Marillion will release a new studio album, Less Is More, through the Intact label in September.…

Words: Jon Hotten

Recorded at their own Racket Club studios in Buckinghamshire, the record features ‘ten to twelve’ acoustic reinventions of songs from the band’s back catalogue.
“It was my idea really,” guitarist Steve Rothery told Classic Rock. “We’d made a lot of albums over the last few years and rather than go into a situation where we start writing another album and Steve (Hogarth) has to come up with an album’s worth of lyrics I thought that it would be good to have a sort of artistic breathing space.”
Among the tracks set for inclusion are Memory Of Water (originally from the album This Strange Engine), Interior Lulu (Marillion.com), Cannibal Surf Babe (Afraid Of Sunlight), and Quartz and If My Heart Were A Ball It Would Roll Uphill (both from Anoraknophobia).
“It’s quite adventurous,” says Rothery of the album. “Some of the songs are re-imaginings. They’ve got lots of weird and wonderful instruments, a harmonium, dulcimer, celeste, a pipe-organ, auto-harp. Memory Of Water is just two acoustic guitars, me and Pete (Trewavas), which gives it a whole different mood and atmosphere. Interior Lulu is cut down a bit from the original, but it’s still about seven and a half minutes”
Less Is More will be available initially through the band’s website at www.marillion.com and via iTunes.
Marillion head out on a previously announced fully acoustic European tour in October, arriving in the UK at the end of November.