My friend Mark Wilkins, who has died aged 68 after several years of declining health, was the founder and frontman of the Hertfordshire-based anarcho-folk-punk band the Astronauts.
In the 1960s, amid a prevailing sense that the joy and naivety of the music scene in and around London was about to take a darker, drug-fuelled and more highly politicised turn, Mark was growing up close to the action, in suburban Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire.
