mark foggo ~ Indorocksteady

Mark Foggo's Skasters - Car on a Train

Born in Liverpool in 1950, Mark Foggo began playing music at age fourteen, inspired by British rhythm and blues groups such as The Animals, whose singer Eric Burdon Foggo cites as an influence. Several years later, Foggo moved to London in hopes of finding work as a guitarist, playing the London pub circuit with a number of different rhythm and blues and punk rock bands for most of the late 1970s.

In 1979, Foggo relocated to Amsterdam. Around this time, he was discovering ska music through 2-Tone and bands such as The Specials and The Beat, inspiring him to start his own punk/ska band, The Secret Meeting.^[ The band was promptly signed to Polydor Records the following year, releasing a successful single, "New Shoes", and an LP, Speeding My Life Away, followed by extensive European touring. Foggo's passion for ska eventually grew larger until he omitted the punk elements from his music entirely, focusing exclusively on ska for his first solo album, 1983's A State of Mind, released on Boni Records. The album proved successful enough that EMI Records approached Foggo shortly after to record an album for their label under the condition that the music wasn't ska, as the genre was at its commercial nadir at the time. According to Foggo, he "recorded a shit rock album [1985's Weapons and Guitars] and went on holiday with [the] money. Afterwards it was straight back to ska".

Foggo formed his most popular band, Mark Foggo's Skasters, in 1987, naming themselves such to make it clearer to audiences what type of music the band played. Their 1989 debut, Ska Pig, was a big success in the Netherlands and Germany, is often cited as a classic of the ska genre. The Skasters continued to tour exhaustively across Europe and record prolifically on several labels until Foggo founded his own label Skanky'Lil in 1990 in order to release his own music, as well as promote new up-and-coming ska bands and distribute material from established ska bands like The Hotknives and Skarface.

Foggo continues to record regularly, though most recently has been recording under his own name, omitting the "Skasters" tag. In 2010, his band signed to V2 Records, releasing the album Mad that year. Foggo also tours extensively, most commonly throughout Germany, France, Netherlands, Belgium, Czech Republic, Austria and Switzerland.

DISCOGRAPHY :

As Mark Foggo & the Secret Meeting

Speeding My Life Away (1980, Polydor)