The Man in the Three-Piece Vortex

Large in body, larger in voice, Professor Ignatius Thurlow Cromicon III was a walking empire of contradiction. He wore pinstripe suits that appeared pressed by a steam engine, a gold pocket watch whose ticking supposedly drove his staff to nervous breakdowns, and a pipe or cigar perpetually clenched between yellowed teeth like a sacrament. He carried a cane carved from whale vertebra, topped with a silver cast of Hermes Trismegistus. No one ever saw him use it to walk—but it was rumored to deliver small electric shocks when he tapped it on the ground for emphasis.

His head was mostly scalp—slick, pink, sunburnt—but fringed at the base with a wreath of damp, grey-black curls like a thundercloud threatening litigation.

He spoke in paradoxes and prophecies. He’d say things like:

“The public doesn’t know what it wants until it hears itself screaming for it. My job is to sell it the scream.” Or —

“Every song is a real estate deal in the astral realm. And lads, I’m the broker.”

Cromicon Industries / Cromicon Limited

These twin companies—Industries for the tech and R&D; Limited for the talent and occult licensing—were like Siamese twins joined at the offshore bank account.

Cromicon Industries built surveillance devices that doubled as novelty musical toys. Cromicon Limited signed bands, poets, psychic ventriloquists, “information jammers” and “dancers on the interface.” He once claimed his A&R department was staffed exclusively with defected intelligence agents and disillusioned exorcists. Their London office was located inside a Victorian Turkish bathhouse; entry required whispering a code phrase into the mouth of a taxidermy puma.

Discovery of The Get Quick

In 1960, The Get Quick were performing at a sock-hop in Bristol when The Professor showed up in a black sedan with mirrored windows and a portable tape recorder. Nothing like either had ever been seen before by anyone in attendance.

He offered them a seven-album deal, access to a “sonic mentorship program,” and “shared authorship in their eventual mythological collapse.”

“You don’t need a manager,” he told them. “You need a custodian of your inevitability. That’s me.”

It was Cromicon who funded their early studio time at the BBC and in subterranean vaults beneath Old Maudlin Hospital, and Cromicon who insisted Coco LeBree be added to the lineup after a chance encounter at a Masonic funfair.

The Fallout: Pyres of Vinyl

By 1975, Professor Cromicon had become obsessed with destruction as a form of promotion. He personally ordered the ritual burning of Legend Tripping, a Get Quick album deemed "too contagious for public release."

The press release included phrases like:

“We burned the master tapes to preserve the band’s future.”


“Art, like war, should leave craters.”


“No refunds.”

This act caused Coco LeBree to collapse onstage during a solo performance in Oslo, and Mitchell Joy to denounce Cromicon publicly as “a rhino with a press release fetish.”

The final straw may have been when Cromicon Limited attempted to replace the group with a band of Mephistophelianly talented impersonators.

Later Life and (Alleged) Death

the Professor retreated from the public eye in the late ’70s. Some say he became a hermit CEO, operating out of a modified observatory in the Swiss Alps, dictating memos through a brass phonograph horn to a series of albino assistants. Others claim he merged with an AI he built to review unreleased music, and now exists solely as a whispering presence in defunct satellite signals.

He was declared legally dead in 1988 when his will was enacted simultaneously in 11 jurisdictions. His body was never found—only his cane, discovered planted upright in the sand of an unmarked beach in northern Libya.

Legacy: Ghost Contracts and Unpaid Royalties

To this day, Cromicon clauses still turn up in artist contracts, obscure boilerplate phrases referring to “duty of spectral performance,” “prophetic reversals,” and “corporeal forfeit in the case of harmonic breach.”

The Get Quick never fully escaped his influence. In fact, Professor Cromicon is still listed as “executive producer” on the liner notes of the 1995 box set, despite being presumed dead for over a decade.

— Mark Question, 2011