Marillion keyboard player Mark Kelly has announced that he will release his autobiography, Marillion, Misadventures & Marathons: The Life & Times Of Mad Jack, through Kingmaker Publishing on January 20.
“Much like finding yourself on the ninth storey window ledge of a Luxembourg hotel as the wind whips around you, as Mark Kelly once did, it’s not unusual to question your life choices sometimes," is just one extract from the upcoming book, of which Rick Wakeman says, "Mark Kelly deserves so much career credit. An incredibly gifted musician and composer, he has now written a book that is compelling reading. It’s rare to find such honesty in a book like this and undoubtedly it was written from the heart.”
Written during 2021, Marillion, Misadventures & Marathons: The Life & Times Of Mad Jack charts the remarkable rise and fall and rise of one of rock music’s most enduring bands and the keyboard player at the heart of that journey.
It llooks back over six decades decades to consider a life less ordinary and the decisions he made that took him there. From a dirt poor early childhood in Ireland to some of the biggest stages around the world, Kelly’s journey has described an arc that any fiction writer might blanch at. The departure from the band of their singer at the height of their powers; reinventing the music industry wheel by pioneering crowdfunding to help his band survive; and going from club shows to arenas and almost all the way back again.
Marillion, Misadventures & Marathons: The Life & Times Of Mad Jack will be published as a 264 page hardback, plus 48 pages of photographs documenting Kelly’s life and career, including some photography commissioned exclusively for the book.
Pre-order Marillion, Misadventures & Marathons: The Life & Times Of Mad Jack.
