Welcome back to Those Who Are About To Dive: Chronicling Colosseum, Track by Bloody Track, where the rules are flexible, the digressions are mandatory, and occasionally the universe hands you a guest who rewrites the evening entirely.

THIS EPISODE:

Episode 7 — Dr.’s Digressions: Mark Clarke, Mach I

For this special digression episode, Chaz Charles and Dr. Glund are joined by Mark Clarke — bassist, vocalist, and one of the great connective figures in British rock. What follows is not an interview, not a résumé run-through, and certainly not a polite Q&A. It’s a long, winding, first-person account of arrival — how a kid from Liverpool ends up inside Colosseum, and how one door quietly leads to many others.

Mark reflects on walking into Colosseum at a pivotal moment, what it meant to serve a band built on listening as much as playing, and how those early lessons carried forward. From there, the conversation opens naturally into the wider map: Tempest, Uriah Heep, Rainbow, Mountain, Billy Squier, and the strange but very real skill of adapting without losing yourself.

Along the way, Mark talks about personalities, pressure, learning curves, and the differences between bands that demand attention and bands that demand volume. There are stories of late nights, long tours, shifting scenes, and the practical realities of surviving decades in music without turning into a caricature of yourself.

The Doctor largely lets this happen.

This episode is about connections rather than conclusions, about experience rather than mythology, and about what it feels like to move through multiple eras of rock without ever stopping to announce it. No tracks are dissected, no verdicts rendered — just one musician telling his story the way he remembers it, with the room listening. Oh, and we do pause for some important musical milestones along the way. No prescription this episode, the Dr. is handing out mandatory meds.

This is Dr.’s Digressions at full stretch: unplanned, unhurried, and exactly where the show needed to go.

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