Mark Hanley

Room 101 was my introduction to the music of Ohio’s Mark Hanley. It was immediately apparent that this guy could really play guitar and with fire in his belly. I loved it right from the get go. From 1984 these live recordings are with Bob Shields on drums and Tom Delequadre on bass.

I traded cassette tapes with friends in America and Europe in the mid to late 70’s but one of my first trades of my home recordings was with Tom Furgas. Oddly enough, I read about his music in OP magazine and noticed he lived about 15 miles from me. I was always interested in who was making original music locally (Youngstown, Ohio) and in those days in the 70’s, there wasn’t much. In the early 80’s I hooked up with Sandy Nyes (Magicsh Theatre) who live in Belgium. Sandy connected me with other networking musicians in Belgium, and Europe. The music scene in Europe was exploding with minimal synth – cold wave music at that time, the likes of which was not happening in the States. It was really great how dedicated the musicians were to circulating all the unique music that was being created. It took a painfully long time to send and receive music via the postal service back then but everything was worth waiting for.