Showcase
This page sets out the Cover Art and lyrics to each song in the form of a .pdf behind each button. There is also some extra information on each track beneath the title. Videos for the songs can be found on the Videos page.
An interesting pairing with In Tension. That song was a about child having run away and the mother coming to find her. With Sanctuary, although there are wider issues at play, the narrative most directly tells of the story of a son, when he is older, being called back (the reasons unstated) to his former home. There is a whole set of issues around trust and how we remember things. Indeed, the working title of the track was called “From Memory to Longing” but a week before release Mark changed this as he felt that title a little “naff.”
A track about the frustration of not being understood. The story follows an estranged young person’s frustration at not being understood by her mother.
Musically, the arrangement endeavoured to be fluid, in terms of production and arrangement to represent the watery aspect of the subject. This included the use of panning with the drums (toms) from left to right and the particular guitar effects chosen.
The original video had the subject diving into the water at the end but this could have been construed as her drowning herself, which was not the intention, and so the less grim version was used.
The lyric was written following a trip to North Wales. Black Rock Sands Beach inspired the title, initially, but the narrative actually is partially about slate (a large part of the industrial heritage there) and also about the foreboding nature of the landscape.
The story is one around returning to a place alone, having travelled to the same place with a loved one previously and how that calls back emptiness and the sense of loss. The lyrics were imagined as an internal monologue talking to the person no longer there.
The lyric is based on a photograph taken by Runs With Dogs (the opening shot in the video). The song tells of autobiographical issues of the fear of being stuck in life but also being fearful of moving on and fearing everything will be out of control. This aligns it to the metaphor of the photograph degrading, rather than real life moving forward and time passing (“time radiates and is gone”).
The original video had one shot of a spaceman flying uncontrolled off into space but that shot was replaced for the final Vevo version.
A lyric coming from watching the unfolding of wars (the item being watched was Ukraine in this case) and grim news on the tv and how easy it is to depersonalise things happening to real people elsewhere. There are three different contexts to the “father” in each of the sections.
The bassline was one take live, which, although it was the same riff all through, was felt to add texture rather than looping it. The relentless nature of the riff is very deliberate and adds tension, with the song weaving around it. The only relief is the (slightly) hopeful ending where a keyboard is introduced to slightly lift it.
The inspiration for the lyric came from Mark sitting in his garden and watching a buzzard circling over the hill of the title and thinking about the bird’s perspective, then that of a potential mouse that may well soon become his prey.
The idea for the musical themes follow the mouse in the picked guitar lines and hi hat; with the bass drum, his heartbeat increasing as the song goes on. The buzzard is the swirling keyboard.
This was a song written about Mark’s late father, John. It tells of his struggles with dementia in the years prior to his passing. It particularly notes an incident when John couldn’t identify his own grandson, AJ, from a picture on a shelf and wanted to know who had slid AJ’s picture from its frame, even though it was in there and AJ was in the room with him.
A song written after a visit to see two friends and ex band mates who Mark hadn’t seen for many years. The lyric was written the day Mark returned home and the style is meant to be a nod towards a more rocky sensibility from those times. The drums are higher in the mix than Mark would normally make them in other songs. The thinking behind that arrangement being one of seeing the world from a drummer and bass player’s perspective, as the instruments that Mark had been mainly playing at that time.
The lyric was thought of on a trip into Cornwall from his home county, Devon, in the UK, travelling west (note the Sevenstones name check of a village travelled through). The refences to pantomime are used as a context relating to both politics and the business world, something that the trip (and life) is trying to drive away from.
The drum voice is played live but uses an electronic voice to mimic that of a electronic drum; a kind of backward twist on when, “back in the day”, we would use drum machines to mimic live drums.
Although not the first song to be recorded (that was The River), it was the first to be released as Professor Blue.
The original version had a layer of keyboards and a number of themic motifs. Having played it to friends, it was felt that was too overly fussy and would be best stripping it back to what was, essentially, the backing track. The only remnant of the keyboard themes can be heard at the end of song.
The song was written about tough times during covid.
The song was recorded in association with Mark’s son, AJ. Working at installing some new studio equipment, Mark tested the new installation with the basis of this tune. The words heard here were added later. It also accounts for the unusual (for Mark) inclusion of an acoustic guitar. The original version actually had AJ playing drums and keyboard. These were overdubbed by Mark as AJ was not available for overdubs in the later recording sessions, although Mark kept faithful to AJ’s original, off the cuff, arrangement.
Chronologically, this was the first music to be recorded as Professor Blue, but was actually released after 56 Winters Unravelling.
Written during a particularly intense period of struggling with mental health issues, both the lyric and the music was written and recorded very quickly. Where generally for other songs, lyrics will take a number of iterations during the process and each instrument will take a number of takes (sometimes many!), the lyrics underwent minimal changes and each instrument only one or two takes. This “rough cut” remains as the only version recorded by Mark of Lost At Sea and serves as a reminder as to the difficult circumstances it was written and recorded under.
Despite the above, it remains one of Mark’s favourite drum performances in the Professor Blue set.