“Mark Question—the name itself has become as enigmatic and riddled with implication as the band he chronicled, and perhaps loved too well. Once described by Melody Massacre as ‘the Boswell of the Breakdown Generation,’ Mark Question was more than just a biographer—he was a colleague, a confidant, a recorder of private rites, and, for a while, a kind of secular priest to The Get Quick’s spiraling mythos.”

— Mark Question, 1998

Early Years: Scribe of the Sonic Underground

Mark Question (born Marcus Q. Kier, 1944, in Hackney Wick) was a precocious literary talent who initially made his name with a string of absurdist op-eds in The Student Lurch and an experimental novella called Gravities of the Electric Avocado, a favorite among the Chelsea acid-intelligentsia. He initially encountered The Get Quick in 1962 at a derelict cinema in Walthamstow, where they were performing their brand of edgy American-British Invasion pop. Even back then they were a band whose wheelhouse was a seemingly irrational loop. He claimed he “recognized something inarguably “now” and yet timeless in them—like troubadours who’d swallowed their own tongues.”

By 1964, he was embedded in their camp, traveling with them to radio sessions, parties, and suspiciously opaque government-funded retreats. He documented everything—reams of tape, photos, notes—in what he called his Hex Notebooks. These archives formed the basis for his scattered later publications.

The Schism: What Tore Them Apart?

The fracture between Mark and the band is debated. Some say it was drugs, but Mark was never more than a “ceremonial user.” Others insist it was black magick, specifically a failed transubstantiation experiment during the recording of The Commonplace Pleasure Cruise in 1968, which left Mark temporarily blind and unable to speak, claiming to only be able to process thought backwards.

But the deeper fault line is worse than drugs or black magick—politics.

Mark had become involved with a shadowy faction within the Committee for Unofficial Culture—a radical arts cell that advocated “aesthetic insurgency” and was rumored to have ties to MKUltra offshoots. His affiliations put him at odds with Mitchell Joy, who allegedly referred to Mark as “an emissary of the soft coup.” After a disastrous attempt to stage a film-scripted mass exorcism in Rotterdam in 1971, the band cut him off completely. He was physically ejected from the recording sessions for GiveTheWorldAWay.

The Lost Tome: A Question of Quickness

Throughout the 70s and 80s Mark continued to work obsessively on A Question of Quickness, his definitive biography of the band. Excerpts appeared sporadically—most notably in the short-lived zine Fangchurch, and later in ParaNoise Quarterly. These fragments blended searing memoir, metaphysical speculation, obscure diagrams and unreadable passages scrawled in asemic script.

By the 1990s, rumors swirled that the manuscript—hundreds of thousands of words long—had been sealed inside a climate-controlled storage unit in Reykjavik, or hidden beneath a nightclub in Naples that burned down in 2001. A microfilm copy was said to have passed through the hands of Klaus Vallis in Berlin, but this remains unconfirmed.

Tragic End: The “Disappearing” of Mark Question

Mark Question gave his last known interview in August 2002 to Low Frequency Reader, speaking cryptically of “decoding laughter,” “The Reverse QGT mirror band,” and “an alien interface from across the threshold.”

That December, his body was discovered in a burned-out bookstore squat in Ljubljana, surrounded by what Slovenian police described as “an installation made of tape recorders, broken telephones, and newspaper cocoons.” His death was ruled “natural,” but ME photos of the scene testify otherwise. Those close to the case believe he was attempting to “perform the book” in a final act of sonic invocation.

Legacy and Present-Day Speculation

Mark Question’s papers were partially archived by The Tincture Institute, but much of it remains in private hands.

A holographic adaptation of A Question of Quickness was attempted in 2023 by Dr. Saria Fong (using AI generated from Mark’s marginalia), but was halted when the project allegedly induced catatonia in two test users.

A Chinese bootleg print-on-demand version, dubbed Get! Get! Get! appeared briefly on darknet exchanges in 2019, but it was largely incomprehensible and rumored to contain subliminal tracking code.

Current rights to the manuscript may reside with the estate of Coco LeBree, who has neither confirmed nor denied their involvement in a posthumous edition.

In the end, Mark Question was both witness and casualty—oracle and outcast. The tragedy of his life is that he sought to document The Get Quick... but instead ended up destroyed by their myth. And absorbed into it.