world of more 'normal' shorter songs was a little daunted by the task of coming up with melodies to sing with such long songs. He did brilliantly and we were off to the races. The three of us quickly realised we had a great writing team and wrote the rest of the album plus three songs for the next one in a few months.
We had a few days at the racket club in the summer of 2019 to demo the songs and I invited Pete 'Woody' Wood to join us on guitar while Conal played the bass for the session.
When Lockdown started in March we decided to record the entire album at home, each of us playing and singing our parts and then sharing them via Dropbox. My friend Henry Rogers agreed to play the drums which worked well as he was used to recording sessions from his home studio.
I invited another guitarist, John Cordy, who was recommended to me by Steve Rothery to also play on the album.
For further information and to join the mailing list check out www.marathonsounds.com and if you are on Facebook you can find the Mark Kelly's Marathon page here.
The album is being mixed by Andy Bradfield (who has remixed a number of the Marillion re-issues) and will be released in the autumn through Racket.
< back
