It's funny what can remind you of a certain song - yesterday it was coming home from watching my rugby team, Northampton Saints, beat Ulster in the Heineken Cup quarter-final in Milton Keynes. Travelling home by coach we passed one of Milton Keynes few distinguished landmarks (as opposed to all those bloody roundabouts!), that odd red and white structure that looks like a circus tent. Do you know, I have no idea what it actually is? But it reminded me of the tent on the poster for Marillion's 1986 "Garden Party" concert, held at Milton Keynes Bowl, the first gig I ever attended (shortly before my 18th birthday, bit of a late developer as far as live gigs go!). Checking out the posters on Google Images the tent looks nothing like that red and white structure, but I've always associated the two, maybe I saw it on the coach going to the gig?
Anyway, the song I was reminded of was of course "Garden Party" itself, and luckily I had my MP3 player with me (an ancient iRiver iHP140 in case you're interested, still works very well) and found the song. What would my nearly 18-year-old self have made of such a piece of technology back then? We were amazed by cassette playing walkmans (walkmen?), I think, so I suspect a small plastic box that could potentially hold your entire record collection would have blown our minds. I say potentially because my personal record collection is too big for this one 40Gb player, so it's lucky I have two! If your record collection was smaller you could fit it all on one OR you could buy a player with a bigger memory, one of these days I might give in and get an iPod as there's one that holds 160Gb, might just be big enough... I digress.
Anyway, 20-plus years disappeared the instant I had the song in my ears, it's still fresh and alive today. Some of that first album, "Script For A Jester's Tear", can sound a little plodding now, possibly due to the soon-to-be-sacked founder drummer Mick Pointer's limited skills on the kit (although for me the nostalgia value usually helps me ignore that), but Garden Party is such a good song, and the memory of how that huge crowd reacted as the band struck it up at that concert gives it a big boost as well. It was bizarrely the second Marillion album I heard but the first I owned - I'd got a naughty tape of a friend's copy of Fugazi, but having remembered Garden Party from Top of the Pops and being disappointed that it wasn't on that album, I went out and spent my limited cash at the time (1984, probably just started as a Saturday boy at the town library) on the only other available album, "Script...". This was a time when you still bought albums on vinyl, although pre-recorded cassettes were taking over, hand in hand with the rise of the aforementioned walkman, I guess. My previous LPs had been largely New Romantic pop (Duran Duran's debut, The Human League's Dare) with minimalist covers and lots of white space. This was a revelation, a densely detailed painted gatefold sleeve, full of symbolism and tiny clues to the music and lyrics within. I'd just got into Genesis at around the same time, as detailed in a previous blog, but at this stage I'd not really seen their painted gatefold sleeves so Marillion's was a first for me. This suggested a lot of care and attention had gone into this record, and I was right! The title track starts very quietly, slightly mysteriously, like a secret being whispered to you, and opens into a lovely and at the time unexpected mix of piano/acoustic guitar passages and full on rock sounds. Fish, their original singer and lyricist used long words, complicated imagery, and angst-ridden poetry just perfect for a pretentious about-to-be sixth-former. Although looking back some of it is a tad, shall we say, overdone and ornate, there was more emotional content in one verse of that song than I'd heard in 16 years of pop music up to that point.
At the time they were constantly being accused of slavishly copying Genesis, but I can't really hear much on that debut album to justify the comparison, really. Yes, Fish used facepaint like Peter Gabriel had, but the only similarity to my ears was that they were both working outside the constraints of convention, and had much more musical skill and imagination than most of their contemporaries! When I later heard Grendel from their first 12-inch single I had to admit a little more similarity there, but what's on this album is pure Marillion. Just listening again as I type, and He Knows You Know has started, Fish sings with so much bite and aggression - and my first (recognised) drug references in a song, I think. I love the time-changes in this song, the pauses for breath, the dynamics and contrasts throughout this LP. So well structured too, something missed by the download generation, I suspect. Each song is subtly linked to the next, and there's a flow to the whole thing akin to a classical symphony's contrasting movements.
Reading the history and recollections of the band and their associates I know that the follow up "Fugazi"
was the clichéd "difficult second album" writ large (basically a nightmare to write and record) but it's my favourite of the Fish-era albums, a superb audio experience when heard through the headphones of my shiny new walkman, usually during a solitary teenage-angst fuelled walk through the country lanes near my home. I seem to remember listening to it a lot during warm evenings in summer, it all seemed so meaningful at the time! "Script..." had some clever use of sound effects and studio trickery, but this was so much richer, lots of subliminal sounds and effects that couldn't be identified as any particular musical instrument. Fish's lyrics seemed sharper, more targeted, less opaque, and sung with so much venom and righteous anger (or heart-rending anguish, as on the beautiful Jigsaw). The eventual arrival of Ian Mosley on the drum stool (again, a complicated tale I didn't know at the time) led to much more exciting and interesting rhythms, and everything seemed clean and bright, much like the pristine hotel room of the cover. And She-Chameleon said the F-word much more clearly than Garden Party had on "Script...", and talked about sex, quite exciting for an inexperienced teenage boy!
Genesis were my first prog-love, but their best albums were in the past (much as I enjoyed their poppier later albums, and went to see their gigs, they weren't as special as their early days), whilst Marillion were very much happening before my eyes (ears?). The expectations for their third album were massive, and built up even more by hearing an unfinished version of half of the album performed live on a Radio One broadcast concert (wonder if I still have a copy of the tape I made?). I'd read an interview with Fish that suggested the album would be called "Year of the Cicada" after the insect that lives in larval form underground for 17 years and then emerges as an adult for a brief time before laying the eggs that will repeat the 17 year cycle. Sounded fascinating, but apparently the idea was abandoned as the new album ended up as "Misplaced Childhood", a semi-psychoanalytical exploration of the singer's past, with some rather meaty and slightly less contrived lyrics with real-world concerns and experiences. Musically even more adventurous than before, they really spread their wings on this one, and were brave enough to revisit a format that was mocked long before, the Concept Album. Tracks rolled up together in mini-suites, lyrical and musical motifs repeated throughout, and yet also their most accessible album for the general public courtesy of the simple but brilliant guitar riff on Kayleigh, a great 80's rock song only kept off the number one slot by a charity single (You'll Never Walk Alone) in May 1985. Suddenly my favourite underground alternative band were popular, it was extraordinary, even the girls I knew liked it! When the album itself came out it was the first I ever bought on the day of release, or at least the week of release, anyway. Apparently it was released on a Monday, the 17th of June 1985, when I would probably have been at school, so I guess I bought it on the following Saturday (during my lunch break from the library job), and then I listened to it over and over for the rest of the weekend. It's still a special album, but parts of it don't completely work for me - Lavender is a little too rocky and simplistic, and I've never really liked the end song "White Feather", partly in contrast to the superb "Childhood's End?" that immediately precedes it. It's just too, well, obvious - bombast and pat where the rest is subtle and poetic. But if you hear nothing else from this album, the "Mylo" section of "Blind Curve" is a must, Fish and the band at a lyrical and musical peak - try the youtube extract
here.
The summer afterwards they held their famous Garden Party show at Milton Keynes, the memory of which started me off on this particular blog. I'd never actually been to a gig before, venues in Northampton at the time rarely hosted the bands I wanted to see and in the pre-internet days the first a clueless teenager like me heard about a gig was when it was too late to get tickets. However, our local independent record shop (the sadly missed Spinadisc) had ads by the counter for coach trips they organised to various concerts, and one of them was for what promised to be a major Marillion show with loads of support bands. Actually managing to buy tickets for me and my friend Scott (hi Scott!) was a real buzz, never mind the excitement boarding a double decker bus for what seemed like a long ride (half an hour at most!) to the Bowl, an open air venue that rarely seems to get used these days. It was a day of blazing sunshine and more people than I had ever seen in one place - something like 35,000! At the time I had no idea who most of the support acts were and wasn't really bothered. I'd seen and liked Jethro Tull on The Old Grey Whistle Test, and Gary Moore was kind of familiar, but I wasn't really a fan of either, and had never heard of Magnum or Mama's Boys (in fact I never heard of the latter ever again!). I really enjoyed Jethro Tull and that started another life-long love affair with their music, Gary Moore was impressive but not quite my cup of tea for more than a few songs, and any way by the time he was on I was desperate for Marillion to come on stage! They didn't disappoint, it was one of those magical moments when everything comes together, the band at their peak (at least with that line-up), the weather perfect, the crowd receptive and enthusiastic, a very special introduction to live music. Since then there have been other great gigs (Bowie at Wembley, or at the other end of the scale Electric Six at Northampton's tiny sweaty Roadmender) but the Garden Party was that special one that stays with you all your life.
From what I've heard and read since, it was probably not long after that when things started going wrong for the band, at least from a personal relations and "musical differences" point of view, due to excessive gigging and lack of breaks to recuperate. Their last album with Fish, "Clutching At Straws", was a masterpiece, but more or less destroyed them. I was about to start at University by the time it came out in 1987, and by that time our family had invested in a new-fangled CD player, and it was the first Marillion album I got on CD when first released. (The first CDs I ever bought as new albums, by the way, were Peter Gabriel's "So" and Genesis's "Invisible Touch" the year before, but they were so comparatively expensive at the time I didn't buy many CDs for a few years). I still wonder what they would have done after this if they had stayed together, for a band in the process of breaking up it's such an accomplished and assured album, much more adult and intelligent than the three before. A serious examination of relationships, creativity, politics and addiction, it runs "Fugazi" a very close second as my favourite from the Fish era - is it bizarre of me to say that "Fugazi" is my favourite but that "Clutching..." is a better album? I think nostalgia probably wins it for the earlier album.
Steve Rothery had always been a good guitarist, but I think this is the album when he learns real subtlety and technique, and comes up with some of his finest fretwork up to that point. The only relatively weak point is "Sugar Mice", still a strong song but a little plodding compared to the rest of the album, and with a slightly silly image in those "sugar mice in the rain". Highlight of the album has to be "Warm Wet Circles/That Time Of The Night", in particular the linking passage between the two joined songs. It's no coincidence, I think, that this is the Fish-era piece that Steve Hogarth has sung most often, or at least with most conviction. Just beautiful. The album even got critical acclaim, making new hip music magazine Q's albums of the year list, with the telling phrase "their next effort will be crucial". Scott and I were also influenced into drinking White Russians by the song of the same name - mmm, can taste them now! We went with another friend from university, Jim (hi Jim!) to see them play at the Birmingham NEC, felt like a massive gig, I assumed they could only get bigger. I didn't realise it would be the last time I'd see the band in that lineup.
As I've said, these were pre-internet days, and I also didn't read the music papers that often while I was at uni (St Edmund Hall, Oxford, since you ask), too busy reading the books on my English course, so it was a bit of a surprise to learn about the Fish-Marillion split via a comedy gig! I was friends with several budding comics at college, including Stewart Lee and Al Murray (a very good drummer), both of whom were also at SEH (or Teddy Hall as we knew it, laughably), and I went to support a lot of student comedy revues. At one of these a sketch consisted of a man doing bizarre ritualistic things with twigs for no apparent reason, ending with someone commenting that "he hasn't been the same since Fish left Marillion". My ears pricked up - what did he just say? By this time the 80s prog-revival backlash had started, and despite continued popularity Marillion were getting mocked more and more often as 70s throwbacks just at the time when they were escaping such links and moving firmly into modern times. Neil the Hippy from The Young Ones (watch
here from about 5:40 in) was a fictional fan, showing the comedy world's unfair opinion of the band. Was it just another joke, I thought? But no, I confirmed afterwards (and I can't for the life of me remember how) that it was true.
Was that it for my musical heroes? MY band? Turns out it was actually just the prelude to something wonderful, but that's another story...
