Hong Kong & France

In Hong Kong, Marco joined The Dregs as a rhythm guitarist, and a few years later in France he formed a new band called Lyrique along with 2 friends from Madagascar, as lead singer and rhythm and bass guitarist. “Even now I have absolutely no idea how on earth I managed to play both bass and rhythm at the same time, but I did, oooh what a great double-neck that was. I sold her 20 years later, for quiet a lot of money, yes, and I desperately needed money at the time, but nevertheless it felt like I sold her out, I've  regretted that for a very, very long time.”

“Even now I have absolutely no idea how on earth I managed to play both bass and rhythm at the same time...”

Career in Design

It was two years later, when Marco left France for Spain and Portugal, that he stopped making music altogether, to focus on a career in shoes, just like his father and grandfather before him. First as a freelance shoe production supervisor and later as a successful children's shoe designer, he lived and worked in many different places in the world, Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, Brazil, USA, China, Indonesia, Taiwan are among them. “I even lived in the Netherlands for a while in the 1980s for er… yes, you guessed it, two years… …or was it just one year?” After a short career switch from international footwear to Spanish real estate, he moved back to the Netherlands, with “a backpack filled with super high ups and extreme downs plus 276 euros in my pocket, a Dutch passport and a just used one-way plane ticket. So I arrived in Rotterdam rather penniless, it's been more than ten years but it feels like yesterday. That's a good thing, I think, because it reminds me of where I come from and especially what I'm capable of, both in positive and eh... negative areas.”

Return to Music

When asked what happened to music, he replies: “In the beginning, after I arrived in the Netherlands, which I thought was a boring, small, uh… mainly boring country, I was very busy doing everything to rebuild what I thought I lost, I'm talking strictly material things. I felt extremely sorry for myself, which made me both angry and sad, and I felt a constant emptiness inside me, which I constantly tried to fill with meaningless things like a Mercedes Benz convertible, a huge 4 bedroom house with a fireplace , all things I didn't need and couldn't afford, but I thought I somehow deserved.
Then once I got it, once I owned something, it wasn't enough, so I wanted more. Needed more. Same thing with booze. Always too much and never enough. At some point I became aware that I wasn't living my life, had never really 'lived' my life, but somehow I was always 'surviving', so I forced myself to make substantial, even radical, changes in order to survive.

 

"Always too much and never enough..."

Then I started making those changes, not all at once or in one day of course, but gradually, with a lot of patience and help from quite a few people. I bought a violin and a guitar and started playing again. For my 50th birthday I decided to turn one of my poems that I had named 'Moonlight' into a song, and posted it on my internet blog. And guess what... a few months later 'Moonlight' was played on internet radio in Germany and the U.S.! So I continued writing songs. The funny thing is that the violin I played as a child, and brought with me to Spain, the Far East and finally France, where I gave it away, over 40 years ago now. Then, 30 years later after donating my violin, around the time I was recording 'Moonlight' actually, that very same violin found its way back to me! True story! Anyway, so I continued to write songs and literally started performing for people and charity. An average of 20% of all my gig proceeds and songs, sometimes more and occasionally all of it, still goes to various charities that I love to contribute to and care about.

Watch 'Moonlight'

I've found that if I keep music to myself, it's ineffective, it has no power. The power of music is that it connects. It connects me to people, of course, but it also connects me to everything around me; it motivates me. I believe that music is a gift from 'somewhere', let's say Universe, and I have to do something with it before I pass it on. If I choose not to accept that gift, do nothing with it, keep it to myself, or not pass it on, I become ungrounded, disconnected, unsatisfied, unhappy. That's how important music is to me. It controls me so that I am free, in my all doings. And, no less important, music ensures that I stay well-balanced and good-humored in my other activities such as designing, entrepreneurship, education.”

Interview 'Who Is Who', Hilversum, March 2022 [translated from Dutch]