Marillion

Inside Marillion’s latter-day masterpiece, and the standout cut that made our Top 100.

Inside the band’s latter-day masterpiece, from a standout album, the standout cut that made our Top 100.

65 LIVING IN FEAR

Marillion From: F.E.A.R, 2016

Most bands don’t sound this urgent, ambitious or just plain good by the time they get to their eighteenth album. Then again, Marillion are not most bands, and Living In Fear is not your average politically charged progressive anthem.

“We’re successful enough and have enough resources to be able to do exactly what we want, but we’re not so successful that we can do fucking nothing,” keyboard player Mark Kelly reasoned at the time. “We’re still hungry.”

If you believe the maxim ‘longer is better’, you’ll be happy to hear that three of the five tracks on F.E.A.R (Fuck Everyone And Run) run to more than 15 minutes. They’re lovingly crafted musical journeys that have all the nuances of a ‘classic’ Marillion album. This is the sound of a band with a revived sense of self-respect and belief, shouting defiantly: “We are Marillion and this is what we do,” and not trying overtly to get down with the kids. It’s an allconsuming record with an intensity to both the lyrics and the music that is at times overwhelming and emotionally draining.

Musically, at least, Living In Fear, is something of a refresher (although still substantial, at just under six and a half minutes). Led by plaintive piano chords and singer Steve Hogarth’s uniquely expressive vocal tone, it escalates into emotional fierceness, soaring guitars and a sublime earworm of a chorus. Ostensibly a song about peace, with archetypal 60s sentiments of disarmament, it’s a polished, succinct track.

“That was one of the tracks that we worked on at Real World Studios [owned by Peter Gabriel],” Hogarth explained. “They’ve got this big screen in the studio at Real World because they occasionally do soundtracks for films as well. So we can drop the big screen in the evening and put a movie on, with the sound off and just have that running while we are jamming as well. So we’d be in the dark and there would be a vibe going as well. We were also able to work late, stop and have dinner and then go back into the studio space at nine or ten at night, and there’s always a different atmosphere than there is during the day.”

The end result is by turns sweet, brooding and biting, not to mention lyrically adroit. Indeed the whole album is packed with thought-provoking passages that often venture into the dangerous area of politics. That’s not to suggest Marillion are suddenly turning into Billy Bragg – the songs on F.E.A.R are far from unsubtle, chest-beating protest songs – but there are undertones that delve into areas that some might find controversial and/or disagree with vehemently. For example, they cover Syrian refugees being denied access to Europe, the greed of bankers and oligarchs, Hogarth’s apparent feeling of shame at being British, and a sense of the loss of a nation. Remarkably, many of his lyrics demonstrate an acute perception, given they were written years ago and are becoming even more relevant and accurate with the passage of time. And in the current climate especially, his words acquire a darkly prophetic quality. Hindsight is all very well, one might say, but still…

“This album really is about a sense of foreboding,” Hogarth told Classic Rock in 2016. “What is kind of interesting is that a lot of these words are about three years old. Now we’re all sitting here, post-Brexit, on the day the Chilcot report into the Iraq war comes out. But all these words were on paper years ago, and some even date back to unused jams from the last album. So it’s about that foreboding and a feeling that everything is going to change in this country.”