Marc Hadley


Musician, Alto Saxophone Player,  Arranger, Novelist

Newlyn…a fishing village in the far west of England -my home as from 2004........

    This was as far away from the music industry as I could get, and I thought by taking on a new identity here I’d be safe from any more interrogation and brainwashing. I hadn’t realised how fanatical these ‘Relatives’ were. ....

On my way back from the pub one rainy winter evening in late 2006 I stopped to help some foreigners looking at a map. A man in Ray Bans (strange for night-time in the Winter) asked me for directions- suddenly, a bag went over my head and everything went black. When I was next aware of my surroundings, I seemed to be in the cargo-hold of a plane, with my hands and feet secured with plastic cable ties. “Oh no, “ I thought, it’s the CIA again. What do they want this time?”

The plane landed, and I was thrown into the back of a blacked-out Volvo. The road-trip lasted about 70 minutes. The hood came off. My abductors had dressed me in an orange boiler-suit. Around me were pine trees and small houses with white fairy lights in their front windows, showcasing tasteful Christmas decorations - good! Not Egypt or Afghanistan , then. I was marched down into a subterranean bunker of smart minimalist design. Then I realised…argh! A recording studio. Shit. It’s worse than I thought. The Dutchman code-named “Die Architecten” was smiling at me, a photo of my pet poodle in one hand and an alto saxophone in the other. “Play this sax on these tracks or Froufrou gets it,” he said. Seated at the mixing console, my old adversary, the English low-frequency assassin known as “The Monk,” ran a scarred hand along his weapon. He gave me his thousand-mile stare from behind cold dead blue eyes. “And no 12- bar blues this time,” he murmured.

Beads of sweat ran down my forehead and my stomach twisted in dry fear. I’d forgotten what these guys were like. Once they decide to make an album, they’re like hammerhead sharks- no sleep, no Phil Collins DVD’s, no pity until the final mix runs down onto the master CD. The empty studio left a smoking ruin of abused equipment littered with the grotesquely twisted bodies of renaissance recorder players, Dutch Jazz drummers and Philippino backing singers. And the music! In my nightmares I sometimes heard – zzzt-

[ Investigator’s note: the audio recording ends abruptly at this point.]