…Marillion rule the charts!
Tonight at La Sala Canciller club in Madrid – hailed as Spain’s “Temple of Heavy Metal” – Marillion played the second date of a European tour promoting their impending third album, the unrepentant concept LP Misplaced Childhood.
Sounds were there for an on-the-road report, and band frontman Fish was in no mood for compromise.
“We just put our fingers up to the world and got on with it,” said Fish, also known as Derek Dick, of the record. “American producers… were turning us down saying, ‘Nobody’s making concept albums these days, and, besides, there’s no hits on it.’ Which sounds great right now!”
His triumphalism was understandable. The group had already scored two Top 10 albums and four Top 40 singles, but now their success had reached an unignorable new level: helped by performances on Top Of The Pops and the Wogan chat show, sixth 45 Kayleigh was currently in the UK Top 5 and on its way to Number 2.
The band had formed in the late ’70s in Aylesbury, with Fish joining in early ’81. By 1984, their classic line-up of Fish, guitarist Steve Rothery, keyboardist Mark Kelly, bassist Pete Trewavas and drummer Ian Mosley was in place. Heretically to some listeners in this era of shining electronic pop, the group loved Floyd and Genesis, and had thrown in their lot with the deeply unvoguish genre of progressive rock. “As a band who like to smash against the walls of categorisation we’ve been fucked up so many times by people who just take one look at the band and think – ‘Genesis’,” Fish had raged to Paul Morley. “And then a lot of people who hate Genesis think, ‘Well then, I’ll hate Marillion…’ We’re probably the most unfashionable band in Britain.”
With lyrics written for Fish’s former on-off girlfriend Kay, lost-love song Kayleigh was an outstanding rock single that transcended such preconceptions. A video for it was filmed on the streets of West Berlin, where the group were recording
Misplaced Childhood at Hansa Tonstudio, adjacent to the Berlin Wall. Ten-year-old Robert Mead, who played the role of the hussar-jacketed, shoeless ‘drummer boy’ that featured on illustrator Mark Wilkinson’s artwork for the LP and its singles, flew over to appear, while one Tamara Nowy played Fish’s elusive love interest. Fish remembered the song’s subject Kay, a pharmacist in Aylesbury, to Dutch broadcaster NPO Radio 2 in 2020. “We fell in love,” he reflected, “but when I went and joined Marillion I gave up everything… I went away to America on a tour and came back and she’d gone.”
On June 29 Misplaced Childhood, with its LSD-inspired concept of fading youth, success and what it costs, entered the charts at Number 1, and went on to sell in platinum quantities. August’s 45 Lavender would also go Top 5. Despite an aborted UK tour in September when Fish’s voice gave out, the group were on a roll, and spent the next year touring Europe, Japan, Britain and the US. The Misplaced Childhood period peaked with a massive show at the Milton Keynes Bowl, entitled Welcome To The Garden Party, on June 28, 1986, with support acts including Jethro Tull and Gary Moore. Yet there was trouble looming.
“We’d gone from being a decidedly unhip
“We’re probably the most unfashionable band in Britain.” FISH
band that everyone fucking hated, to getting fucking Top 5 singles,” Fish later told MOJO. “I think I became distanced from the band… the demands on us were for an album straight away and another hit, ‘Kayleigh Two’. It wasn’t gonna happen.”
The band managed one more LP – titled, portentously, Clutching At Straws – before Fish departed for a solo career in 1988. Marillion regrouped with new singer Steve Hogarth and continue to this day.
There were a series of postscripts to the story. Fish would marry Kayleigh video star Tamara Nowy in 1987. Then, in 2005, he re-established contact with old love Kay, discovering she’d never listened to
Misplaced Childhood. “She said, ‘I never realised that that was how you felt at the time,’” he told NPO Radio 2. “The next thing I got a phone call off a friend of ours, that said she’d died of cancer.”
Fish would play the LP in full live, most notably on a 30th anniversary tour in 2015, and released the live recordings Return To
Childhood (2006) – which featured a new Mark Wilkinson artwork of the grown Robert Mead with his 10-year-old self – and
Farewell To Childhood (2017). Apart from an informal get-together on-stage in Aylesbury to play debut single Market Square Heroes in 2007, a reconvening of Marillion and their former singer seems unlikely. As keysman Kelly said in his recent memoir Marillion, Misadventures & Marathons, “sometimes it’s best to leave memories of the past unscarred by the present.” But as fans still prompted to lovelorn nostalgia by Kayleigh know, it’s not always that easy.
Ian Harrison