Mountains Come Out of the Sky

by Will Romano

  Both camps suspended disbelief long enough for Fish and Diz to win the gig. From the outset, the band set high standards for themselves. Founding member Brian Jelliman was out in favor of keyboardist Mark Kelly, who was up on the new technology. Much in the same way Keith Emerson, Patrick Moraz, and Rick Wakeman used Moog, Kelly utilized portable organs and grand pianos, a PPG Wave 2.2 (a polyphonic analog/digital synth that could produce thousands of waveforms and featured sequencing capabilities and sound samples), and a Yamaha DX-7, generally referred to as the first affordable and portable digital synth (it did for keyboards what Digidesign’s ProTools did for home recording).

  “The band evolved over the next two years,” Fish says. “Members came in, members were fired, and whatever.”

  A buzz was building around the band with the clown-faced front man. Marillion’s strong local followings in St. Albans, Bedford, Milton Keynes, their home base of Aylesbury, and even London (most notably at the Marquee) caught the attention of EMI, which had rejected an early demo made by the band.

  EMI tapped David Hitchcock, who had worked with Genesis, Camel, Caravan, and Renaissance, to produce the band’s early recordings. Songs such as “Market Square Heroes,” inspired by Aylesbury Market Square; “Three Boats Down from the Candy” (keyboardist Mark Kelly’s debut as a songwriter for Marillion); and the seventeen-plus-minute controversial epic “Grendel,” based on the John Gardner book of the same title (complete with “Apocalypse in 9/8”—like odd meter), were eventually released as the band’s first 12” EP/single.

  The songs were a mixed bag of pop and Genesis-style prog, with Fish’s thick Scottish accent neatly tucked away amid hints of Peter Gabriel, Dave Cousins, and Peter Hammill vocal inflections.

  Laugh as some critics did, Marillion continued to gain fans, playing numerous shows around England and outside the country throughout 1982 and 1983. Strangely, the band even attracted attention from the heavy metal press and hard rock fans, who identified with the band’s frontal assault. “You’ve got to look at the Marillion’s rise in popularity in terms of the whole ‘New Wave of British Heavy Metal’ happening in the early ‘80s,” says Fish. “Suddenly, there was a throwback to the Led Zeppelin/Deep Purple stuff, which was all around when progressive rock was about in the ’70s. . . . It wasn’t as if there was a schism between the progressive rock thing and the punk thing. The way I see it, out of the punk thing came the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. Those guys wanted something that was a little more complicated, which was the same thing I wanted when I was thirteen or fourteen years old.”

  By being associated with the NWOBHM bands and being featured regularly in a British metal magazine like Kerrang!, suddenly, the band had a roughness, an edge (even if it was only a perceived musical edge), something that a lot of the earlier prog rock bands lacked.

  STICKING TO THE “SCRIPT”

  Marillion’s first full-length record for EMI, Script for a Jester’s Tear, is a bit like an adolescent dressing in adult clothing. The Genesis-style musical arrangements and flowery vagueness of the lyrical content only add to the artificiality. Even the album’s title speaks to Marillion’s modus operandi: witty but also calculated, lacking in any spontaneity. This perception, justified or not, would dog the band for most of the 1980s.

  Just as the first wave of progressive rock bands had, Marillion needed a visual translator, someone who could successfully complement and package their music with art. The cover illustration of Script, airbrushed by Mark Wilkinson, reinforced the perception of Marillion as pretenders to the prog rock throne.

  Overall, there’s a naïve ambition, an arrogant cluelessness about Script for a Jester’s Tear. The music is a bit like Fish himself: The songs are of an adult nature, but their truer, deeper meanings are masked by dramatic prog rock trappings and escapist language.

  Not everyone viewed Marillion as being purely derivative. The band impressed with its chops, stage show, and willingness to discard trends even at the risk of being ridiculed for doing so.

  “Fish was very aggressive onstage,” says Nick Barrett of 1980s prog rock band Pendragon. “[He] was spitting out the words with the passion and venom of a punk [singer]. This is not strictly a limp-wristed prog. It gave Marillion a lot of credibility, in my opinion.”

  FUGAZI

  Fugazi, Marillion’s most diverse record to date, was the result of the band’s growing pains and the dizzying effect of being behind schedule and in and out of recording and rehearsal studios, having EMI breathing down their necks for new material, and a producer (Nick Tauber) so overwhelmed from the pressure he was backpedaling (forcing the band the work long hours in order to hand the record in under the deadline). The band was on the road before the record was finished, for a tour that was meant to promote Fugazi.

  Fugazi was torturous to put together, beginning with the search for a new drummer to replace Pointer, who’d been asked to leave. (After Marillion, Pointer would go on to form the neo-prog outfit Arena in the mid-1990s with Clive Nolan of Pendragon.) Jonathan Mover, world-class drummer, auditioned for the drum chair and won it.

  Everything seemed to be going well, but, as Mover remembers, a fateful conversation involving Fish’s idea for a concept record caused major eruptions within the band. “We were already writing individual songs that had nothing to do with each other, and [Fish] wanted to do a concept record like The Wall,” Mover says. “Over dinner one night he said, ‘We need to attach all of these songs and make them a theme. What do you think?’ The other three guys, who were very much afraid of Fish, said, ‘Well, maybe, I don’t know.’ Then he looked at me, [and] as his buddy, and I said, ‘That’s a stupid idea. We are writing individual songs [and] there is no theme . . . unless you want to scrap these songs and start from scratch.’ I didn’t realize it then, but that was the wrong thing to do.

  “So, not long after, I woke up and the other band members were sitting on the couch with their heads hung low, looking very sad and meek. I asked, ‘What’s up?’ They told me, ‘Fish said it is you or him.’ They embarrassingly told me, ‘We can’t lose Fish. He’s the leader of the band. This isn’t going to work without him.’ They just said, ‘Sorry.’ I went upstairs and it felt like someone stuck a vacuum up my ass, turned it on, and sucked all the life out of me. I came to the bottom of the stairs and [Fish] walked out and opened my hand and he gave me one of his fish earrings, and the next thing I know I had a plane ticket home. It was devastating to me. It was a really hard blow. I thought my dream had come true. I realized that it’s all a tap dance and a game and you have to play the game right if you’re not the leader.”

  Fish reflects on that time period, both personally and creatively, with a mixture of amazement and embarrassment. “I look at interviews I did at the time and now I say, ‘Who the fuck is that? What was I thinking?’” Fish says.

  Mover would go on to play with Steve Hackett, whose onetime drummer, Ian Mosley, had played on Hackett’s Till We Have Faces and Highly Strung. In an ironic twist, Mosley replaced Mover in Marillion. “I found out that Ian Mosley had gotten the gig and I think he was one of the guys who had auditioned originally,” says Mover. “I knew he had played with Hackett, so I later called Hackett’s manager and asked him if Steve was looking for a drummer, because I knew Ian was now playing with Marillion. Even though Steve’s manager said that the position had already been filled, I made him a proposition: ‘I’d like to audition for the position, anyway. If I get the gig [Hackett] can pay for the hour. If I don’t, I’ll pay for it.’ The manager called me back about an hour later and said, ‘Steve Hackett thinks you have big balls. Thursday. One o’clock . . .’ and gave me a location. I showed up, met Steve, and we played for about maybe two or three minutes, and he said, ‘The gig is yours.”’

  MISPLACED CHILDHOOD

  Marillion was touring extensively in the mid-1980s behind Fugazi and a then newly released live record, Real to Reel, in late 1984. But it wouldn’t be until Misplaced Childhood that the band went inte
rnational.

  Misplaced Childhood is a highly personal album for Fish. But it’s also a concept album, about an adult looking back at his life, his past loves, his excesses, his loss of innocence, and his search for a kind of spiritual rebirth.

  For the recording, the band convened at Hansa Studios in Germany in February 1985. Marillion was more prepared for the production process than they had been for perhaps any record up to that point. “That in and of itself was unique inasmuch as we had rehearsed it for about a month in England,” says producer Chris Kimsey (ELP, Rolling Stones, Peter Frampton). “The record company were keen to know what the singles were, what the songs were, but I kept them away. We actually went to Berlin to record the album, because [it cost less] to go to there.”

  Living in Berlin for four weeks (writing, recording, and mixing) had a tremendous impact on the band. As David Hentschel had achieved with Genesis for the Wind & Wuthering album by bringing the band to Relight Studios in Holland, Kimsey fostered an atmosphere of freedom away from England, and this fed into an uncommon musical continuity.

  “Most of this stuff had been written before we went out,” says Fish, “but as an environment for writing, it was fantastic. This was pre-[Berlin] wall falling. So what you had was a very tense city, a bohemian city, and for someone like myself, it was incredible. You are living life to the absolute fuckin’ max.”

  “Apart from the verse structure of ‘Kayleigh,’ [which] I had written before we’d gotten together, everything else came together in about a week or so,” says guitarist Rothery. “I wrote probably about seventy-five-percent of the music on Misplaced Childhood. I used a Roland [GR-300] guitar synth on a few of the tracks, including the ‘spider’ section of ‘Brief Encounter’ from ‘Bitter Suite.’ It was a way of exploring different textures and approaches from the viewpoint of having something that is a guitar but sounds slightly like a keyboard. I [had used the same synth] on the previous album, Fugazi, most notably for the intro of the song ‘Assassing.”’

  As the recording wore on for a few weeks, EMI, having been blown off by Kimsey earlier in the process, was getting antsy to hear something, preferably a lead (hit) single, and hounded the band and Kimsey for the goods. “I said, ‘Well, the single won’t be [ready] just yet, because we’re making a concept album,”’ Kimsey says. “They completely freaked out and they said, ‘You can’t make a concept album.’ The idea of a concept record—they didn’t know what it meant. It just confused them. So we just sent them the second song we recorded, which was ‘Kayleigh.”’

  “From a musical point of view, EMI didn’t understand us,” Fish says. “We hadn’t had any real hit singles. . . . Initially, we were going to do side one and side two, no singles. Chris Kimsey fell into our game plan, and we kind of kept it hidden from EMI for quite a long time. . . .”

  “The record company was demanding something pretty much after the first week,” Rothery says. “Even when we recorded ‘Kayleigh,’ we had a huge fight with the record company, because they wanted the B side of ‘Kayleigh,’ which was ‘Lady Nina,’ to be the A side. It was really a deal breaker. It was nearly a mutiny. Fortunately, we got our way. It is funny, but you have to stick to what you believe. We weren’t thinking about singles; we were just making the album.”

  It’s been proven time and time again—another tenet of progressive rock—but record companies refuse to listen, sometimes for their own good: Let the band (and their producer) present their own musical vision, because you never know what will connect with people. If bands are left to their own devices and are allowed to evolve, both the artist and the label most likely will be rewarded.

  Misplaced Childhood is living proof. The video for “Kayleigh” was on heavy rotation in America on MTV, a channel still in its infancy, and was an anthem for many a young person’s love found and lost. “Kayleigh” placed in the U.S. Top 40, and Misplaced Childhood reached number 47 on the Billboard U.S. Top 200 Albums chart. It was even bigger in Europe, where the album went to number one, “Kayleigh” went to number two, and “Lavender” reached the Top 5.

  CLUTCHING AT STRAWS

  Marillion were on top of the world with the success of Misplaced Childhood. In 1986, they opened for Queen in Germany, in front of 130,000 people, and become a genuine commercial and artistic force. However, this only meant that the band was expected to perform in more places with increased frequency. It’s a little bit like the law of diminishing returns: The more time you spend on the road to support your current record, the more fans you gain, but the less time you actually have to write and record the follow-up to your next record.

  Fish, in particular, was having a hard time juggling a personal life with the burdens of being in a successful band. And his partying was spiraling out of control.

  “Money wasn’t the driving force,” Fish says. “We were just happy to be in a band, making records. We really just wanted to make music. But by the time you get to Clutching at Straws, you start to realize, ‘Wait a minute: there’re an awful lot of people making an awful lot of money off this band, and the people who are at the core, the energy of the entire unit, the creative end of the unit, we [are] getting paid less than everybody else.’ On the top of that, we were away from our families. . . . I just got sick of it. I just wanted to stop.”

  “The band was touring a lot in Europe, and they were under great stress because of the success of Misplaced Childhood and were exhausted,” confirms Kimsey. “This industry never recognizes the kind of pressure they put on artists. [A band] becomes a cash cow and the label and management . . . don’t realize that there are egos and human beings involved.”

  All of that frustration found its way into 1987’s Clutching at Straws. You can hear it in a song such as “That Time of the Night (the Short Straw),” in which Fish uses drink imagery and a dog-on-a-leash analogy to describe his state of mind and the dynamic between artist, manager, and music industry machine.

  “In the middle of it, the band found out that someone had severely ripped them off,” Kimsey says. “So it wasn’t a very fun album to make, really. Being back in England, instead of everyone being together in Germany, they’d go home and bring their day-to-day problems into the studio. That was a bit of a labor of love, that one.”

  Fish admits that Clutching at Straws is his favorite Marillion record, but “it was a torturous process putting it all together,” he says. “There were casualties along the way, and I was one of them. By the time we got off the tour we were sick and tired of each other. We had been together for too long. We didn’t have a break from each other.”

  Clutching at Straws reached number two on the British charts, one slot shy of its predecessor. Marillion were stuck in a merciless vicious cycle of rehearse, tour, write, record, tour. Not slowing down was a mistake that would cause irreparable damage to the band.

  “We should have taken a break from each other after Clutching at Straws,” says Fish. “We didn’t, because the machine was too big and... the machine needed so much money to keep it going forward. We had no time between Misplaced and Clutching. We had to go to work. We came off the Clutching tour, we had a month off, and then we went right backing back into fucking writing another album,” Fish says. “The record label said ‘We want another ‘Kayleigh.’ I said, ‘Wait a minute. This isn’t what I signed up for.”’

  Ultimately, Fish, Marillion’s charismatic front man, left the band to save his sanity and work at his own pace. Plenty of rumors spread at the time as to why Fish had exited a successful band, namely that his exit was due to problems with alcohol and drugs, as some stories had indicated. “That’s bullshit,” Fish says. “It was something that was very useful for the management and... others concerned to try to deride the fact that I left the band. It was very easy to use the drug-and-alcohol brush on me. It was bollocks.”

  Fish calls any allegation of drug or alcohol abuse misguided and uninformed. “I have never been an alcoholic. I have never been dependent on alcohol,” Fish says. “I have
never been dependent on drugs, and I have never been a drug addict. I’ve used everything, but... it was never anything that has caused a problem to me professionally.... What was bothering me at the time was a psychological thing; I just felt like we were being used. That’s why I left. It suited people to make out as if I was... some kind of rogue factor, and they went out there and tried to keep the band together when singer Steve Hogarth joined.”

  Kimsey confirms Fish’s assertion: “I remember [Fish] being into Jack Kerouac at that time. And what I mean by ‘being into’ Kerouac is reading Kerouac; not doing all the drugs.”

  Fish suspects that certain elements, after realizing what a loss it would be for the Scot to leave the band, forced the situation, perhaps for financial gain. “You’ve got to remember that it was in EMI’s interest to have two units,” Fish says. “They wanted the Peter Gabriel/Genesis vibe. They wanted the lead singer doing an album and they wanted the old band doing albums with a new singer. Best of both worlds.”

  TRANSFORMATION

  With Fish out of the picture, the hunt was on for a new singer/lyricist. It took several months to find the right man.

  “Steve Hogarth is a musician as well as a singer, whereas Fish never was,” says Rothery. “So he can graft an idea quicker and he ... is a very talented writer who can come up with vocal melodies. We started working with lyricist John Helmer before Steve joined, so, we already had some lyrics written for Seasons End. Steve came in and he sang some things in the audition that pretty much stayed in that form until we made the record.”

  The press welcomed Hogarth like a conquering hero, as did the fans: The first post-Fish Marillion record, Seasons End, went Top 10 in Britain (with three singles, “Hooks in You,” “Easter,” and “The Uninvited Guest” charting). The transition appeared to be a smooth one.