Marillion keyboardist Mark Kelly to release autobiography

Mark Kelly
(Image credit: Mark Kelly)

Marillion keyboard player Mark Kelly has announced that he will release his autobiography, Marillion, Misadventures & Marathons: The Life & Times Of Mad Jack, through Kingmaker Publishing on January 20.

“Much like finding yourself on the ninth storey window ledge of a Luxembourg hotel as the wind whips around you, as Mark Kelly once did, it’s not unusual to question your life choices sometimes," is just one extract from the upcoming book, of which Rick Wakeman says, "Mark Kelly deserves so much career credit. An incredibly gifted musician and composer, he has now written a book that is compelling reading. It’s rare to find such honesty in a book like this and undoubtedly it was written from the heart.”

Written during 2021, Marillion, Misadventures & Marathons: The Life & Times Of Mad Jack charts the remarkable rise and fall and rise of one of rock music’s most enduring bands and the keyboard player at the heart of that journey.

It llooks back over six decades decades to consider a life less ordinary and the decisions he made that took him there. From a dirt poor early childhood in Ireland to some of the biggest stages around the world, Kelly’s journey has described an arc that any fiction writer might blanch at. The departure from the band of their singer at the height of their powers; reinventing the music industry wheel by pioneering crowdfunding to help his band survive; and going from club shows to arenas and almost all the way back again.

Marillion, Misadventures & Marathons: The Life & Times Of Mad Jack will be published as a 264 page hardback, plus 48 pages of photographs documenting Kelly’s life and career, including some photography commissioned exclusively for the book.

Pre-order Marillion, Misadventures & Marathons: The Life & Times Of Mad Jack.

Mark Kelly

(Image credit: Kingmaker Publishing)
Jerry Ewing

Writer and broadcaster Jerry Ewing is the Editor of Prog Magazine which he founded for Future Publishing in 2009. He grew up in Sydney and began his writing career in London for Metal Forces magazine in 1989. He has since written for Metal Hammer, Maxim, Vox, Stuff and Bizarre magazines, among others. He created and edited Classic Rock Magazine for Dennis Publishing in 1998 and is the author of a variety of books on both music and sport, including Wonderous Stories; A Journey Through The Landscape Of Progressive Rock.