Marillion

History

In 1977, drummer Mick Pointer was part of Electric Gypsy, a band that featured Doug Irvine on bass, Alan King on vocals, and Andy Glass on guitar. Later that year, Pointer and Irvine broke away to start their own group, Silmarillion, a name taken from J.R.R. Tolkien’s book. They performed just once in London as an instrumental act, with Neil Cockle on keyboards and Martin Jenner on guitar. By 1979, the lineup had shifted to include Pointer, guitarist Steve Rothery, Irvine on bass and vocals, and Brian Jelliman on keyboards.

Their debut concert took place on 1 March 1980 at Berkhamsted Civic Centre in Hertfordshire. Pointer says the name was shortened to Marillion around this time, though other accounts place the change in 1981 to sidestep copyright issues. That same year, on 2 January, singer Fish and bassist William “Diz” Minnitt replaced Irvine after an audition at Leyland Farm Studios in Buckinghamshire. The new lineup—Rothery, Pointer, Jelliman, Fish, and Minnitt—played their first show on 14 March 1981 at the Red Lion Pub on 35 Market Square in Bicester.

(Irvine later joined the band Steam Shed.) By the end of 1981, Mark Kelly had taken over keyboards from Jelliman, and in 1982 Pete Trewavas replaced Minnitt on bass. Minnitt later formed Pride of Passion and performed with Zealey and Moore.

Marillion’s earliest recordings were two demos made in March and summer of 1980, before Fish and Minnitt joined. Collectors know two versions of the spring demo: one with four tracks—“The Haunting of Gill House,” “Herne the Hunter,” an untitled piece called “Scott’s Porridge,” and “Alice”—and another that swaps “Scott’s Porridge” for an instrumental version of “Alice.” All tracks are instrumental except “Alice,” which features Irvine on vocals. The summer demo includes three tracks: “Close” (parts later reworked into “The Web,” “He Knows You Know,” and “Chelsea Monday”), “Lady Fantasy” (based on an earlier Electric Gypsy song), and another take of “Alice.”

Both demos were cut at The Enid’s studio in Hertfordshire. After Irvine left and Fish and Minnitt joined, the band recorded a third demo in July 1981, produced by Les Payne, with early versions of “He Knows You Know,” “Garden Party,” and “Charting the Single.”

Line-up, influences and sound changes

Marillion’s sound has shifted over the years, and the band has said that each album often reacts against the one before it, which makes their work hard to pin down. While they’ve had two very different lead singers, the core group of Steve Rothery on lead guitar, Pete Trewavas on bass, Mark Kelly on keyboards, and Ian Mosley on drums has stayed the same since 1984. In the 1980s, with Fish as vocalist, their music was a guitar-and-keyboard-driven style called neo-prog.

Early on, critics described them as a link between punk and classic progressive rock. Rothery handled most of the songwriting during Fish’s time in the band. Iron Maiden’s Janick Gers noted that Marillion could be both powerful and quiet, with the heavy parts feeling edgy and intense. Fish drew from a broad range of artists, listing favorites like Van der Graaf Generator, Joni Mitchell, the Who, Pink Floyd, John Martyn, Yes, Lowell George, Led Zeppelin, Roy Harper, Faces, the Beatles, and Supertramp.

Rothery’s main influences were Andrew Latimer of Camel, Steve Hackett of Genesis, and David Gilmour of Pink Floyd, along with Jimi Hendrix, Carlos Santana, Jeff Beck, Joni Mitchell, and Gordon Giltrap. Kelly looked up to Yes’s Rick Wakeman, and Trewavas named Paul McCartney as his favorite bassist. Original drummer Mick Pointer was a big fan of Rush’s Neil Peart. After Steve Hogarth took over vocals, the band’s sound on various albums drew comparisons to more modern acts like U2, Radiohead, Coldplay, Muse, Talk Talk, Elbow, and Massive Attack.

In 2016, Hogarth described the group by saying, “If Pink Floyd and Radiohead had a love child that was in touch with their feminine side, they would be us.” Rothery mentioned in a 2016 interview that many of the later albums with Hogarth were created through jamming.

In the media

The Guardian’s chief music critic, Alexis Petridis, once called Marillion “perennially unfashionable prog-rockers.” When Steve Hogarth joined the band in 1989, he later recalled that Matt Johnson of the The had also asked him to play piano on tour. Hogarth put it this way: he had to choose between “the most hip band in the world, and the least.” In the same 2001 interview, he added that the group was fed up with people who had not listened to their work in a decade forming opinions about them, calling much of the gossip “laughable.”

This stubbornly unfashionable image goes back to the early 1980s, when Marillion became the biggest commercial success of the neo-prog movement. That movement revived progressive rock, a style that critics had largely abandoned by the mid-1970s. Early reviewers often wrote them off as clones of Peter Gabriel-era Genesis. The similarities were easy to spot: long songs, a keyboard sound shaped by the Mellotron, lyrics full of vivid fantasy, and album covers by Mark Wilkinson that matched that fantastical tone. Lead singer Fish drew frequent comparisons to Gabriel, both for his early vocal style and for theatrical stage shows that, at first, included face paint.

In 1989, Jon Wilde of Melody Maker summed up the band’s odd place in pop history. At the close of a strange year for music, Marillion arrived in November 1982 with “Market Square Heroes.” 1982 had plenty of strange things, but Wilde argued that Marillion were the strangest of all. For six years, they seemed to exist outside their own time. They were the least hip group around.

As punk faded into memory, Marillion appeared with a sound and attitude that looked back longingly to the pomp of the 1970s. When people compared them to Yes, Genesis, or ELP, they took it as a compliment. The 1980s produced many odd phenomena, but none odder than Marillion. Along the way, almost by accident, they released a few singles that everyone quietly enjoyed: “Garden Party,” “Punch and Judy,” and “Incommunicado.”

By then, the band no longer needed approval from the hip crowd. They were huge. Perhaps the strangest thing of all was that Marillion became one of the biggest acts of the decade. They might have been an anomaly, but they were monstrously effective.

Crowdfunding pioneers

Marillion is often credited as one of the first major acts to realize and use the internet for musician-fan interaction, beginning around 1996, and is frequently described today as a rock and roll "Web Cottage Industry." Michael Lewis’s book Next: The Future Just Happened presents the band’s internet history as a case study in how the web shifts power away from traditional gatekeepers like big record labels and producers. The group is known for its intensely loyal fanbase, whose members sometimes call themselves "Freaks" and travel long distances for single shows, a devotion fueled by the band’s active engagement through their website, podcasts, conventions held every two years, and regular fan club mailings.

Their 2001 album Anoraknophobia attracted major notice because fans funded it through pre-orders rather than the band signing with a label; the BBC called it "a unique funding campaign." Guardian critic Alexis Petridis labeled Marillion "the undisputed pioneers" of fan-supported music.