2. COMPANY HOLLAND INTERVIEW

3. AIRBRUSH ART AND ACTION

4. FLAMING SHROUND

5. BABYLON MAGAZINE

The Lizard Meets Mark Wilkinson

Mark Wilkinson and Fish are about to publish a book, Masque, that runs through their relationship from the early days with Market Square Heroes right up to Fellini Days. It includes a set of questions from the fans, as well as trying to address all the issues that everyone wanted to know. So, the Lizard went to see the artist currently known as Mark Wilkinson, and tried to ask questions that nobody else would have asked. Not much of a challenge, you might think, based on the Lizard's past history, but let's see what happened.

I had a sense of needing to start at the beginning, so opened with a subject covered in the book, namely how the relationship with Fish started? Mark repeated the story of meeting Joe Morowsky of Torchlight, and getting the deal, which he stressed is all covered in the book. As he says, "I wasn't a big fan to begin with, which I think is well known, but there was something there. I remember Joe Morowsky in the audience, and he said to me 'They're going to be huge', and I said 'Really? I've got my doubts.' But, three albums along the line, they were huge, so he was right and I was wrong."

Mark became synonymous with Marillion, and then with Fish. I asked how he saw the artwork fitting into the whole 'experience', and commented on buying Misplaced Childhood, and sitting on the bus home, reading the lyrics and scanning the cover to see what bits I could spot. I asked about the linkage between the covers and the lyrics and whether he was aware of that integral nature of his artwork?

"No, I wasn't, not at the time. Difficult one to answer! I suppose I knew where Fish's lineage was - Yes, Roger Dean, all that. And I was quite surprised to get the gig, to be honest, because I thought that was the kind of thing that a band like them would have gone for. And I don't think I do that kind of work at all, never have. Although I'm loosely described as a fantasy artist, it's much more realistic than the Roger Dean, Rodney Matthews type of thing. And Fish's stories, and his briefs, for the album sleeves, were always routed in reality - they weren't ethereal as such. There was always a strong underlying story of relationships and childhood angst, trauma . So I suppose he wanted that reality that I could provide in paintings, but which a surreal edge to it, and I guess I was right for that."

"I think Joe Morowsky showed them three or four different artists' work and they were your typical science fiction artist, you know, much more rooted in that kind of fantasy / spaceship type of thing. Which I've done, not that well I have to say, but possibly they saw something there that fitted that real / surreal concept that they've always had running through their albums and Fish's albums. Although they're sort of weird images, there's still a very recognisable person there. There's always a face behind The Masque, if you like! That was good, wasn't it. I've got to remember that."

I commented that the artwork is a crossbreed. There are the 'fantasy' elements - the jester motif etc., but then there's a dark side to it. On Script they introduced the jester motif, and then on Fugazi there's the jester again, but out of his head. It's almost like he decided to accept the heritage of that sort of artwork, but to put that twist on it. Was that deliberate, did that come out of Fish's fairly dark lyrical themes?

"Yeah, that was very conscious, I'm sure, on Fish's part, to want to do that. I wouldn't have been very interested in painting those pictures anyway - that's not what I do. Although obviously Fish art directs me and gives me the briefs, it's my interpretation as well. I don't know where all the symbolism came about. I've always been very keen on the Flemish painters and neo-realists - the fantasy art movements going back a few years! I'm not that huge a fan of fantasy art on album sleeves, as such - I bought Roger Dean's Views like everyone else did, but I was never a huge fan. I used to like Alan Aldridge and Harry Willock who did all the Beatles stuff , and Michael English, and people like that. But I also used to like people like Neon Park, who did all the Little Feat covers and some of the Mothers of Invention stuff. Stuff with a little bit of a twist to it. I didn't really like the stuff that was just pretty for its own sake."

"It's very interesting this line of questioning, because I don't think anyone has ever asked that before, and it's certainly not in the book! Why we did try and make it dark, and why we did try and put the symbols? I mean it's in the book that the symbols are there, and where the symbols are derived from, but why we did it? I don't really know. It's probably because you don't want to lay yourself bare - you want to hide it a bit, you want to not be that direct, and I think it's the same with the lyrics. Superficially there's a song called Script for a Jester's Tear, but it's not really a song about a jester, it's about someone that perceives themselves to be the jester, and this is just a graphic way of portraying that. And yeah, it's very dark, and I think it's very rooted more in reality than some of the other people that we've been talking about."

To a degree, many of the songs are collages of ideas and there is the same collage of ideas within the cover. Was that tricky, because there's almost a checklist of elements: jester, poppy, magpie, wedding ring, etc..

"To begin with. Certainly Script was pretty much made to order - there was a list! I put pretty much everything that was on Fish's list in that one, apart from the rubber plant. I forgot that, for some reason. And I put one or two things in there of my own, like Mr Punch on the TV. I don't know why I did that. I thought I'd spurred Fish on to write Punch and Judy, but apparently he wrote that before, so that was just an amazing coincidence. But yeah, there was a checklist of things. As we went on, I stood my ground a bit more and said 'Fish, that won't work' or 'That'll look ridiculous' and 'What about trying it this way', but Script was pretty much a checklist of things he wanted - the bedsit, the mattress on the floor, the pre-Raphaelite painting over the mantelpiece, the fireplace. It just so happened that I lived in a bedsit with a fireplace and I had a seedy mattress, so that lived-in room was mine. It really was."

"I think it got more symbolic as we went on. Script -if you take the jester's uniform off, that could just be a pretty realistic picture of some guy playing a violin in a room. Obviously the chameleon makes it a little bit weird - I mean there's not a lot of fiddle players with a chameleon! But Fugazi was a lot more symbolic, I think, and Misplaced Childhood -that was far more symbolic. The whole business of the rainbow, dark to light, the four magpies, which you had to know was 'one for sorrow, two for joy, three for a birth, four for a boy' or something. I can't remember!" Three for a girl, I suggested. "That's it, three for a girl. So that was a lot more symbolic. I mean the whole business with the chameleon being in the cage, and the magpie. I've just been reading some of the final copies of the book, just to reacquaint myself with some of the answers that I should give you," Mark laughed.

Rather conveniently for another article in this very issue of ROBW, Mark continued; "Misplaced Childhood has very strong references to almost a misogynist view of life. His wariness of women comes out a lot and that whole business of the she chameleon being in the cage and the magpie holding the key, flying off for freedom. You know, all of that is very symbolic of that, but I don't really know - there certainly wasn't a checklist with Misplaced Childhood. That was a meeting with the band, and Fish, and they weren't so sure of exactly what they wanted. It was just that it's called Misplaced Childhood, we ought to have a boy, and Fish was very keen that it should be a drummer boy, because of the tin soldier connection with childhood. And that was pretty much it. It wasn't 'can he be standing in a room with a rainbow' - that all came from me. As I sent him sketches, he would say 'Yeah I like that' and 'What about adding this', so it was a real mixture of ideas from that point on, but I think the first two were definitely a sort of checklist. Am I rambling a bit here, or does that answer it."

It did, and it also led into another question. When Mark first started working with Fish they were both young and fairly wet behind the ears, but as things went on and they got to know each other better, how much did the creative process change? "There's no recipe, if that is what you are implying. It's different for every album, it really is. I mean, there's some projects (Fish the solo years now), where he has a very clear idea. On Vigil he had a very acutely clear idea of what he wanted, and that goes back to the checklist, which again is covered in the book. It's quite interesting, because there's three chapters on Vigil. It was such a pivotal album and it comes pretty much in the centre of the whole story, so we devoted three chapters to it. The first one is, ironically, the last conversation that we taped when it was supposed to be the next Marillion album. It's very interesting to contrast that with the next conversation, which is the third part - the middle part is a step-by-step 'how I did it' kind of thing. The third part was recorded ten years afterwards. It's very interesting because we both looked back on what was the initial brief and it's two very different people - Fish the solo Fish, and Fish the Marillion Fish. That was supposed to be the next big album after Clutching. You know, the whole meeting with Bob Ezrin, the American producer that was going to give them a leg up to the next stage of conquering America, or whatever - the whole corporate thing. Nobody really knew where they were going. I don't think the band knew, I don't think the management knew and I don't think the engineer, or the producer… Nobody knew where to take them. They were floating. They were ripe to go onto that next stage and Vigil really does describe the attitude that Fish had to all that at the time. And then the third part, the conversation ten years afterwards, it's very interesting his reaction to all this. What was the question again?"

Even I couldn't remember, but I assumed he had probably answered it somewhere in there. And anyway, I wanted to stay with Vigil, because it started as a Marillion album, and then became a Fish album. The artwork obviously changed… "No, not really. It was pretty much set in stone." So Mark Kelly was always going to be at the bottom of the hill, and Rothers' Porsche was always in there?

"You've found me out. I have to say, for the record, and this is the honest truth, that was my idea. It certainly wasn't anything to do with Fish. I think it would probably discussed in a joke sort of way by Fish and me, talking about the whole concept of who's at the top of the hill and who's at the bottom. I can just imagine a little jokey reference in there - let's put them at the bottom of the hill. It probably came out of a drunken talk one night, but it certainly wasn't a serious intention on Fish's part. When the artwork was delivered to EMI, they were extremely worried about it. I think Fish missed it. I remember showing him the artwork, which was a massive piece of work, a massive painting. He loved it, and he scanned it, very quickly and he took the whole thing in, but he didn't go into details. Because there's a lot of detail in that picture."

Ironically, that was the first album out of the whole Marillion / Fish catalogue that I bought on CD as opposed to on vinyl. "So you missed the whole thing.", Mark said. Everyone always asks cover artists about the problem of the smaller space on CDs, but that is "heavily discussed in the book", so we discussed how the designs themselves have become simpler over the years, less 'cluttered'. "Yeah. I think also a correlation can be drawn with Fish's lyrics. I might be going out on a limb here, but I think his lyrics were… what's another word for cluttered… involved. He's trying to say too much. That, for me, was Fish in the early years, trying to say too much with too many words. I think he's learnt as he's gone on, as I have, as everybody does. I mean you try and get it all out, don't you. When you first start in whichever artistic endeavour you wish to make, it's 'bleurgh' - the whole lot comes out. You think it's the best thing you've ever done, so you want to get everything in there. You want to cram that bag with as much stuff as you can. Sometimes you can say a lot more with a lot less and I think Fish has learnt that in his lyric writing and I think I've learnt that with the pictures, as we've gone on."

As well as Vigil being a pivotal point, it was originally when the book was going to come out. "Yeah - that would have been the last chapter. It would have been a much shorter book." But why didn't it come out then, and why such a long time coming? The answer was very simple - "Because Fish left the fucking band, that's why!" Mark went on to tell the story in more detail:

"We had two publishers that were going to go with it; Sidgwick and Jackson (that published MSH) and Hamlyn Books both wanted it. It wasn't exactly a bidding war - we're not talking Harry Potter here - but they were both very interested. And as soon as he left the band, they both withdrew. They didn't see the market would still be there for this book, in such a way. They were nervous anyway, because Hamlyn had released a book on U2, who were just about the biggest rock band of the day, and it hadn't been successful, because you can't necessarily relate album sales to book sales. 20,000 copies of an album is a relative failure, but that's pretty good sales for a book. In fact that's very good sales for a book of this nature, and they didn't sell anything like that. But we thought there was something a little bit unique here with all the covers and the designs. Alright, Yes and Roger Dean, etc. but there aren't that many bands that have had this sort of relationship. Anyway, they said no we're just not interested."

"We hawked it around and showed it to Dragon's World, ironically, and they were interested for a while. We took it a few stages further and got mock-ups, but it takes a long time to put a book like this together and by the time we got all the material ready, I think in the publishing world their star had been seen to wane a little bit. On both sides - Marillion and Fish. So they weren't interested either and it was dead in the water for years." But to a certain extent does it make more sense to bring it out now? "In terms of material, yeah."

A lot has been said about Mark's move from airbrush to computer, and he explained. "It's easier, it's quicker, you can get your ideas on paper, or screen, a lot more effectively and it's not one at the expense of the other. If you look at the book [cover], that is a real mixture. All the figures are airbrushed and all the background is done digitally. The foreground of the background, if that makes sense, is actually an old, disused car breaker's yard. I've just taken bits and pieces and collaged them together and coloured them up on screen. And the background, the flames have all been collaged in there. But I hope it makes a seamless picture, so that you can't tell where one technique ends or begins. That is what interests me about computer-based art. I like what computers can do to texture, for instance. With the foreground of this book, you can add texture, you can make it look as though it's been painted. There's programs (Painter) where you can mimic oil painting very effectively and you also use the airbrush facility. It is exactly the same as using an airbrush: you build up layers of colour very, very gradually, because you can turn down the opacity of what you are spraying to 10%. You can put a very minute amount of, say, green over a blue, and get a sort of aqua colour, and that's exactly the same as using an airbrush."

"I know that there's a lot of people out there that seemingly prefer the airbrush style because they think it's more human, perhaps. But the middle section of the Vigil chapter is a step-by-step and you can see what a painstaking technique it is. In the old days, when the record companies had the money, you could afford to spend months on a record sleeve. You can't do that any more. I mean there's not many bands that have got that sort of money. But even if they have - I've been working for Iron Maiden and they have got the money - I would still prefer to work with a computer, because the effects are that much more instant. I do say this in the book, but it is very true of any artist I think - the most important part of doing a picture is what you see in your head. What you see on the paper is always a disappointment, because it is never as effective. And I'm sure that's the same for a poet, or an author, or whatever. It's the idea in your head that is perfect. It should be irrelevant whether you do it with collage or you paint it with oils or you do it with an airbrush or you do it with a computer. It's the idea in your head, not how you get it on paper: it's the finished result, the look of the picture. But for the artist, how you do it is not important, I don't think."

I compared this comment with those of Storm Thorgerson, who shuns computers, preferring to set covers up and actually photograph them. Take Momentary Lapse of Reason as an example - it must have been tempting to say hang on, they're beds, they're identical! Take a picture of a bed, a picture of the beach, put The Bed on The Beach over and over again and nobody would know.

"He did the same thing with Elegy by The Nice. He flew to the Sahara with a photographer and film crew and everything, and put all those red balls on the dunes, and that picture was exactly how it appears in real life. My answer to your question would be that I've met Storm, he's a nice guy, but I think that's bullshit really. If you've got the money behind you to do that, wonderful. I would love to have set up a scene for the cover of Masque and had all the models dress up, make up people, got three jets to fly by at exactly the right moment - I'd love to do that, of course I would. That would be all part of the artistic dream, wouldn't it? But in reality, how many people could afford to that? Luckily he can."

To people reading this, Mark is intrinsically linked with Fish, but he has worked with many other people. Iron Maiden we already mentioned, and Mark pointed out he was currently working with Judas Priest. So how differently does he work with different people? Fish gives him a lot of ideas, and they know each other very well, but what approach does he take when he is given an open brief?

"Well, it's very different for somebody like Iron Maiden -basically you are dealing with a franchise. You've got to deal with Eddie, and I think poor old Derek Riggs, he just had enough! I don't really know why Derek didn't work on the last three singles. I think he was just exhausted with the theme and sometimes it takes somebody new to bring a new sort of insight onto the whole thing. I don't know - that sounds a bit grandiose for old Eddie. With Iron Maiden it was a case of the Wickerman, which was supposed to be the album sleeve, not the single. I was very disappointed that it ended up as a single, and that was all down to problems on the Internet. Apparently somebody leaked the title and the band were extremely upset, because there's a lot of secrecy around that band and what they do. So they said right, we're going to change it and we're not going to tell you what the album's called. Of course, meanwhile I'd done the album sleeve and been paid for it as an album sleeve. So I was happy from that point of view, but it was a shame that it came out just as a single sleeve. Anyway, the Wickerman was quite easy in terms of the brief. It wasn't easy to do, but the brief on that was the Wickerman movie, 1973, Christopher Lee, burning effigy. They didn't really know if Eddie should be inside the Wickerman tearing out or whether he should be the Wickerman himself. So I had to try different ideas and that again was a mixture of illustration and photography and touching it up on the computer."

This took us back to the issue of budgets again, and his earlier comment about Pink Floyd. "I'd just love to work for Pink Floyd. They were THE band for me and, I say this in the book, I was fan club member number 425. I was there right at the beginning. I caught them at Alexandra Palace when Syd Barrett was in the band and they were just so unique. I don't care what anybody says, I think from start to finish they were completely different. And that for me was the perfect relationship - Hipgnosis and Pink Floyd. I'm not a huge fan of Hipgnosis's other stuff, but for Pink Floyd they were perfect. And I don't buy that from Storm Thorgerson. I mean I've got that book, about the Pink Floyd stuff [Mind Over Matter]. You can't tell me that tree, for instance, that's in the shape of somebody's head… Storm did not get Edward Scissorhands to cut the exact shape. I don't buy that, and I do not buy that with the naked figures coming out of the water, with the spiralling water. Nah, come on Storm, you're being a bit disingenuous there - you got that done by computer. But I understand what he means, or I imagine this is what he means - there is that perception by the public that if you use a computer you're cheating. I think they think that there's a Surreal button on the computer that you just press."

"I had this when I was at art college, using the airbrush. For all you purists out there, the airbrush was considered to be anathema -that wasn't real art. For God's sake, you don't even touch the paper! It's got to be the artist's idea in his brain, it transfers to his hand, you touch the paper with the paint dripping off the paintbrush. For Christ's sake, you're using an airbrush and you're getting an instant… For all the artists out there, it's bloody hard to get that effect , because you have to use a fan brush and all the rest of it to get that gentle fade from one colour into another, then you have to wait for the paint to dry, you know it takes weeks. An artist like Patrick Woodruff, for instance, who did stuff for Pallas, could never take his paintings into the record company because they were always wet! So they were photographed and he took the photograph in. Then, about five weeks later, the painting finally dried. There's a lot of weird perceptions out there about what is real art and what isn't, but when I was at art college I wheeled out the compressor for the airbrush and everyone groaned. I was at college when punk was very big and it was all collage and quick stuff and people like Jamie Read, they were the heroes of the day. And there I was and they said 'Oh you're going to do Mott the Hoople covers are you'.

" So who would Mark have liked to do stuff for that he hasn't? "Apart from Pink Floyd… Oh God I haven't really thought about it. It is a good question, and I was asked something like it at the convention a few weeks ago. I said Radiohead, purely off the top of my head, because I do like Radiohead." But Thom Yorke does his own covers. "Yeah, I'm not very keen on their covers. The question then was which covers, of bands you like, do you not like and you wish you could do. And I said Radiohead, because I don't like their covers very much, but I love their music. To answer the question, though, I'd like to do Wire. I used to go to college with Colin Newman and he started off being a Todd Rundgren fan. Overnight he threw his greatcoat away, cut his hair and suddenly he was spitting everywhere, and was down the Vortex pogoing, and I thought 'Good God'. But I think they turned into an amazing band - very, very influential and I'd love to work for a band like that. But it certainly wouldn't have been anything like the stuff I did for Marillion."

Coming back to Marillion, Mark must have his own favourite cover - what is it? "Well, in the book I say Script, because it was the first and I didn't like it at the time. I don't really like any of my stuff at the time. There's nothing I've done I think, apart from one - the Chocolate Frogs thing for Raingods - as soon as I'd done that I really liked it. I put it up on the wall and to this day that's the only thing of mine I've got up on my wall at home. It really means something to me, that picture. But anyway, Vigil, I think - the hill, rather than the front cover picture. Again, I didn't like it that much to begin with. I appreciated the amount of work that had gone into it, but it grew on me by stealth, because it took so long to do. I can only see the mistakes, that's the problem, especially with the airbrush years. Script is far enough back now for me to forget about the mistakes - I look at it and it's not me that's done it, in a way. Vigil I can remember so well because it took so long to do - six months I think, solid work on that, which is ludicrous. If I was doing that now, I'd use a computer, and it would probably be six weeks, probably less."

It's well-known that Mark wasn't happy with the cover of Clutching, because of the rush to finish it. "It's terrible. Back cover's not so bad, but the front cover's awful. I hate that one. I think the concept is great - the original concept from Fish was to have all these writers and musicians colliding with the walls and each other in this bar. It's like the great bar in heaven, where Jim Morrison is chatting with Tony Hancock, bizarre as that may seem, and wouldn't that be a great place to be. And nothing like that is conveyed by that cover, at all. And this whole thing about the patron saint of drinkers being at the end of the bar, actually I think that was my idea. I just grafted it on at the end because I just said that there was something that was missing. The timing got ludicrously slashed - that was down to, I think, having to have a simultaneous release in America as well as Britain. Again, that was this whole thing that was going on at the time -where do we take this band now? This is EMI - we've got them so far, now they need this big push for America. I don't know if they ever would have worked in America. That wasn't the album to do it with, though, because of the subject matter. Everyone was very nervous about the subject matter on that. Nobody really knew how to market that album, certainly not EMI. And as far as the picture is concerned, they look like four, five, six figures stuck on a photograph. I could do a much better job with it now." If he had the computer technology available today, he means? "Well, the technology existed then, but it was hideously expensive, prohibitively expensive. Pink Floyd could afford it…"

Whereas now you buy a Mac, hook it up and off you go? "Yeah. Yeah, that's right." So before you know it, we'll all be doing album covers? I was rather surprised when Mark agreed: "Yeah - I think that's the way that people think it's going to go, unfortunately. We'll all be downloading stuff from the web, and we'll all have our blank CD cases, which will probably only be two inches square, and we'll do our own pictures. That is the way it is going to go, I'm sure. So you're talking to a dinosaur."

Dinosaur he may be, but a nice bloke nonetheless, and quite a talented chap. He never did tell me who the five people on the front of Thieving Magpie were, though.

COMPANY HOLLAND INTERVIEW

On Monday 18th of September i had an interview with Mark Wilkinson. Mark did the artwork for all the Fish-era Marillion covers and nearly all Fish solo-covers. I talked with Mark about the upcoming release of the famous Masque book and lots of other interesting topics.

How is The Masque book coming along Mark, is it finished?

Not yet, the deadline is the end of September. I'm currently finishing the scanning. Fish sent me his old lyric books before he left for the USA ( to play with the SAS Band ) We hope the book is ready to go on sale at the end of November.

The original idea for Masque dates back to 1988, is that correct?

Yes. Fish and myself had the idea already when he was still in Marillion. It's been 12 years since than, so we have an awful lot of material now. The problem is what the leave out of the book. I think we might even have enough to fill 2 books, which is not so bad.

Can you already tell something about the artwork for Fellini Days, the new album?

I haven't begun work on Fellini yet. The idea is to do something with Fellini in the last chapter of the Masque book. Masque will probably end with some rough sketches for Fellini. The problem is, the deadline is in 2 weeks, and Fish still hasn't sent me his idea for Fellini.

How do you work normally with Fish, does he send you lyrics or demo recordings? Do you get together for each new album?

Normally i try and spend a few days at the Farm together. That's the way Fish likes to work. We talk a lot and watch some movies. I've been over for a couple of days for each album.

How do you like the music Fish makes nowadays, Raingods for example?

Fantastic, Raingods probably is my favourite album. I think that Plague Of Ghosts is a master-piece. In my opinion Raingods is even better than Vigil, which makes me part of a minority, i guess. Fish told me again and again that he considers Vigil as his master-piece.

The artwork on Vigil is brilliant, at least that's my opinion. The front, but especially The Hill drawing on the inside are so full of details. There should be some things in the drawing that refer to The Beatles Sgt Pepper's album. Can you tell something about that?

Your the first person to ask me this. If you entered this question in The Masque competition you definitely would have won. I put in references to The Beatles in some of the covers, sometimes even without Fish knowing about it. We always played games when we talked about a new cover. We challenged eachother to put symbolism and references in the covers. The barrel in the left corner on The Hill drawing has the text: Welcome Skyline Drifters. Marillion, in the early days, once in a while played warm-up shows under this name. On The Beatles Sgt Pepper's album there is a doll which has embroidered on it's chest the text: Welcome Rolling Stones Good Guys. They did that to point out the rivalry between The Beatles and The Stones. I thought it was a nice idea to do that on Vigil, because it was Fish's first solo album since leaving the band.

On the Suits cover we see all kinds of tattoos on the skin. Every tattoo should point to a certain song. Can you tell something about that?

Not really, no. At least i don't remember it. The tattoos on Suits are not that well done. We were both not really happy with that cover. I was very limited in my time. On The Masque cover there will be a girl with tattoos, that's done far much better than on the Suits cover.

In November 1999 i visited The Baker's Arms Pub in Colchester, together with Harry & Astrid & Hindrik from The Company Holland. The cover photo's for the Clutching album were taken in this pub. Can you remember something about that photo-shoot?

The idea was to use drawings and photo's for this cover. We never were satisfied about the Clutching cover. The deadline was cut short, untill in the end i had about 10 days left to do the cover. Fish was furious about this, but the managment ( John Arnison ) decided this. John Arnison was already busy planning the tour and the artwork had to be finished. It was impossible. I had about one day per person in the sleeve. Fish's idea was brilliant, he wanted a sort of Great Bar In The Sky, where all these dead celebrities were at the bar. The people in the sleeve all kind of died from fame-related things. Alcohol and drug abuse, murder and accidents. Fish originally wanted about 20 or 30 persons in the sleeve. I called him that he had to cut down his list to his favourite 7. Fish for example also wanted: Jim Morisson, WC Fields and Tony Hancock. A lot of comedians were on his list actually. Torch is sort of like the guardian angel of the people in the sleeve. He is the patron-saint of the " drunken romantics " A friend of mine, Janus van Helfteren took the photo's.

In the early days, who came up with the Jester idea?

Fish!! I got the job to do the sleeve for Market Square Heroes from a design firm called Torchlight. EMI had just contracted a new band called Marillion. Jo Mirowski, an employee from Torchlight showed my portfolio to the band, along with 3 others. They chose my work. Fish wanted a recognisable symbol in the sleeve that would represent Marillion. He came with the idea of a Jester, i think he got it from some kind of book. I don't exactly know anymore. The Jester as a symbol will always be related to Marillion and especially to Fish.

Who actually designed the famous old Marillion logo?

That was designed by Jo Mirowski of Torchlight.

Something i wanted to ask for a long time. The Jester on Script and Fugazi, the boy on Misplaced and Torch on the Clutching cover are all barefoot. Does this mean something?

Again there's a little reference to The Beatles. It's a reference to The Beatles Abbey Road album. On the sleeve of this album they walk over the famous zebra crossing. Paul McCartney is walking barefoot and it was rumoured that he was in a car crash and died. The story was that somebody had replaced him. In some religions there is a religious meaning when someone walks barefoot, i don't recall what meaning this is. As i said we played a lot of games surrounding the creation of an album cover. In those days i was sent a lot of manuscripts. I used to draw my raw sketches on these manuscripts and send them to Fish. He would not only look at the drawings, but also read the manuscripts. He thought that i was sending him hidden messages and secrets. We talk about this in Masque.

The Torch figure on the Clutching cover has some little marks of mascara and paint on his face. From his pocket we see the belled Jester cap. Is he a descendant of the Jester?

Fish thought it was time to say goodbye to the Jester and the Boy. Those 2 figures played a major role in the Marillion artwork. Still we thought that there had to be some kind of central character in the sleeve. Nobody knew exactly what we wanted. At a certain point in time Fish came with the idea of Torch, a figure he had already written a lyric about, Torch Song. Fish explained what Torch represented. Torch was the patron-saint, the guardian angel of the " drunken romantics " in the bar. We decided to do him as some kind of angel. John Arnison thought that this was fantastic, as he was planning the tour together with a Geman promoter. This German promoter told John Arnison about the Black Angel, a symbolic figure in German mythology. The Torch figure could be used on all the things surrounding the album and tour. John Arnison asked me to paint Torch as a black angel. The original drawing shows Torch as a black angel, and this drawing is actually better than the original sleeve.

The drawing will also be in Masque. If Torch is a descendant from the Jester?

We left that open for discussion. He could be seeing the belled cap from his pocket and the mascara on his face.

How did you meet Robert Mead, the boy on the Misplaced Childhood cover?

He lived next door to me. He comes over next week. I want to take some pictures of him as he is now, and combine these with some old pictures of him leaning against the Berlin Wall, when they were shooting the Kayleigh video. I want to use these pictures for Masque. Robert is 27 now, the age Fish was when Childhood was released. He is a journalist now and maybe he can get us some publicity.

On the Lavender cover we see the boy crown the girl with flowers. Who's the girl?

She's a fictive person.

What education did you have Mark?

I went to the art-academy in Watford. I did a course in graphic design. Here's The Beatles connection again: One day we had a lecture by someone called Graham Palfrey Rogers. He was the art-designer during The Beatles Magical Mystery Tour. We became friends and he encouraged me to take up illustrating. When i left school i went to work for him in his studio in Covent Garden in London. On his advice i carried on and began to work free-lance. He is now living in Spain and makes paintings.

Do you paint Mark?

Not much. I did some painting for Masque however. Almost all figures on the cover are painted and than scanned into the computer. It's quite a complicated cover. There are 5 persons, the boy from Childhood holding a moon-shaped mask, the Jester from Script, a figure in a chair resembling Torch holding a cockerel. There's a half nude woman holding a masque and there's the figure from Sunsets.

Why is the Torch figure holding a cockerel?

When Fish came with his idea, i got a book from the library about the history of Jesters and clowns. The idea for the Jester, or at least for his clothing and belled cap, dates back to the MiddleAges. People wondered why the first thing a cockerel would do in the morning and the first thing the people would hear was the crowing. The story goes that the cockerel told all of the peoples secrets before they were awake. In the book i got from the library there is a beautiful painting of a jester holding a cockerel. The jester has his finger to his lips, as if he is trying to say to the cockerel: don't tell all my secrets.

Will Masque also be available from book-stores?

Yes, Rob Ayling from Voiceprint will take care of that. He also finances the book. ( last thing i heard is that Fish is now financing the book himself? WL )

On the Warm Wet Circles cover we see a drop of blood running from the eye. Is there a reason behind this?

It has the same reason and reference as the bullet hole. Both things refer to the murder of John Lennon. John Lennon was shot dead by crazed fan Mark Chapman on 8th December 1980 in front of his appartment in the Dakota building which overlooks New York's Central Park. In the lyrics of the song there is the line: Like a bullet hole in Central Park. The idea for this cover was mainly left to me to decide, because the band was in the USA at the time. At the bottom of the sleeve there is a lipstick which also gets mentioned in the lyric: "Rolled from stolen lipsticks across the razored webs of glass" It's always meant as a lipstick, although Fish thinks it's a penis.

On the Vigil cover the man carries an hourglass. The hourglass shines, why?

I was very impressed by a drawing called The Light Of The World by William Holman Hunt. I mixed this idea with an idea i got from a book called Bearing An Hourglass by Piers Anthony. In this book the main character holds an hourglass. On the Vigil cover i used the hourglass, but the idea had always been in my head as a lantern from the Light Of The World drawing. Probably it all happened a little subconscious, i can't explain everything. Sometimes a drawing takes on a life of his own, tells it's own story. What i really like is the glow from the lantern that falls on the cape. The two figures on top of the Hill should look innocent. You have no idea how they got there. The rest is fighting and clambering to get to the top. The whole idea behind the Vigil cover was time ticking away. The idea that we are 2 minutes away from Doomsday.

On the left side of The Hill drawing we see 3 crucified figures. Is this a reference to the crucifixion in the Bible?

Yes and no actually. They hang from telegraph poles. This refers to the Big Wedge lyric of religion being spread by all kinds of media. The crucifixion reference is also there. There's blood running from the crosses, down the hill. The blood in the middle represents Jezus's blood.

Also on the Hill drawing we see light fall through the windows of the cathedral. The light falls on some people, who are they?

These are African refugees. They are the innocent ones in the whole story.

The woman at the bottom of the Hill has red hands. Does this have a meaning?

No, she wears red gloves, that's all. Fish wanted the drawing to represent chaos. He wanted the idea of the Tower of Babylon. A scene full of figures.

Can you tell something about the different drawings for Plague. Are these all Fish's ideas, or is there also something personal in it?

He left it completely to me. Fish's idea for the Raingods cover was also very different from the final sleeve. He wanted a photo from him with his reflection in a gold Zippo lighter. He should be under an umbrella, and a storm should rage there. He called me and said that he booked a photographer, and that i should instruct the photographer, David Darling, on how to position Fish for the picture. I called David Darling and told him about an idea i got from an old album by Weather Report called Heavy Weather. In promotion campaigns for this album you see a drawing of a man with a hat and a raincoat on. Where his face should be a storm is raging. I told David Darling to position Fish in the same way as in this drawing. Afterwards the sleeve had to be ready in 1 weekend, which was nearly impossible. Again i had far to little time to work on the cover. If you compare that to Vigil, back than i had almost 6 months and a much bigger budget to work with.

What do you consider to be your best work to date for either Fish or Marillion?

I think i like Script best. It was the first album sleeve i did for them, and bringing back memories for Masque was a lot of fun. Fugazi and Clutching are my least favourite sleeves. Misplaced is also a great cover in my opinion. Regarding Fish solo, Vigil stands out. Fish shares this opinion, luckily.

The inside of the Clutching cover shows a cocktail glass. Wasn't this originally meant to be the cover for the album?

That's interesting. Fish also mentioned this. Back than he wanted this as the cover for the album. When we talked about ideas for the artwork he always made raw sketches of his ideas. I can remember that he once made a drawing of a cocktail glass with the world floating in it. The band rejected the idea, and Fish came up with The Great Bar In The Sky theme.

The clown on the painting in the Fugazi sleeve, is this Joey Grimaldi?

No, i have heard of him, but that isn't him. At least i can't remember, maybe it is, i don't know. All i remember is that Fish wanted some paintings in the sleeve. On the wall are two painting my wife Julie did, called Ressurection and Temptation.

Does your wife still paint?

Not much, she does a lot of photography. We worked on different projects together, she is a really talented artist.

Do you have children Mark?

You talked to one of them when you called me. We have a 15 year old son and a 12 year old daughter.

What's your opinion about the current Marillion sleeves and would you consider doing a sleeve for them?

I don't think they would ask me. They tried real hard to get their own identity after Fish left. Regarding the Marillion albums with Steve Hogarth, i really like the Brave album. The whole concept of it. It's by far my favourite Hogarth album, and i play it regularly. The last two Marillion albums i don't like that much. They have the same problem Fish has i think. They reached a certain level of fans and sales. The time they sold millions of albums is long gone. What i don't understand is, Marillion made a great album with Brave, Fish did the same with Raingods and Sunsets, but the albums don't sell that much. It's quite frustrating for them, i guess. Childhood sold over 2 million copies, nowadays they should be glad to sell hundred thousand. Plague Of Ghosts is a master-piece in my opinion, but Raingods didn't sell that great, i don't understand that.

Plague is a master-piece indeed, i agree. Fish did so much brilliant music and it frustrates me as a fan that he doesn't sell more. Nowadays i guess you have to take a lot of money to the radio stations to get your music played. What's your opinion on this?

I don't understand it really. Incomplete and Change Of Heart are great songs. The same goes for Easter by Marillion. All these songs have done nothing on radio, unbelievable. I thought Fortunes Of War was great, but that song also didn't do much. Fortunes Of War comes of my least favourite Fish album, Suits. I like Fortunes, Raw Meat, MR1470, Lady Let It Lie and Emperor's Song, but the other songs aren't that great. Still Suits sold more copies than Raingods i believe, i don't understand this.

Can you tell something about The Outpatients sleeve?

The studio was than called The Funny Farm. In Britain they called mental hospitals sometimes Funny Farms. On the cover you see the suits, the bussiness-man taking the musician with them, to lock him up in a Funny Farm.

Did Fish ever discuss a sleeve for a project called Geistfahrer?

Yes, he did. This came up in 1988. Actually there was the plan to make Geistfahrer the next project after Raingods, but he changed his mind for some reason. He is now going for Fellini Days. In the last chapter of Masque he explains waht a Fellini Day is. It's about a certain day in Kopenhagen, i believe.

What is your opinion about the Interal Exile sleeve?

I wasn't to thrilled to use a photo again, like we did on Clutching. Nowadays the techniques are far better than back in those days. The Sunsets sleeve is quite good i think, although Fish has a different opinion. He wanted to do a sort of art-deco 1930 style poster. That requires a certain style, which is different from what i normally do. I think Sunsets turned out great.

Why the different logo on Sunsets?

A promoter in South Africa told Fish that the old logo wasn't clearly readable from a distance. Fish asked me to change the logo, which i was not thrilled about. Sunsets became the first sleeve i actually got back from Fish for changes. The logo had to be changed and he wanted more cannabis leaves round the edges.

Which logo do you prefer, the round or the oval one?

The oval one. It's the best logo to work with and it looks more contemporary. The only minor problem is, that it resembles the Ford logo.

The Masque is almost finished, when will it be released?

December probably, at least that's the plan.

In 1988 you already had a cover design for Masque. Is the current cover much different from that old one?

Yes, completely different. The old black and white drawing is on my website. We now have enough material to fill 2 books. The Masque is containing the best material we had. Maybe some day there will be a part 2, who knows.

Why was there never a picture-disc release for He Knows You Know?

No idea!!

Do you collect something by a certain artist or group?

I used to have quite a big Pink Floyd collection. I sold a lot of it to purchase my first computer. Among the items i sold there were a few posters, which turned out the be quite valuable. I always regreted it. Maybe if i make some money with Masque, i will buy some things back. I never sold any of my Marillion or Fish stuff though, or other things i worked on.

On the Gentleman's Excuse Me cover we see Tammi, Fish's wife. Did she model for you or did you draw her from pictures?

No, she didn't model for me. I used pictures of her to work from. Actually it's only Tammi's face. Tara, Fish and Tammi's daughter, considers this song as her favourite.

This was the interview i had with Mark Wilkinson on the 18th of September. After thanking him for his patience and his time, he told me he had send me a picture of the cover for the Masque book. The cover is absolutely brilliant in my opinion, and if the rest of the book has the same quality, we have definitely something to look forward to.

Wilco Lathouwers

AIRBRUSH ART AND ACTION

Interview with Mark Wilkinson

AAA: Mark, first of all tell me something about your childhood. Were you one of those fledgling artists who couldn't stop torturing his parents by making drawings on the living room walls all the time?

Mark: As a small boy (and this is true) I used to creep inside a huge green cupboard, close the doors and out of the shadows came two imaginary friends called "Biss" and "Bess," little devils that played tricks as we flew inside a magic chariot to "Nonsuchland," a cross between Narnia and Neverland. My parents grew used to my tales of the underworld and obviously thought I would grow out of it. But I still work inside a big cupboard only now it is white and the little devil "Biss" is still with me, producing tricks! The men in white visit me every other day with the medication!

AAA: Well, that explains the white van with the darkened windows parked outside... Besides your battles in Nonsuchland, music was also a strong influence and attracted you to starting a career in art-is that right?

Mark: Oh yes, definitely. Music provided the adventure playground of my youth. If you didn't dance to it, you watched it played live and then read the lyrics on the inner sleeve when you got home -or tried to decode the hidden messages in the sleeve painting. "Designed by Hapshash and the colored coat;" now what did that mean

AAA: Uh.. no idea Mark. What does it mean?

Mark: It meant that you had to discover who they were! It was all part of the game of reading album sleeves. The more obscure the information-the better the game.

AAA: How did you finally succeed in getting your first jobs?

Mark: Well, after knocking on many doors, my first commission was a portrait of James Brown for a compilation album, the next-a compilation album of heavy metal called "Hot Shower." The next-four compilation albums of classical music for Deutsche Grammophon

AAA: ... So you got all compilated! I must assume that this was not exactly what you were looking for.

Mark: No, not really... Boy, was I getting fed up with compilation albums! But where was the strangeness and charm to which I could hitch my magic chariot? The tide turned in 1982, when I was asked to submit some samples of my work to EMI records for a new band called Marillion. I went to see them in concert and met up with the band a couple of days later to discuss their ideas for the first album, "Script for a Jester's Tear." They wanted a highly detailed gatefold sleeve for the first in a trilogy of "concept" albums! Such extravagance was unheard of for a new band in the early eighties. But they doggedly swam against the tide of fashion, and with the third album they went on to become one of the most successful rock bands of the eighties. This was the band I had been waiting for. In Fish, their charismatic singer and lyricist, I had at last found my soul mate. Not Peter Pan exactly, because he jerked my imagination away from "Neverland" to his heart of darkness, "The Wilderness of Mirrors." It's fifteen years later and I am still working for him in his solo career. His latest album. "Sunset on Empire," was released last April. From that one contact I have worked for many other bands over the years, including The Scorpions, Judas Priest, Europe, Status Quo, Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush.

AAA: In an earlier conversation you told me Punk and New Wave music had thrown out all that "flowery nonsense" that had inspired you in the sixties. This must have been a setback, although you clearly succeeded in doing what you always wanted to do- record sleeves. What was the secret of your considerable success?

Mark: Persistence, I guess. When I graduated from art college, Punk music was at its peak and suddenly the anthem was "destroy." It was a necessary catharsis, but the whole scene changed. Members of the local college band Wire all shaved their long hair off and snarled their way into a record contract with EMI, but it was worth it They went on to become very influential. R.E.M., Elastica and Blur are now citing them as an influence on their music. The point here is self belief, don't take no for an answer. If it means riding a new wave to get noticed, then try it. Once you are in, you can grow! It is the same for illustrators. I had been waiting five years for that call from EMI, but when it came you can be sure I was ready. All kinds of doors that had been closed before, suddenly opened.

AAA: After that you also got to work in the comics field, illustrating icons like Judge Dredd, as well as doing designs for Star Wars and posters for the immensely popular TV show Red Dwarf, to name but a few. Did people just come knocking on your door for that, or was there a bit more involved?

Mark: Catch 22. Art directors are reluctant to take a chance on a new artist unless they have experience, but how do you get the experience if you don't get the chance? It has always been tough and the standards are getting higher. One successful project, though, can get you noticed to such a degree that a whole career can develop. This was my experience. From the work I did for Marillion, EMI used me for other bands. The merchandise company Bravado Big Tours that produced the T-shirts and tour brochures for Marillion was anxious to keep the same artist that did their album covers. From that came more contracts in the music world. The film and TV-related work came from an offshoot of Bravado-Network Distribution Co., and so the T-shirt designs for Star Wars and posters for Red Dwarf and Judge Dredd came.

The chance to work on Judge Dredd came from meeting one of the regular writers, Alan Grant, who moved to my village. So I knocked on his door, too! We became friends and he introduced me to John Wagner, the creator of Dredd (with the Spanish artist Car-los Ezquerra). Dredd has an entirely different feel to it compared to American comics-something that the movie missed perhaps. I know that Alan was very upset by it, by how wide. of the mark the movie really was...

AAA: Didn't some of your work appear in the movie?

Mark: ... Yes, one of my cover designs was used in the opening title sequence of the film. For this I received a tiny fee, but went to a special preview in London attended by writers and artists of the comic, and introduced my two children to a chap dressed up as Dredd in the foyer. He was trying to look menacing, but to me, sweitering in a œ4000 rubber suit in the middle of the summer, he just looked hot!

AAA: You mentioned Alan Grant, a writer of Judge Dredd, being very upset by how wide of the mark the movie was... Being so closely involved with the original comics, what do you think of the transition of the Judge from paper to celluloid?

Mark: Well, it wasn't "Blade Runner," was it. I thought it looked tremendous and Sly Stallone was okay, but the fans really wanted Schwarzenegger for the role. The problem, as so often happens now with Hollywood, is in the writing. The best comics-related movie, in my opinion, was the first Batman. It had the look, but far more importantly it had a good script. I loved the new "Spawn" movie as well; Todd MacFarlane's inspired creation is one of the most exciting in comics today.

AAA: I always liked Judge Anderson more than Dredd, and I have heard this from other people. I wonder why... how about you?

Mark: You know, with Dredd I feel that the character is not so interesting as the plots. With Alan and John's stories there is so much humour and dry wit going on that the personality of Dredd HAS to be a blank canvas almost, to accommodate all that irony.

Also you have to take on board that Dredd was cloned. His mother was a test tube and his father a Bunsen Burner! With Anderson's history being what it is, an "abusive father"-who she destroyed with a voodoo doll, etc., and with her special "powers" just crying out for weird psychedelic stories, it's not surprising that you find her more interesting! Me too! In fact I asked Alan if he could write me a really weird story to illustrate, so he gave me the old "telepath flies to the centre of the Universe to find herself and gets to meet the awful truth of creation by a black hole" chestnut to work on. Whoa! That did it for me, I can tell you!

AAA: I hope this is just coinci dence, but in a previous interview Edward Reed told me that he's a regular visitor to the centre of the Universe, and he recently warned me that it is about to fold in on itself! Let's hope that's not the awful truth Judge Anderson is to discover!

Mark: Not for a few billion years yet, Edward! By then we will all be whizzing about through wormholes in space and warping time like nobody's business! Until then I guess the truth of creation, awful or not, remains ... well, a mystery.

AAA: Anyway, back to more Earthly matters... Can you tell me something on how you tackle a painting? Is there some kind of ritual you go through or some imaginary world you plunge into? To put it simply-this is my favourite question by the way-where does the inspiration come from?

Mark:Well, I don't climb into the green cupboard any more, if that's what you're getting at. One ritual I do like if I really need to "visualise" is to sleep on it. I read somewhere that you can "program" your brain by thinking about a set of given problems the last thing before going to sleep at night. In the morning, train yourself to recall those last thoughts and sometimes-not always-an answer or "picture" pops into your head. It has something to do with harnessing your brain's Alpha and Theta wave activity to solve a problem of any kind, so why not? The next step is to play around with ideas by roughing them out on a scrap of paper. I only make these roughs about 50 mm square and end up with dozens of them scrawled out. They help a lot with the composition, too. It's surprising how a few squiggles in a small box can suggest a complete illustration in your head. These shorthand roughs are usually indecipherable to anyone else; even my wife has difficulty working them out. But then I work one or two of them up and that is what the client wants to see. After that we're off! I collect together any reference material I have found from a large cupboard full of magazine clippings, or photographs I have taken, to help along the way. Then I start work on the illustration itself.

AAA: How about the technical side of your work. Do you consider the airbrush to be a holy relic?

Mark: It has been said many times before in your magazine, but it bears repeating nevertheless: "It is just a tool." I used to get very irritated when people called me an airbrush artist. I am not so sensitive anymore; you can call me a banana if you like, as long as I get the job! I work on Schoellershammer 4R paper (which is increasingly hard to get hold of in England. Why?) and I use acrylic and Gouache, inks and dyes, Chroma color paint coloured pencils, pastels, felt pens... all sorts in fact. Many of my pictures are painted to begin with, then airbrushed on top to get that "finished look" of realism that I like.

AAA: What about computers, do they affect the kind of work you are doing? Do you have one yourself. or do you intend never to touch those electronic boxes?

Mark:So far I have managed to survive without one, so they have not affected me or my work. I am aware of the changing climate, however, and I never ever say never. My London agent, Harry Lyon-Smith of the Illustration Agency, has recommended that I have a go. A few of his "realistic" artists have switched to computers, either completely or partially, with great commercial success in some cases. It's the learning curve that worries me. Some people reckon on a year, some say two, before you are competent enough to be able to compete with all the other computer artists around. How many pictures would I have painted in that time? Oh well, my son already thinks I am a "holy relic" for not using computers in my work, but I am suspicious that he is trying to goad me into getting one so he can zip around cyberspace on the Internet himself.

AAA: Recently you had another big commission for Red Dwarf that forced you to work day and night because of the tight deadline. How do you feel about deadlines-a necessary evil, perhaps?

Mark:Deadlines can be a curse when you have been up all night trying to meet them, but on the other hand if they are too relaxed you can overwork the painting to become a bit sterile. I never seem to have enough time, though.

AAA: What would be your artistic heaven?

Mark:My wife, who is also an illustrator, and I tried unsuccessfully to get a book project off the ground a few years ago. It was a children's story called "The Wastes Of Time," and was a fantasy adventure that we both wrote and illustrated. Having attracted a lot of interest from two agents and a TV producer (who saw it more as a film project), it was a source of great frustration for us that it never happened for various reasons. So I think that would be our artistic heaven-to see a project such as this take off.

AAA: If there is anything you would like to say to future artists-besides to stay the hell away from your clients-what would it be?

Mark: It's a jungle out there, is what I would say. If you are determined though, then keep knocking on those doors. Follow your dream! It all sounds terribly glib, I know, but it's true. Often with these things it is down to stamina, not talent. How many times have we all heard about people with talent who don't make it?

AAA: So very right you are. One last question, Mark. Please tell me what "Designed by Hapshash and the colored coat" means.

Mark: They were a design group in the sixties headed by that well-known "Airbrush artist" Michael English. They designed many posters and album sleeves, and even formed a band of the same name. Apart from Alan Aldridge their work, more than any others, forced me to re-evaluate my life and take a chance in the lines waiting to get into art college....

THE FLAMING SHROUD

ISSUE 8 APRIL 1992

INTERVIEW BY ALEX MOSELEY

As promised, and just in the nick of time, the Mark Wilkinson interview was finally completed twenty-four hours before this issue was speeding its way towards the metal plate of the lithograph. So excuse any typing errors caused by the 4am blues, and enjoy an interesting range of questions sent in by your good selves, and more importantly, an even more interesting set of answers. Also bear in mind the advances in technology utilised by this interview; a top-of-the-range Fischer Price tape recorder belonging to Mark’s daughter.

What materials do you use to create your covers?

I use a variety of things: ink and paint, mainly gouache paint, I also use acrylics, and photographic dyes to get the very detailed airbrushing on faces and figures in particular. Then I use Magicolour ink, which is very, very bright pigmented ink, for the backgrounds where you need a broad sweep of colour. I work on a mineboard called CSlO; this is very technical stuff! There’s no real magic to it: I use an airbrush called a Devilbiss Super 63... this is like a guitarist telling a musician's magazine all the equipment he uses! Just because you’ve got a Les Paul doesn’t mean you play like Eric Clapton though.

What are your artistic influences, for example other artists, any training, and any formative experiences or events?

First of all, Salvador Dali, he was the first for me, and Magritte and all of the surrealists and the surrealist movement was what really got me interested in art in my early teens. I remember hearing this song from Captain Beefheart’s album called Dali’s Car and I remember saying to a mate of mine ‘who’s Dali?’ and he’d got this book on Dali which was like a chocolate box, the way it was produced, and it was the most beautiful thing. I didn’t realise painters were doing work like that.

"I like other people as well, not necessarily figurative artists. I like Egon Schiele for instance, any work that’s very intense.

"I remember buying a book called The Beatle’s Illustrated Lyrics, and seeing the airbrush illustrations of Harry Willack and Alan Aldridge, and I thought they were wonderful; that was the initial reason which made me give up engineering and go into art school. I was also very friendly with a chap who used to do screen printing from a very battered caravan at the end of his garden, and he used to do concert posters for the local universities, for people like East of Eden and David Bowie etc.. And he showed me how to do some screen printing. I took some samples along to art college, not thinking I would get in, but I did!

"At college I was very influenced by a visiting lecturer called Graham Rogers, who had worked on Magical Mystery Tour for the Beatles, and was pretty good in my books! He invited me to join his studio in Covent Garden when I left college, which I did do. I didn't get any work for quite a while until I met an agent who got me some black & white work in computing magazines, and Accountancy Age, and it got to the point when I felt confident enough to start hawking my stuff around record companies."

Which subjects do you find the most difficult to draw, for instance, figures, landscapes, perspectives, etc.?

"Well, they all come easy to me, you know (modest chuckling). Landscapes, I suppose sometimes give me a bit of a problem. Trees - I was never very good at those. We used to go to Covent Garden when I was at art college to study plants and trees, and I always found it very tedious, I still do, I mainly prefer drawing figures."

Did you work on any other album covers before Marillion's?

"Yes. The first album sleeve I had to do was for James Brown, one of his many greatest hits albums, for Polydor, funnily enough. I got that job through a design group called 'Shoot That Tiger'; I knew that they specialised in doing designs for record sleeves so I went to see them and they gave me a few video covers to do, mainly horror-type things like 'The Werewolf of Washington'.

"The next one I did was for RCA, which was a heavy metal compilation album called Hot Shower and I had to do a picture of this chap playing a guitar in the shower wearing an asbestos suit, and fire coming through the fire nozzles!!"

At this point Julie brings Mark a cup of coffee, places it on the interview tape box, and is severely reprimanded.

If you had the chance to re-do one of the Marillion LP covers (except Clutching) which would you do, and why?

"Either of the live albums, Real to Reel especially, which was a disaster! It wasn't my idea, mind you, it was Fish's idea to do that, but he didn't like the idea of the band in the spokes of the reel, for which I can't blame him really, they weren't very flattering! But if you're talking about any of the studio albums, I'm happy with Script and also Misplaced Childhood I think possibly Fugazi I would do again, certainly the figure is very weak: there's not enough flesh on the bone."

Julie interjects again to point out that the paintings on the wall were good (painted by Julie Hazelwood who was to become a certain Mrs. Wilkinson). Modesty obviously abounds in the Wilkinson household...

"It's just the whole look of that sleeve somehow I'm just not happy with. I think, because I knew from Fish that there was going to be a series of albums around this theme of the jester and chameleons and what have you, I thought it would be good to make the second album a light one, as the first one was fairly dark, and then go back to a dark one again. Weird! But also the dingy bedsit was lit by that one window, whereas this was a high-tech hotel.. in those days, of course; look at that hi-fi and video set-up! It was very sort of chromey, steel and big windows. I'm not a big fan of that sleeve I must say."

"I suppose Fish... it was always Fish, you notice; the rest of the band didn't have a clue what he was talking about, or what I was doing, I don't think! So I think Fish threw a lot of ideas into the hat, to see which ones stuck, and whichever aspects of his vision I responded to and developed, he would put even more into that particular area. I mean there were very specific things like the stiletto heel lying at the end of the bed, and this whole business of the mirror having a different image in it.

Fish is in love with surrealism and symbolism as much as me, I guess, and I think he wants to re-use that idea in an interesting way for his next album. So watch this space!"

You’ve been quoted as saying it was overworked, in what way?

‘Have I really said that? Not as over-worked as Vigil but I enjoyed doing Vigil and I really like that sleeve. I guess some of the symbolism there worries me a bit: you know, the chameleon going after the ring in the magpie’s beak, it’s a bit over the top. Maybe that’s what I was thinking when I was quoted."

Was there any additional pressure on you to make the Misplaced Childhood cover ‘something special’ to live up to the massive scale and concept of the album?

"Not at all, because nobody realised that it was ‘something special’ when we had the discussions about the sleeve

which was at The Grange where they were rehearsing. I know Fish wanted to get rid of the jester, because he didn’t want to be tied to one image for the rest of his recording career, and so he came up with the idea of the boy. I think It was Mark who suggested dressing him up as a soldier boy. I talked to Fish at length about what he

was trying to covey in this album, and what exactly was the Misplaced Childhood that he felt he had missed, and suggested that he read a book by Herman Hesse a big hippy book which he had never read. But there’s a passage in that book about the boy; it’s a rites of passage story about this boy who becomes a man but his guru has the Mark of Cain... which makes him different to all other people, that marks him out as being special. And I remember us talking about how we could do that with this boy on the very vacant stare. Anything that didn’t look like the Boy cover from U2 because Fish was a bit concerned that he’d be accused of jumping on that bandwagon, "There was a lot more input from me on that cover than the previous two. I said to Fish right from the start: let’s not go in for the heavy symbolism this time, let’s go in for something a bit simpler, and I think we achieved that to a degree. The only thing that I left off which Fish was quite insistent on having was in the floor where it opens up, the jigsaw area, there should be this steel town emerging underneath; an aerial view of this mill town, or steel town. It was a shame I couldn’t put that in. It was on the drawing, but as usual I ran out of time!"

Do you feel that your ‘artistic freedom’ has changed at all now that you are producing covers for a solo artist rather than a band?

"It hasn’t changed in the slightest, because I only ever work with Fish, so it was natural when the band split up that I go with him, because the rest of the band never really seemed to be that interested in the discussions of the

sleeve. I think they felt that it was Fish’s vision, and mine to a certain extent, so they left the entire thing to us. They did ask me to carry on working for them when they split up with Fish, and there was absolutely no pressure on me at all from Fish not to work for Marillion as well, but I felt that artistically I couldn’t work for both parties. It’s quite interesting to see how they’ve developed with their sleeves. It’s also interesting to see some of Mark Kelly’s ‘remarks’ in the press about those sleeves that I did. If he didn’t like them he should have said something at the time. That’s all I shall say."

Is there an album cover (by another band) that you have looked at and thought "I could have done a better job with that"?

"Yes, there’s many, of course there are. Well, Meddle by Pink Floyd. I never liked that. In fact a lot of the Pink Floyd album covers; Animals I never liked that much either. The conceptual approach of Hipgnosis was

all very well, but I think they did better sleeves with other people. Even Dark Side of the Moon, although it’s perfect in a way, it’s just a bit vague for my taste. And as they’re my all- time favourite band and the reason really I started listening to music in the first place, I suppose I’ve got quite strong feelings about the covers. I

suppose the best cover was Saucerful of Secrets.

"I think my all-time favourite album cover is Strange Days by The Doors. Also another by Beever & Kraus, All

Good Men which is a beautiful surrealistic painting. I also love anything that's been done for the Cocteau Twins; 23 Envelope, the design group, are wonderful."

The big question: what has happened to Masque, the book yourself and Fish were writing?

(Coughs) "The answer to that is: it's there, it's ready, waiting to be published, we're just waiting for a publisher to agree to do it, basically. We did have a number of publishers that were interested over a period of time, but for mainly legal reasons we couldn't go ahead with it. By the time we were ready to publish it and all the elements were right and the legal question was sorted out, the recession had hit quite hard and publishers were very reluctant to take a chance. Also another reason is that to get a decent publishing run. they would only be interested in a co- edition, which means linking the publication in this country with America and Europe. I don't think Europe would be any problem but certainly America isn't, shall we say, swamped, in the marketplace with Fish products! So we're hoping that with the release of Internal Exile in America, there might be some interest there, and the publishers may give us a deal. But at the moment I think we've just got to wait until Fish's career is firmly established as a solo act. The good part about it is the longer you go on like this then the more Fish-paintings (for want of a better word!) are going to be included in the book.

"I mean we could put it out tomorrow with a small publishing run with a small publisher, or someone like Omnibus press, that would do a limited run, but it would be a very cheaply-produced book, and we're not really keen to do that. We would prefer to stick with our original concept, which would be something a bit larger in scale than just a flimsy paperback."

Will the demise of vinyl diminish the importance of artwork, since the size of a CD is much smaller and so doesn't display the artwork in as much detail?

"Yes, I'm afraid so. This has already hit me. Even in the Marillion days John Arnison was very fond of telling me that a CD would make me redundant, as it were. I think what they do in America is have the packaging for CDs 6" by 12" which makes for a bit more scope for an illustrator or designer to do something with. Otherwise these small trinket cases that CDs come in, the record companies want to go for far simpler images; just usually a picture of the artist, with a bit of quirky graphics in there. If they do go for illustration or painting they tend to go for quite simple things or graffiti- style paintings, and so yes I think it has affected, and will affect what I can do."

Are there any forms of art, outside of LP covers, band promotion that you would like to pursue?

Yes, If I was rich, which I'm not, I'd like to do huge 8'-square canvases for art's sake, which is, I think, the dream of any commercial artist. In every commercial artist there's a frustrated fine artist waiting to break out, but as I can't afford to do that, I do commercial art; you work to a brief. In my case, I've been very lucky over the years to work to a brief by someone like Fish who gives me a lot of interesting concepts to play around with. Apart from that my wife and I have just put together a book project of our own, which is a children's book fantasy called The Wastes of Time. We've yet to show this to a publisher; it will be a 30-40,000-word novel with pictures; not a picture book, as such.

But once again we've got to convince the publishers that something like this is a viable commercial prospect, and we've just got to wait and see, but we're very optimistic. We're just about ready to go out with it in fact, my wife is upstairs now working on the final two chapters!

And there we leave Mark, who then proceeds to play me a selection of his album collection. And I thought Peter Hammill was weird...

Enormous thanks go to Mark for his time and patience in this interview, and especially for his help over and above the call of duty. Thanks also to those of you who sent in the questions.

BABYLON ONLINE MAGAZINE

(Max Murgia) (Translated by Shadowqueen)

Mark Wilkinson, that is when art meets music. Mark is one of the most appreciated record cover designer: his paintbrush has been beneficial to some very important bands such as (Fish era) MARILLION, JUDAS PRIEST and IRON MAIDEN, defining a style and integrating perfectly in the imaginary world of the bands for which he’s been the illustrator.

I personally cared much about this interview, and it was supposed to be made during a rainy Saturday night in Milan, when Mark came to Milan for his recent appearance in an MTV Italy show. The informal ambience and the copious quantities of alcohol that flooded the Pudding Tavern table made this a hard attempt, so I gave up. I’d rather let Mark talk freely and listen to him replying to the interrogations of something like 15 of his hardcore fans, who had lots of inquisitive questions for him.

Mark was very kind and made himself available to sort-out the information, oddities and behind the scenes anecdotes that had been called to mind during that night, in an e-mail interview that I hope you’ll find as interesting and enlightening as I did.

First of all, would you tell our readers something about how your art met music, and how you have become a much sought-after illustrator for album covers?

I don’t remember when exactly it was that I became fascinated with record sleeves but it must have been sometime during the last year of school. Some friends and me used to bunk off from school to go to the record store in Windsor to listen to the latest releases that week. If there wasn’t anyone new that I wanted to listen to in the listening booths, I used to look at the sleeves in the racks to see what I could find. I loved the painted sleeves the most, anything by “Hapshash and the Coloured Coat” for example...who designed posters as well as sleeves and eventually ended up making an album. It wasn’t very good actually but I loved the sleeve! I would sometimes buy albums just because I liked the sleeve...sometimes I was disappointed in the music and other times surprised! I had friends who were in bands but I wasn’t too interested in learning an instrument but thought a lot about how great it must be to design record sleeves. I became fascinated with the airbrush a few years later when I’d bought a book “The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics” and seen the illustrations by Alan Aldridge and Harry Willock. I bought one and set about learning how to use it and designing sleeves for imaginary bands in my spare time. I started drawing at work where I was employed as a draughtsman at a company that designed heating systems. I used to draw caricatures of people and workmates encouraged me to design posters for the dances that my workplace organised for the employees’ social clubs. I also helped out a friend who designed silkscreen posters for bands that played the local university and colleges nearby. One fateful day I saw an advert for an Art School in Watford where they were advertising for students who were not necessarily trained at school but had a portfolio of interesting work. If the work was good enough they would take you on for a 3 year course in Graphic Design. So...I went to an open day and showed my drawings and posters and had an offer to join the course. I left the engineering job and started. After a year I switched to Illustration full time as I had been encouraged to do so by a part time lecturer there called Graham Palfrey-Rogers who it turned out was the art director a decade before for the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour TV film. I left the Art School with a diploma and joined his studio in London and it all really started to happen for me after a few hard years doing book jackets and magazine covers, barely making a living...I was on the dole (social security) to make ends meet. I walked into a design studio one day in 1982 that had contacts with EMI Records and needed an artist to do some sketches for a new signing there called Marillion. The studio asked 3 illustrators to submit work and the band chose my ideas. So that was it...my first record sleeves...apart from a few isolated designs for compilation albums for Heavy Metal bands called "Hot Shower" for RCA and one or two classical records for Polygram and the Decca label.

Is there any artist who has influenced you more than others?

Caspar David Friedrich...and the whole symbolist school of art. Rick Griffin and the Stanley Mouse Studios in America, and the aforementioned Hapshash and the Coloured Coat studio in England which was really Michael English and Nigel Weymouth. I also loved the work of Viennese artist Gottfried Helnwein.

Tell us how a Mark Wilkinson album cover takes shape, from the original concept to the finished product? Do you get to listen to the music first?

Sometimes... but not always. I like to hear the music if at all possible. I play the demos or whatever constantly to see if there are any ideas that pop into my head that are suggested by the music. Sometimes the band has a specific idea of what they want, other times they leave it to me to send in sketches or nowadays digital designs by e-mail. Once the ideas have taken shape and have been approved, I do the finished work.

Most people got to know about Mark Wilkinson’s art through the work you've done with Marillion. Would you like to tell our readers how you got the job and how the Jester character was born and later developed?

They didn't want photographic cover designs but wanted to return to the earlier era in the 70's of painted sleeves, they wanted to establish a relationship with an artist, one that would grow with them over time like the Roger Dean/Yes example. The Jester was suggested by Fish as the obvious choice for an image for the band as they already had the album title "Script For a Jester’s Tear". The first single "Market Square Heroes" was to have the Jester hiding behind the mask...the second one, the mask torn away, an idea suggested by Mark Kelly. For the album we all got together and ideas were flying about all over the place and Fish had more or less a complete image worked out in his mind's eye... the seedy apartment, the Jester, a struggling musician, playing the notes scrawled out on a sheet of paper, etc. It was up to me to make sense of it all visually.

After the Jester went through the window in the "Misplaced Childhood" cover, there was a change in style in your job for Marillion. Tell us about the "Clutching At Straws" concept... We always had a tough deadline on this album... a few weeks at most, for various reasons. The concept was there... a bar with lots of characters who had been an inspiration to the band, hard drinkers and life-on-the-edge writers and artistes, a bit like a drinker's Sgt. Pepper sleeve! Originally there was supposed to be dozens of people in that bar. I suggested doing a mix of photography and illustration this time to get over the problem of such a short period I had to complete the picture. I was about a week into it when the manager called me to say I had 2 or 3 days more at the most to complete the job because of a deadline of getting the album out in time for an American release. It was a tough call... I had to compromise drastically, and it was not the sleeve we had intended. We ended up with what... about 5 or 6 people in the bar instead of the dozens we had originally intended. It was the worst sleeve I have ever done... and in my opinion for the best album Marillion ever made. I was terribly upset about it and thought it may well be my last for them! It was... but not because of that, as history showed.

When Fish parted company with Marillion, you stuck with him: tell us about your professional relationship with the Big guy, and how's working him.

I was asked to carry on working for Marillion after the split and I considered it carefully. I decided against it because I didn't trust their manager at the time. Artistically I wish that obstacle had been removed earlier and I could have carried on working for both. You look for truth in an artist. Otherwise all you're left with are "phonies" as Holden Caulfield stated. And there are too many of them in life let's face it! In the end they don’t deliver on their initial promise and you feel cheated and let down. You look for an artist that you can heap on the praise for the high points and give enough slack when the lows happen. I can love him. I can hate him. I think... I hope... there is a mutual respect between us. In the good times (if there is an "r" in the month and a fair wind in his sails)... Fish'll out-metaphor the hind leg off a frog and put together some great work. In the bad times?... Watch out for breaking glass!

People have been waiting for the "Masque" book to be released for years: now it's finally out (and thank God for that!) - tell us about how it was conceived and how it developed the way it turned out?

I hoped people were waiting for it too! It was conceived to be published after "Clutching At Straws". What a thin book it would have been? Ironically though, it would have sold many more copies if we had brought it out then! As it is...it is a much more complete work. It tells the whole story behind those album sleeves, what the symbols splattered all over the covers meant. It delivers a no-holds-barred account of our working relationship. I love a lot of what Fish does, but not all which he well knows! It is the same with him with the covers. When it works it works beautifully. That is the story we thought we would tell. An honest one. Visually, the book is absolutely what I wanted. I think it should be of interest to anyone fascinated by album sleeve art. I sure could have done with it when I first started out! There is even a step-by-step account of how the "Vigil In A Wilderness Of Mirrors" sleeve was made. Both visually from first drawings to the airbrushing... what inks were used etc. and conceptually with Fish and my first meeting about it when it was to be the next Marillion album chronologically. Of course they imploded before it was released and it became the first Fish solo album sleeve!

In your latest works (Fish's last couple of albums and John Wesley's record, for example) you started experimenting with computer graphics - tell us something about it.

I really liked the cover for Wes' album, one of my best ever I think. With Fish, I think the last two albums worked better inside the booklets rather than the covers. Generally speaking though it was market forces that made me switch to computer art. I could no longer afford to work for weeks at a time airbrushing and painting a single picture to be paid less than I had been 20 years ago. Everywhere you look in graphic art the budgets are shrinking along with the size of the canvas... IE CDs. I have a family to support like the next guy... but I'm damned if I will sell my soul to rock 'n roll! So I, like many others saw what was happening with digital art and decided to have a go. I love drawing with a graphics tablet and playing with images on screen. Also, it can be quicker to do, BUT crucially... not always! The thing is... people take advantage. Clients want to pay even less because they think it is done quickly. So you are left feeling pretty demoralised and artistically stifled if you're not careful! I think Wes's album sleeve doesn't look as if it was created on a computer. I don't like a lot of the smooth... 3D side of computer art. I like what you can do with texture for instance. That' what interests me, to have the end result not looking as if it was done on the computer. I like it as an art form in its own right. And I think it is equally valid as an art form to painting. I must admit to a feeling recently though that I would like to return to painting a picture by hand again. Just for me... see if I can still do it I suppose.

Are you gonna work on Fish's next album? Are there any ideas already in your mind?

The subject matter of “Field Of Crows”, the next album title was borne out of Fish seeing a field of crows in Kosovo I believe...and he wasn’t aware of the Van Gogh symbology...so don’t expect a messy suicide! There is a rough idea of what he would like to see in this album cover, elements of which may change. It would lend itself very well to do by hand. I have expressed a wish to do this one as a painting. Quite how I can afford to do it is another matter as budgets as ever are tighter than a gnat's toupee.

You made a few covers for Judas Priest too. I guess our readers would be very interested about that...

I started working for Judas Priest on the "Ram It Down" album sleeve and have done all their covers since. I got the job after the band had seen my designs that year for "The Monsters Of Rock" festival which I had done each year for 8 years before it folded. The last two ("Meltdown" and "Demolition") were done digitally. "Demolition" in particular was a difficult one as the band really wanted something different this time and were concious of the changing styles in album covers for metal bands... a more simple direct approach, more graphic than illustrative. It took about 20 attempts to get to the final cover that they liked. The lettering was in place early on...it was just difficult to get the rest to work and to fit in with the title. We got there in the end! Before that - with "Painkiller" probably being the best example - it was a case of supplying rough drawings based on the band's ideas. We had the biker in place on that one for instance and they suggested a metallic creature riding pillion but I replaced the biker with the metallic creature and put the monster's head on the bike to add to the hellish theme of the title track.

From the Jester to Eddie: tell us about how was taking care of a character that wasn’t originally created by you - and since we're talking about Iron Maiden, I guess it would be interesting to know about your relationship with this band.

I had painted the image for one of the "Monsters Of Rock" posters that featured the winged Eddie when Maiden were performing, it was released as an album with the design as the cover. I had met Rod Smallwood (the band's manager) at the time and he had said we must work together again as he was pleased with that poster. A few years later I got the call to see if I could help out with "The Wicker Man" design for what was then to be the band's album cover. It was a tricky