Got It Covered
“This was the clichéd rock musician on tour,” explains Fish of the artwork for Fugazi.
Mark Wilkinson’s artwork did more than just give Marillion a visual identity – it introduced an overarching visual narrative from album to album that dovetailed perfectly with Fish’s lyrical and conceptual ideas.
Where the painting that adorned the cover of Script For A Jester’s Tear captured that album’s bedsit claustrophobia, the equally intricate Fugazi cover mirrored the place the fast-rising band now found themselves in: all chrome fittings and cocaine-white walls.
“It was supposed to reflect the next step up from the bedsit seen on Script…,” explained Fish. “This was the clichéd rock musician on tour. The trashed hotel room, or despot in situ in a luxury flat. Abuse was highly prevalent, as illustrated in our own personal lifestyle.”
The Jester – the band’s mascot-come-Fish surrogate – is once again central to the image. Except this time, he’s sprawled on an unmade bed, unconscious and half-naked, plugged into the “halo of distortion” from a Walkman (a direct reference to a lyric from the album’s title track). In his right hand is a poppy, signifying either opium or a general death wish. In his left is a wine glass filled with red liquid – it could be vino or a it could be blood…
“I look at it now as an allegory for being on the edge of madness… being out of control,” Mark Wilkinson tells Prog’s
Rich Wilson in the liner notes to the new deluxe reissue of Fugazi. “The jester living inside his head, dealing with nightmares both real and imagined.”
As with Script…, symbolism and Easter eggs abound. Some are obvious, from the word ‘Fugazi’ scrawled on a mirror in red lipstick to the chameleon (She Chameleon) and the magpie with a stolen wedding ring in its beak (a reference to Marillion’s intro music, La Gazza Ladra, or ‘The Thieving Magpie’). Records by Pink Floyd (The Wall), Peter Hammill (Over) and Marillion themselves (Punch & Judy) lie scattered on the around. A jack-in-the-box contains Mr Punch, a jigsaw of the Jester lays on the floor (missing a piece, naturally) and an ‘incubus’ claw emerges from the acid-fried TV screen.
Other references are more subtle. The video recorder is set to 1984, a nod to both the year of the album’s release and George Orwell’s dystopian novel of the same name. Where issues of Kerrang! and Sounds appeared on Script…, it’s a copy of Billboard that lays on the bed, signifying commercial success. The painting on the wall on the front of the cover (by artist Julie Hazelwood) was titled ‘Temptation’, while the ruins of an abbey visible from the window on the back signify redemption, according to Wilkinson (it’s apparently Byland Abbey, near York).
Ironically, Wilkinson was never entirely happy with Fugazi. “I wasn’t as happy with this album art as with Script…,” he says. “It just looks too clean, sanitised even and badly composed.
If I was painting it now, hopefully it would be so much better technically. I would make it look much more mysterious and the symbols far less literal.”