Mark Astronaut 27 August 1954 to 6 July 2022
I don’t think I ever told him, but Mark was one of my teenage heroes, and the only person I ever put on a pedestal that stayed there for the rest of my life. I still can’t believe he’s gone. His music has always been a huge part of my life, and every song has an attached memory for me. They saw me through good times and some very dark periods, but they were always there, playing in the background.
Mark had been ill for a long time, and needed an operation to fix it, but covid put an end to all hopes of that ever happening. Ever the professional, he continued performing through the pain he must have suffered, even when there was only a couple of dozen people there to watch him. Sometimes he would be very subdued on stage and you could tell how frail he was. Other nights he would down a couple of cans of energy pop and he’d be bouncing off the ceiling all way through the gig like the teenager he still was inside his head.
I always felt a bit guilty injecting myself into Mark’s life – the sheer audacity of a hack writer of teen fiction for the over 50s blagging his way into chronicling something as important as his lifetime’s work. The first thing he said to me was “I don’t want it to be a book about me, I want it to be about the band.” Which pretty much sums Mark up – he never wanted to take the credit for what he saw as a collaborative effort. He was just a member of a band who ended up singing because he couldn’t play any musical instruments. The fact that he wrote all the songs and composed all the music was irrelevant to him.
Never meet your heroes, they say, because they are not the people you think they are. Mark was the exception to that rule, he was exactly like I always imagined he would be – intelligent, humble, scatty as hell at times, but always sincere – he wasn’t just writing protest songs for the sake of it, or to make money, he actually believed in every word and (to paraphrase one of the songs), lived his own life and did what he wanted.
We became friends while I was writing the book, I started making regular 200 mile round trips to Astronauts gigs and he would always come over for a chat when he saw me. Because we lived at opposite ends of the country most of the interviews for the book took place by telephone, but even after it was published he would still call me up pretty much every Sunday night to tell me what he’d been up to that week, his plans for the new album, any feedback people had given him about the book, and his ideas for promoting it – he even had a plan to sneak copies into the local Waterstones.
We’d talk for about an hour or so, until he would eventually say something along the lines of “I need to hang up now, I just remembered I was supposed to be giving X a call.” (With X almost always being someone famous.) Then we’d talk for another hour about random things – the state of the country, what we’d bought at our respective car boots that morning, our plans for a follow up book containing the lyrics to all his recorded songs, and a re-release of Soon and Seedy Side, the last of the ‘classic’ Astronauts albums from the 1980s. “But don’t put those shitty singles on it like All The Madmen did,” he would always say when the topic came up.
None of that will happen now, and neither will most of the things he mentioned in the interview at the back of the book. I don’t know if we will ever get to hear his last album, I suppose that will depend on how advanced the recording of it was, and whether the rest of the band will want to finish it without him.
It was always my intention to write additional chapters and publish them on my blog as and when anything new happened in the world of Mark Astronaut. I had already started on one called ‘I’ve Been Getting Into Books’ when I heard the news, but I don’t really feel like finishing it now. I know how it ends, and I just can’t bring myself to write those words. Because then it would become real, and I’m not ready for that yet.
