Lost in Room focusses on the first four years of Mark Perry's musical path, beginning with ‘Love Lies Limp’ and ending as the first version of the group collapsed soon after 1981’s Strange Kicks album and Mark’s joining The Reflections. Along the way are tours with Chelsea, Here & Now and The Pop Group, a huge love of Frank Zappa, a meeting of minds with the late Genesis P-Orridge, the running of Step-Forward Records and working for Miles Copeland’s Faulty Products network of labels, plenty of anecdotes about the world he was embroiled in, and the story behind the records themselves.
Broken into two main parts, one concerning the historical development of Alternative TV and Mark’s occasional releases outside the group, and the other dedicated to the ideas that informed many of the songs themselves, this book is centred around a conversational approach to a series of weekly interviews conducted with Mark via Zoom between late 2021 and autumn 2022. Deliberately retaining the organic nature of the conversations, replete with tangents that sometimes refer to later work or creep elsewhere completely, Lost in Room is the first book to explore the early years of Mark Perry’s having become one of the most interesting and honest voices to have arrived from the cultural shift of the late 1970s.