Marillion: Downward Into Blue Sky
By Team JamBase Jul 5, 2007 • 12:00 am PDT
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“When you’ve made so many albums over so many years you have to keep changing,” says guitarist Steve Rothery, an axe-man who combines the stratospheric beauty of David Gilmour with an incisive, diamond-tipped imagination all his own. “When you do try different things you run the risk of losing a percentage of your audience. There’ll always be certain people that want you to carry on making the same record time and time again. But, as writers and artists you have to have the freedom to take it where you want. That’s pretty much what we’ve done throughout the whole of our careers.”
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If they sound like these younger bands it’s because they stumbled into the same fertile creative fields rather than any conscious imitation. Marillion are masters of long form composition, able to carry complex musical and lyrical concepts through numerous changes, inking the lines deeper and deeper as pieces progress. In recent times, they’ve refined things into shorter, sharper forms, unveiling a still very vibrant rock band lurking below all the loftiness.
“We’ve always strived to write the perfect song. That’s what it boils down to really,” offers bassist Pete Trewavas. “You don’t want to be the best musicians or have the most flamboyant music, you just want to write the best songs.”
A White-Knuckle Journey
Over the course of Marillion’s career they’ve been a lot of different bands but a number of longtimers (this writer included) believe the last couple records, 2004’s Marbles and this spring’s fantastic Somewhere Else are their best work yet.
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Marillion is dramatic, even melodramatic at times – delving into wars of foreign lands, environmental collapse, the nature of God and human existence, death and all manner of lust. They’ve also produced some of the most direct, sincere love songs ever written. Where in the past they occasionally veered into overly earnest territory, since the arrival of lead singer Steve Hogarth in 1989 there’s been plenty of black humor and gory details to take the piss out of things. They balance their predilection for pomp with something more down-to-earth now. While adept at overriding story arcs and interlocking musical themes, Somewhere Else ditches the highbrow angles to reveal a working rock band offering up good songs they clearly enjoy playing.
“The title is what it’s all about. We’ve taken the whole thing somewhere else. We’re working with [producer] Mike Hunter [Mansun, Embrace], and there was a freshness and kind of energy that was brought to the sessions. It’s a very forward-thinking kind of album,” says Trewavas. “Mike just wanted to bring out one of the things we do best, which is performance, playing live. With songs like ‘See It Like A Baby’ or ‘The Other Half’ there’s a sense of that band energy captured in the studio, the spark of something happening in the room.”
“A lot of people say they much prefer us live to our records [laughs]. I do think we cut it live, though,” adds Rothery. “Everywhere around the world we go, there’s an intensity we get back from the audience. Whether it’s South America or Mexico, there’s an understanding and passion for the music that translates across languages and cultures. It’s a great thing.”
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The Other Side of the Spotlight
Marillion has more than a half dozen official live releases, plus a truckload of fan-oriented live sets available through their own label, Racket Records, which has steadily documented rare acoustic gigs, outtakes, demos and the other ephemera loyalists pant for. More than most bands, Marillion understands the appetites of the truly devoted, and luckily they’ve developed a core audience that sustains them. In return, they nurture that support with a rapport and genuine care that’s rare. They eschew the usual arm’s length distance most bands keep, offering recording updates complete with video footage from the studio, limited run special editions and regular heartfelt notes from band members. Yes, many of these things are revenue streams but ones that recognize and celebrate the symbiotic nature of performers and their patrons.
The pinnacle of this deep relationship with their fans is the bi-annual Marillion Weekend, where the band lives and plays with the hardcores at a holiday camp, performing spectacular one-off concerts including a gig where they invited fans to play with them and a rarities and covers set this year that found Marillion trying their hand at Split Enz, Beatles, Jellyfish, Keane, Focus, The Move and, most oddly, Britney Spears’ “Toxic” [Racket Records will release this concert later this Summer].
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When the band decided it wasn’t financially feasible to return to U.S. on 1997’s This Strange Engine tour, Stateside followers raised close to $60,000 to underwrite it. Several times they’ve financed albums through fan pre-sales, offering exclusive versions of the albums along with liner note credit to those who contribute. Marillion fans are truly a force to be reckoned with. “They certainly are! They’re fantastic people, they really are,” gushes Trewavas. “It’s amazing to be in a room with 3000 people and there’s no trouble. Everyone just seems to bond and get along really well.”
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“We’ve been changing the set constantly, which is great and frustrating at the same time,” says Trewavas. “Every now and again, we’ll play a set and think, ‘That really worked!’ But we know the next night we need to change it. We’ve put ourselves in a situation where we’re forcing ourselves to change the set every night. It’s fun. It keeps us on our toes, and keeps the audience interested as well. You can’t stagnate. Standing still is really going backwards in this day and age.”
“We’ve done tours where we’ve played the same songs night after night,” Trewavas continues. “You end up playing them really really well but the audience doesn’t get anything out of it. They just get to see a show that’s very polished, and that’s not necessarily what people want to see. They don’t want to see safety, they want see something’s that’s a little bit unsure. They want to see what would happen if it all fell over a bit.”
This quest for happy accidents infuses every aspect of Marillion these days. “Some of those accidents are fantastic! We’ve had a few evenings where the audience has started singing a song they wanted us to play and we’ve had to kind of join in, which is great. It happened with ‘Ocean Cloud’ on this tour,” offers Trewavas.
The Singer Not The Song
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“He brought not only a great voice but also a musicality that complimented what we do,” offers Rothery. “Even now, there’s such chemistry between the five of us when we’re writing we always finish with a lot more ideas than we can use. You could make half a dozen different albums from the raw material. It’s interesting to have this surplus of creativity. Sometimes it’s a problem because ideas don’t get used so having projects outside the band is a healthy mechanism.”
“We’re very happy about [our outside projects]. Apart from anything else, it’s good for all of us to have a natural outlet for musical ideas that aren’t for Marillion. We’re curious musicians and we like working in other fields. Some of the experiences are good and some of them are bad. And the bad ones help us appreciate what we get from Marillion. There’s a huge support we have for each other,” Trewavas adds.
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One of the hallmarks of Marillion is how well they listen to each another, especially for such top-flight musicians who could easily solo endlessly and showboat over the other’s parts.
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Even after 10 studio albums with Hogarth, they still get blowback, from press and fans alike, for the departure of original vocalist Fish, who’s remained an active solo artist, though always closely tied to his ’80s work with Marillion, which remains his meal ticket.
“Occasionally, you get the diehard fans, the ones who scream the loudest, but that’s really the exception rather than the rule. What we get is less about Fish than about being a band who’s been around for so long,” Rothery observes. “So many journalists have preconceptions about what we stand for. It’s a cliché but the whole ‘Scottish heavy metal band’ for some people or Fish’s theatrical elements. That’s incredibly frustrating if it’s just a case of lazy journalism. We had two reviews of the [new] album in the main daily newspapers in the UK. The one in The Times was an excellent piece but The Telegraph just completely slighted it, but it was obvious the guy hadn’t listened to the record. It’s so easy to trot out clichés.”
Like Faith But Not Faith
With their own recording studio and label, Marillion has an enviable independence, especially amongst working bands.
“Now, to be in the position not to have interference at all from a record company is the best possible situation for an artist to be in. Financially it also makes so much more sense because you only have to sell a fraction of the records to sustain a decent career,” comments Rothery. “When you sign to a major label, depending on your deal, you make well less than a [British] pound a copy. We sell an album directly, and depending on what edition it is, we can make 10-15 pounds a copy. All of the sudden, you can sell half as many albums and make twice as much money. It’s insane to sign a deal – which we’ve done in the past – especially with independent labels, where you get an advance and your lucky to see any royalties after that. At least doing it our way helps ensure the continued survival of the band. With the way the industry is going, with so many sales lost to downloading and CD copying, in a way we’re in a better position to survive than a lot of bands signed to major labels, tied up in contracts for years and years.”
The last time Marillion made it across the Atlantic was a mostly acoustic trio of Rothery, Hogarth and Trewavas in 2005. This very intimate setting made abundantly clear that despite all the usual bells and whistles in their work, the core songwriting is amazingly strong.
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Right now there’s no firm plans for a U.S. tour behind Somewhere Else, but Trewavas remains hopeful. “You never know. We’re personally pushing for it because we’d love to come back. Whether the reality can happen, well, I don’t know. The problem we have is we can do both coasts and dip into the Midwest but there’s a whole area where we don’t know what to do. Logistically and financially it doesn’t always make sense, which is really sad. It’s a huge beast to try and conquer, and I don’t think you should even try to conquer it in one go.”
Unlike many of their peers, this hardly seems the end of Marillion’s story. There’s still music to be harnessed, feelings wrestled into poetry you can lift a pint to, and these five gents are just the ones to do it.
“All being well, we’ve got at least another three or four albums in us. Provided we all last that long [laughs]. I can’t see any of us doing anything else really. The chemistry and magic we have together is quite unique and we’d be insane to stop,” says Rothery.
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