The Minister of Reverberation
“He claims to have discovered The Get Quick. He was there when we lit the fuse, sure. But The Get Quick weren’t discovered — they were detonated.”
— S True Smith, 1981 interview (heavily redacted)
The Early Years:
Kevorkian was already legendary in London’s underground tape labs by the late 50s — an engineer with a producer’s instincts and a bureaucrat’s access. His first known contact with The Get Quick came in 1960, shortly after the circulation of their chaotic live demo at the Velvet Glass in Soho.
He brought them into a disused RAF listening station in Wiltshire, now wired as a studio, and began shaping what would become the band’s early sonic identity — tight but cavernous, punchy yet full of subliminal drift.
“Fabian didn’t mic instruments — he mic’d the decisions leading up to them.”
— Mitchell Joy, TapeHiss Quarterly, 1974
The S True Connection:
Kevorkian and S True Smith formed a potent double act: Smith the public architect, the hype-man and arranger of corporate buy-ins (the infamous “Flash Action” perfume campaign, The forgotten TGQ puppet show on Luxembourg airwaves); and Kevorkian the private visionary—cutting tape like a psychoanalyst, miming the band through a song’s bridge by waving flags like an airport marshal, donning his trademark inspirational furry headgear, often refusing to explain what he was doing, or to even speak in coherent phrases at all.
Together the pair ushered the band onto major festival stages, late-night television, and oddly high-placed government galas—always with the distinct impression that someone more important was watching.
The Mind Control Allegations:
Nothing proven.
Nothing withdrawn.
But the rumors stack up:
Heavily encrypted speaker frequencies used in tour mixes that caused audience blackouts.
Audio-only rehearsals with the band under hypnosis, conducted in near-complete darkness.
The infamous “Caisson Process” — a technique Kevorkian once described in private memos as “laying narrative egg clusters in the listener’s auditory tract.”
“If he wasn’t MI5, then MI5 were following his lead.”
— Col. Boran, Vienna affidavit
Some say Stunt of the Century — the album that “doesn’t exist” — was his final, broken attempt to record a magick ritual in the form of a song suite that, when played, would erase itself and the listener simultaneously.
Collapse & Withdrawal:
By 1981, Kevorkian had moved to Los Angeles, supposedly at the behest of a paramilitary art collective disguised as a synth-pop label. There, in ’86 he began working with Crashing Magic on their major label debut, but things disintegrated quickly and Kevorkian abruptly left a session mid-take and never returned.
His ’87 total mental collapse is well documented. His disappearance and eventual fate, still up for debate.
Do songs ever completely end? Or do they only exhale?
— Mark Question 2011