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"And on our Who Dares Wins-a-thon, we will play a record from Marillion unless you pledge �5000 in the next five minutes!"
Marillion's music shone as a beacon in the darkness of the 80s, an often grim decade where style took precedence over content, where the dominant artists were talentless poseurs more interested in hairstyles than music.
The four studio albums recorded with Fish remain four of the landmark albums of the 1980s.
Not many bands come up with a debut album as impressive as this, with just the right combination of freshness and maturity. Just six songs, ranging from the commercial-sounding satire of Garden Party, to the dark intensity of Forgotten Sons, Fish's rant at the stubborn stupidities that then dominated Northern Ireland. The only weak song is the badly-structured 'The Web', which comes over somewhat half-formed.
Marillion's "Difficult Second Album" is the one often overlooked by fans. It deserves better than this; while it lacks the unified feel of "Script", some of the individual songs such as Assassing, Incubus and the title track stand among the finest of the band's career. The whole album shows a growing maturity in musicianship, songwriting and arrangement.
This album divides fans. Some maintain this is the band's best work, others deride it as their "misplaced album". I don't think it's quite either of those things. It's an intensely personal concept album, some of which only makes sense if you've read the interviews and know what Fish is on about. Musically the first half (side one of the original LP) is very good, but I the second half much weaker. It spawned two hit singles, Kayleigh and Lavender. The record company also released 'Heart of Lothian' as a follow-up despite the fact it didn't work as a single at all. When they toured, they played the whole album as a single continuous piece of music.
The band took a bit of a left-turn with this one, which disappointed those that really liked 'Misplaced Childhood'. A lot more diverse both musically and lyrically, it's still a strong album, taking the demon drink as it's theme. Sadly it proved to be this lineup's swansong, as Fish and the rest of the band went their separate ways. Highlights are the Warm Wet Circles trilogy, still performed live by Fish many years later, and White Russian, a warning about the resurgence of neo-nazism than proved disturbingly prophetic.
Fans awaited this one with some trepidation, but the band still came up with a strong album, albeit different. Much of the material had been written while Fish was still in the band, and there's more than one song you can imagine being sung by the big Scotsman, such as Uninvited Guest. High spots are Berlin and Easter, the lyrical followup to Forgotten Sons, still in the live set of the most recent tour.
Marillion's worst album ever, this was a failed attempt at a more commercial sound. Unfortunately it sounds like a poor man's Del Amitri. It is perhaps fortunate than none of the bland singles taken from them album made any impact whatsoever in the charts.
Just when some people had written them off, they bounced back with possibly their best work, an intense concept album inspired by a news report of a girl found wandering on the Severn bridge. Musically, it's the most complex and ambitions work they've attempted; if you only ever get one post-Fish album, make it this one.
This album finds Marillion in a more reflective mood, replacing the intensity of Brave with a slightly more commercial sound. I found this one a little disappointing at the time it came out, but it's nothing like as bad as Holidays in Eden; Brave was a hard act to follow. Many other Marillion fans disagree, and rate it as the band's best. Make your own judgement! The best song is Out of This World, about Donald Campbell and Blue Bird. The song is said to have inspired the successful efforts to raise what 'no one dared call a boat' from Coniston water.
Their seventh album saw the band experimenting more with different sounds and textures, particularly the ambient Estonia, and the lengthy title track. Overall it's a rather patchy album, with some high spots and some indifferent moments too.
Sometimes I seem be the only person in the universe that likes this album! With a harsh 'low-fi' sound, in places it shows an influence from more fashionable bands like Radiohead, although Cathedral Wall shows strong echoes of parts of Brave. Although not their finest hour, it's by no means their worst either.
Marillion's 11th album, named after their website, as seems to be a trend nowadays. In some ways it's similar to This Strange Engine, showing the band experimenting their sound again. We see the return of the 20-minute song, with the epic Interior Lulu, complete with an ELP-style parpy keyboard solo. I could never really get into this album.
After several albums of experimentation, Marillion finally come up with the finished result! Although they've come a long way since Script or even Brave, this is their finest album for many years. Don't believe the arrogant press release, they haven't sold out and become trendy. Anoraknophobia may contain a lot of the elements the band had experimented with on the preceding albums, this time it all comes together as a cohesive whole. High spots are the slow-burning epic This is the 21st Century, based around a drum loop, the groove of Quartz, and the atmospheric When I Meet God. There are up-tempo rockers as well, Seperated Out and the U2-like Between You and Me
Fish made an impressive solo debut with this album, without a single weak song. From the horn-driven funk-rock of Big Wedge (which hit the lower reaches of the singles chart) through the epic balladry of Cliché to the lengthy prog-epic of the title track, it proved Fish had lost none of his bite.
The followup to 'Vigil' was, to me at least, a bit of a patchy affair. While it contained some strong individual songs, such as Credo and the cynical Tongues, it suffered from a perhaps a little too much variety. I think we could have done without the cheesy cover of Thunderclap Newman's Something In The Air.
In a bad accident of timing, Fish did an album of covers about a year before it became fashionable to do so. But since the "Fashion Police" have never liked him anyway, releasing it a year later wouldn't have helped. Unsurprisingly, most of the songs date from the 70s, with Fish covering artists as diverse as David Bowie, T Rex, Alex Harvey, Sandy Denny and Pink Floyd. The instrumental arrangements are often quite close to the originals, but Fish's delivery is all his own.
Dropped by 'polymer records', Fish struck out on his own. Suits sees him trying a funkier sound in places, such as MR 1670 and Somebody Special which works most of the time. Standout track is perhaps the self-pitying ballad Raw Meat, where tries to come to terms with not being a big star anymore. All-in-all I found this a competent album, a notable improvement on 'Exile'. Biggest weakness was that almost every track seemed to end in a two-minute jam which didn't add anything much to the song
Produced by Steve Wilson of Porcupine Tree, who co-wrote several tracks as well as playing guitar, this was his best album since Vigil. It had a harder edge which had been missing from the previous couple of albums. High points are the Zeppelinesque "The Perceptions of Johnny Punter", and the hard-edged funk of "Brother 52". This album's probably more straight-ahead rock rather than "prog". But the lack of 20-minute epics with widdly mini-moog solos doesn't mean it's a bad album.
A very varied effort, marred only by a weak first couple of songs. High spots are the barnstorming cover of Alex Harvey's Faith Healer, the duet with Elisabeth Antwi, Incomplete, and the undoubted highlight, the 20-minute epic "Plague of Ghosts", written with Mark Daghorn and Tony Turrell, featuring drum'n bass rhythms.
Don't forget to visit the respective web sites, www.marillion.com and Fish's site www.the-company.com.