1980s-2009 Beginning at age 14, Marks played a variety of instruments in several different bands. Performing as a rock and jazz guitarist was not meeting Marks' creative needs, but he was fascinated by ethnic fusion music. He had temporarily moved to
Glasgow around 1987 to study jazz guitar, where he also began an interest in the new dance music he was hearing in clubs. He sought to combine it with atmospheric textures like those found on
Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd and
Chill Out by
The KLF. The 1989 single
A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules from the Centre of the Ultraworld by
The Orb opened a new artistic path for Marks. "It's Pink Floyd meets techno meets acid house meets sampling meets soundscape," he said. "It was just exactly my thing. Add in a bit of world music and I was set on my course." as well as Club Dog, owned by Michael Dog. His first experiments with synthesizers and samplers resulted in the 1990 self-released cassette album
Medium. His track "Soufie" was included on the compilation
Ambient Dub Volume 1: The Big Chill, released in August 1992. Its corresponding album,
Freeform Flutes and Fading Tibetans, was released later that year, as was
Deep Live. These three releases were sold at gigs but never commercially released due to copyright issues with the samples used. In 1993, he made his commercial debut with the EP
Desert Wind on Michael Dog's label,
Planet Dog Records. He followed it with
Maya in 1994, which was submitted to the
Mercury Music Prize on its release, and in 1995 by the critically acclaimed
Last Train to Lhasa. Both albums reached No. 1 on the
UK Indie Chart and featured in the top 40 of the
UK Albums Chart. Meanwhile, Marks was growing artistically, preparing his next album to be more complex and incorporating a greater use of acoustic instruments. The record label was requesting another dance-oriented album, which frayed their relationship with Marks. Meanwhile, they were going bankrupt, prompting him to form his own label, Disco Gecko, in 1998.
Big Men Cry, released in 1997, featured a collaboration with
Dick Parry playing saxophone. The track Drippy was prominently featured in the film
Pi by
Darren Aronofsky. In 1997, Marks put together a five-piece band that included Ted Duggan (drums), Ashley Hopkins (bass), Larry Whelan (wind synth, saxophone and ethnic flutes), and Gary Spacey-Foot (percussion and saxophones). The band reduced in number to just Marks, Duggan and Hopkins in 1999, and then just Marks and Duggan from 2000 until 2003, when Marks went back to being a solo artist. Between 1999 and 2004, he released
The Magical Sounds of Banco De Gaia,
Igizeh and
You Are Here. In 2015, Marks returned to playing with a live three-piece band, with Ted Duggan (drums) and James Eller (bass). On 7 October 2016, he released his ninth studio album
The 9th of Nine Hearts, featuring collaborations with
Sophie Barker (
Zero 7),
Tim Bowness (
No-Man),
Dick Parry (
Pink Floyd) and his band. Marks' tenth studio album,
Trauma, was released on 6 September 2024, on Disco Gecko Recordings. == Discography ==