Picking up the progressive rock baton from Genesis in the 80s, they’ve recorded one of prog’s most impressive catalogues.

Picking up the progressive rock baton from Genesis in the 80s, they’ve recorded one of prog’s most impressive catalogues.

If progressive rock bands are supposed to be boring, nobody told Marillion. The making of their classic album Misplaced Childhood – in early 1985, at Berlin’s Hansa Studios – was effectively one almighty bender. Singer Fish led the debauchery, blowing his wages on hookers, sampling heroin for the first (and last) time, stripping naked in a bar to win a bet, crashing a car in a race round the city, and throwing bricks over the Berlin Wall in an attempt to set off landmines. Marillion might have been inspired by the music of Genesis and Yes, but they could party like Guns N’ Roses.
Formed in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire in 1979, the band were originally named Silmarillion after a posthumously published work by JRR Tolkein. The name was shortened in 1981, the same year that charismatic Scotsman Fish (born Derek William Dick) joined the group. After signing to EMI the following year Marillion released four studio albums – all of them UK Top 10 hits – before Fish left for a solo career in 1988.
His replacement Steve Hogarth, formerly of The Europeans, this year celebrates 20 years as Marillion’s frontman. Yet Hogarth will always be considered ‘the new guy’, such was the impact of the music that Marillion made with Fish, especially Misplaced Childhood and its hit single Kayleigh, a song which had the singer credited for inventing an original name. As he recently commented: “I’ve got used to signing autographs for 13-year-old Kayleighs.”
In the Fish era, Marillion were standard bearers for progressive rock, but with Hogarth the band have been progressive in the broadest sense. Their music has evolved far beyond those primary influences, and after being dropped by EMI in 1996 Marillion created a new, internet-based business model that has seen them thrive as an independent cottage industry. Eight years before Radiohead sold In Rainbows exclusively online, Marillion financed their album marillion.com by inviting 30,000 fans on their database to pre-purchase the album before it was even recorded.
It’s ironic that a band once derided for sounding like the dinosaurs of 70s rock should prove to be pioneers of the internet age. But this forward thinking has secured Marillion’s future. A new, as yet untitled, double album is due for release in 2008. And having come this far, they’re comfortable with their past. On August 26, 2007 the band, minus Hogarth, joined Fish on stage in Aylesbury’s Market Square to perform the song they wrote about that very place – Marillion’s debut single, Market Square Heroes. It was just like the good old bad old days…
– Paul Elliott

ESSENTIAL: CLASSICS

MISPLACED CHILDHOOD
EMI, 1985
In the finest progressive rock tradition, Marillion’s greatest work is a concept album.
It started with an acid trip: an hallucinating Fish envisioned a child in soldier’s uniform, and from there flowed a narrative that ranged from the personal (old love affairs, rock star ennui) to the global concerns of the Cold War. It inspired a brilliant ensemble performance from the band. And, despite initial concerns from EMI over the dated ‘concept album’ format, Misplaced Childhood was a huge success. Their only No.1 album, it produced two hit singles in Kayleigh and Lavender.
Artistically and commercially, Misplaced Childhood is Marillion’s Dark Side Of The Moon.

CLUTCHING AT STRAWS
EMI, 1987
“All the songs were drawn from inspiration on the road or from bars,” said Fish of the album that proved to be his last with Marillion.
Consumed by booze and drugs, the singer became alienated from the rest of the band, no puritans themselves. But from his stated position – that lonely place “at the end of the bar” – Fish wrote the finest lyrics of his career.
The cocaine itch in Hotel Hobbies, the transparent revelry of Incommunicado, the desperate homesickness in Sugar Mice, all were brutally honest entries in the diary of a lost soul. The music was wonderfully atmospheric and beautifully weighted.

SUPERIOR: THE ONES THAT HELPED CEMENT THEIR REPUTATION

SCRIPT FOR A JESTER’S TEAR
EMI, 1983
Released at a time when Genesis were having mainstream pop hits, Marillion’s debut was a homage to the Genesis of old. Four of the six tracks stretched over eight minutes, incorporating smart-arse
time signatures, while Fish adopted the stagy mannerisms of Peter Gabriel to deliver his wordy poetry.
Garden Party was an uproarious satire of class snobbery, Forgotten Sons a searing indictment of the British army’s presence in Northern Ireland, the epic title track was a frank admission of romantic failure. At a stroke, Fish was a cult hero and Marillion were Top 10.

SEASONS END
EMI, 1989
Marillion without Fish? It didn’t seem right. Many diehard Marillion fans were sniffy about Steve Hogarth: he’d been in pop bands. But Seasons End put the doubts to rest.
Hogarth had his own style, more naturally melodic than Fish, and if his lyrics (co-written with friend John Helmer) lacked his predecessor’s idiosyncratic edge, there was a sly dig at Fish in The Uninvited Guest.
Musically, Seasons End was a subtle progression, peaking with the elegant Easter and a green-themed title track developed from Beaujolais Day, a song the band demoed with Fish in 1988. Seasons End charted at No.7.

BRAVE
EMI, 1994
After 1991’s pop-oriented Holidays In Eden alienated some long-standing fans, Marillion went back to their roots with Brave – a concept album, no less – inspired by a news story about a young woman who had been
picked up by police on the Severn Bridge and either did not know her identity or refused to reveal it. “I thought it was a great first page to a mystery story,” said Hogarth, who subsequently constructed a “fictional documentary” of the woman’s life.
This weighty subject matter was matched by some of the most complex and emotionally charged music of Marillion’s career.

MARBLES
Intact, 2004
The best of Marillion’s albums with Steve Hogarth, Marbles was conceived as a double album (and is available as such via www.marillion.com). But even as a single CD, minus four tracks, it’s stunning. Thirteen-minute opener The Invisible Man is a modern progressive rock classic, combining the lyricism of Wish You Were Here-period Floyd with the dark ambience of Massive Attack.
There are fine songs throughout, with You’re Gone and Fantastic Place both sounding like a subtler U2. The title track is full of quintessentially English black humour. And to finish, there’s another brilliant extended piece, Neverland.

GOOD: WORTH EXPLORING

B’SIDES THEMSELVES
EMI, 1988
With the noteable exception of Oasis’s The Masterplan, B-sides albums are mostly rubbish. Marillion’s, however, is mostly good, and includes two of the band’s best-loved cult-classics.
Market Square Heroes was actually an A-side, the debut single, left off the first album but always a live favourite. The B-side to it was Grendel, a 17-minute, Rush-style epic based on the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf. In honour of this song, the band invented the lethal ‘Grendel’ cocktail, coloured bright green by crème de menthe, heavily laced with various spirits, and – alarmingly – always served by the pint.

HOLIDAYS IN EDEN
EMI, 1991
Marillion went straight for the mainstream with the second album of the Steve Hogarth era, and in truth the results were mixed. The rockier songs – Holidays In Eden, This Town – were uninspired, and The Party, Hogarth’s study of lost innocence, lacked the incisive quality of Fish’s Warm Wet Circles.
On the plus side there were several fine songs that benefited from Christopher Neil’s slick production
Three singles were released – Dry Land, No One Can and the U2 rip-off Cover My Eyes (Pain And Heaven) – but none reached the Top 30. Clearly Marillion were not cut out to be pop stars.

SOMEWHERE ELSE
Intact, 2007
Not many bands can still cut it when they’re 25 years into their recording career. Marillion are one of the few who can. Their 14th album received widespread acclaim.
It was quite a turnaround for a band whose profile had slipped so low since the mid-90s that Steve Hogarth admitted, only half-jokingly: “Most people thought we’d split up in the 80s!”
Somewhere Else features some of the most beautiful songs the band has ever recorded: Faith, Thankyou Wherever You Are, and the expansive title track.
“Marillion deserve a fair hearing,” said one critic.
Oh, the irony!

AVOID

FUGAZI
EMI, 1984
According to Fish, Marillion’s second album was “aptly named”. ‘Fugazi’, meaning ‘all fucked up’, was an expression used by the US military in Vietnam. The wasted rock star on the cover accurately reflected Fish’s own lifestyle, and his lyrics documented a conflicted attitude towards women, from jealousies in a long on/off relationship (Emerald Lies) to the ‘who’s using who?’ question of groupies (She Chameleon).
Ultimately, Fugazi suffered from classic ‘difficult second album’ syndrome. The band had years to write the first album and weeks to write the second, and it shows. It’s the darkest, edgiest album of the band’s career.