Standing Out From Crowd The
Crowdfunding, copyright claims and the birth of the Marillion Weekend. In an extract from his recent autobiography, Marillion, Misadventures & Marathons: The Life & Times Of Mad Jack, keyboard player Mark Kelly recounts the story behind the band’s first f
What was it Oscar Wilde said? “An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.” We had a database of fans. The whole world was waking up to the potential of the internet and the dot-com bubble that would change the world was just drifting into view. We had no record contract and the US tour fund of 1997 had highlighted the fact that our fans would be willing to spend money up front when it came to the band. Saying that, it still took a few months from parting company with Castle and Sanctuary for the penny to drop. We might share the same barber (and by barber I mean that God cuts both our hair), but I was clearly no Jeff Bezos.
Not that we were sitting around idly. We were beefing up our website with lyrics, news, interviews and anything else we could think of to drive traffic there. As part of our push to become independent we even decided to take on a new employee to work alongside Erik Nielsen [the band’s keyboard techcum-website designer]. We had no money but one more mouth to feed wasn’t going to make much difference.
We had been very impressed with Lucy Jordache’s work on the remastered albums series and over the years we had found out how much she cared about Marillion, even under the auspices of EMI. We invited her to come and work for us full time as our Marketing and Communications Manager. Her head turned by the offer of a pay cut and the wilds of Buckinghamshire, she quickly quit London and her corner office at EMI for a portable cabin in the carpark of the Racket Club. Not just one cabin, we had two! Affectionately referred to as the kebab vans. What a perfectly tuned beast the micro-sized Marillion machine truly was.
We had already started work on the next album and were still debating if we should sign one of the deals on offer. As Brian Wilson almost sang, ‘God only knows we needed the money.’ And then, just like that, it occurred to me. We needed the money, but that was all we needed. We didn’t need anything else from a record company that we couldn’t do ourselves. No lightbulb flash of inspiration, just a problem and a solution.
Standing around the kitchen with mugs of tea in hand, I said to the
“It was us against the world again. We were making the album we wanted to make, confident and sure of ourselves, with our fans behind us both spiritually and financially.”
boys that we should ask the fans to buy the next album in advance through an online pre-order. The money it would bring in would fund us through the making of the album. I did a quick back-of-a-fag-packet calculation and figured that about 6,000 orders would be enough to make it work. History turns on such almost imperceptible moments, though I’m not sure they’re always accompanied by a cup of Yorkshire Gold.
I got a few looks that suggested I had pulled a live raccoon from a sack and deposited it on the kitchen floor, but there was general agreement among the band. Lucy and Erik were especially receptive to the idea. Understandably, all the things that might go wrong were raised: What if we didn’t make enough money? Would we look bad asking for a handout? Might the fans expect some control over the sort of album we were going to make? And so on. There were plenty of reasons why we shouldn’t do it. But there are always plenty of reasons not to do anything. But as I argued (in the most genial way), sometimes you just have to dive off the top board and see how you land, so I pushed for everyone to at least try it.
Ideas go through several stages: from impossible to dangerous to the bleedin’ obvious. Crowdfunding (a new word, it wasn’t coined until 2006) wasn’t impossible since the dawn of the internet, but it wasn’t as omnipresent as it is now. It still felt a bit ‘Wild West’, but I was drawn to the unknown and the untested. Much like I was drawn to speeding red sports cars and the windswept high ledges of European hotels. I like a little bit of danger. How can you truly enjoy life when there isn’t a small risk of death? Or at least an interesting scar you can tell your grandkids about. I have always believed that taking risks is good. If it goes awry, then try something else instead. I’m either right or may just be lucky enough to never have my belief truly tested.
Our first and most pressing need as a band was to find out if the fans loved the idea as much as we did. On June 16, 2000 (our drummer Ian Mosley’s birthday) we sent out an email to the 6,000 email addresses we had collected asking fans if they would be willing to support a pre-order for the next album.
So that we didn’t have to read all 6,000 replies, we simply asked that they send their reply to yes@marillion.com or no@marillion.com (the mailboxes are now closed in case you had something pithy in mind to send) and we could simply count the replies. Almost everyone answered the call and there were only 200 emails in the ‘no’ mailbox.
Over the next few months, we fleshed out the idea of the pre-order
(it sounds sexy, but I’m here to assure you it’s not). We needed to make the album feel like an event, so the pre-order version came with a bonus disc, not available in the shops. We also offered to include the name of anybody who placed their order before the end of the year in the CD booklet. This served the dual purpose of personalising it for our backers and it gave them a reason to not wait too long before ordering. It sounds like small beer these days but was pretty revolutionary at the time, as was
“Just like that, it occurred to me. We needed the money, but that was all we needed. We didn’t need anything else from a record company that we couldn’t do ourselves.”
deluxe packaging and an array of formats. Not that I’m claiming the credit for every great idea in the campaign. These would often evolve out of the frequent chats and meetings we had, though my enduring memory of the campaign is that Erik and I were leading the charge.
Although Marillion have been credited as the inventors of online crowdfunding (and not afraid to go on stage dressed in sackcloth with eyes emblazoned on their backs either), and I sometimes get the credit as the band member who came up with the idea, it doesn’t take a genius to see how it evolved from [US fan] Jeff Pelletier’s tour fund idea [which covered the costs of Marillion’s USA tour in 1997]. We just ran with it. Besides, crowdfunding as a concept had been around in one form or another since at least the 19th century. Remember the debentures at the Royal Albert Hall?
Still, we were pioneers after a fashion. Imagine Hillary and Tenzing scaling the frozen white face of Everest, the perishing wind whipping through their beards. Substitute a warehouse full of boxes of CDs and some Excel spreadsheets for one of the most dangerous peaks in the world, and that was us, pretty much. At least that’s what I tell myself before I bed down each night.
And, almost as a happy accident, it meant that as a band we had suddenly found our way again. Like stepping out of a dark forest and into the light of day. We had taken a journey and come back changed, but changed for the better. It was us against the world again. We were making the album we wanted to make, confident and sure of ourselves, with our fans behind us both spiritually and financially.
Around this time, I brought up the subject of money and how we distributed it. For many years we had continued to split the publishing income unequally, a hangover from the Fish years. Having not quite shed my communist tendencies, I suggested that we should revert to splitting the publishing equally again. We had been through a near-death experience and were closer than ever. It seemed like a good time to put our money where our mouths were. Once we started talking about it, then it seemed an obvious step to split all Marillion income, whatever the source, equally, which is what we agreed to do. This was a sacrifice for H [Steve Hogarth] and Rothers [Steve Rothery] and principally benefited Ian and Pete.
But it felt good to all be equals again. All for one…
As the money started coming in from the pre-orders, we also realised that we could afford to hire [Fugazi and
“It was how we felt about ourselves and our fans. Prog and proud of it. Anoraks all. No more trying to be ‘relevant’ or hip, whatever that even was.”
Brave producer] Dave Meegan again. Things were looking up.
Dave joined us at the Racket Club, and we worked together on the arrangements and recording throughout the second half of 2000 and into early 2001. There was some discussion about what sort of album we were going to make. We felt the pressure of knowing that the people were paying up-front and deserved our very best, but we were brimming with confidence that we could deliver.
From the uplifting opener Between You And Me to the roiling closer If My Heart Were A Ball It Would Roll Uphill, we knew we had something special. I know you’re scratching your head at such an obtuse song title, so I’ll tell you the story behind it.
It’s the smallest of battles, but since the early days of the band there had been a struggle between the music and the vocals. Which takes precedence? Who should be louder? Naturally, the singer (every singer, it comes with the territory of leading a band) wants the listener to be able to hear every word they utter. What’s wrong with that? Nothing, except that if you make the vocals louder, then the instruments go down in the mix. It’s simply not possible to have “everything louder than everything else”, as Ian Gillan famously requested during Deep Purple’s performance of The Mule on their 1972 Made In
Japan live album.
If the vocal is too loud then the band can sound minuscule in comparison, which might work in the pop world, but in prog rock? Never! This endless war for dominance often came to a head during the mixing. It could get unpleasant when two or more members of the band had a disagreement over how a mix should sound. Not in a Gallagher brothers’ ‘I’ll break your guitar and glasses’ way, but in a much more English way: the sort of smouldering resentment that can lead to an ulcer in later life.
It’s stressful and unpleasant enough that when it was time to mix This Strange Engine, I decided to give it a miss altogether. Like a spoilt child I just refused to attend the mixes and let the rest of them and Dave slug it out. It wasn’t because I didn’t care. Instead, my reasoning was that no matter how upset or angst ridden
I have felt about a mix at the time, a year or two down the road when I heard the song again, I wouldn’t give it a second thought. Besides, I trusted Dave’s mixing expertise.
Got a little off track then, didn’t I? Embroiled as I was in memories of the mixing wars. So, why such an ungainly song title? It was H’s backup plan in case the final mix meant his vocals were too quiet and that people might miss out on his carefully crafted lyrics. Calling the song If My Heart Were A Ball It Would Roll Uphill would leave no doubt as to the exact words he was singing. Thankfully, he held off including the song’s entire lyric in the title, so a minor win for the rest of the musicians in the band, and for the audience when he introduced the song each night.
For the album, we tried to cover as many musical bases as possible, from the funk groove of Quartz to the heavy rock riff of Separated Out to the understated When I Meet God. The first song we wrote for Anoraknophobia was This Is The 21st Century. We were all very excited about how good it sounded but, not unlike many first dates, the initial spark of excitement sometimes sputters out. If Dave Meegan has a weakness as a producer, it’s that he sometimes lets a song outstay its welcome. Often, he can’t bring himself to take a razor blade to a few unnecessary bars. Which was the case with This Is The 21st Century. Lyrically, I would like to imagine
H was thinking of me when he wrote that first verse. We are very different, he and I. He believes in magic and I believe in science. It works though, our shared world keeps spinning.
Not that I want you to think that
Anoraknophobia was beset by problems; it wasn’t. Gripes were minor, arguments few. We got on well together and it was a real pleasure to be working with Dave again. Even calling the album
Anoraknophobia was a statement of intent we could all get behind; it was how we felt about ourselves and our fans. Prog and proud of it. Anoraks all. No more trying to be ‘relevant’ or hip, whatever that even was. We even had some T-shirts printed, emblazoned with the legend ‘Marillion, Uncool as
F**k’, which the fans loved. Us and them against the world.
Which isn’t to say there weren’t a few teething problems.
After practically pleading with the bank for a credit card machine, we had it installed in one of the kebab vans. For some reason the bank assumed we couldn’t be trusted with such a tempting piece of kit. At first, it was exciting watching the little machine process the payments and experience the money flowing into our bank account. After a while, punching in credit card numbers reminded all of us why we hadn’t pursued a career in accountancy. And to think, I once contemplated a bank job. It was mindnumbing stuff, even if we did know that it was helping fill our coffers with every order. We all took it in turns to spread the tedium.
Besides, Worldpay (the payment processing company), like many music critics before them, thought we were a bunch of wrong ’uns. Becoming suspicious of our sudden influx of cash, they started asking questions. They didn’t like us taking payment for goods that didn’t exist yet. They had a point. On the face of it, it sounded like a scam. Eventually they agreed to release enough money to us so we could pay for the manufacture of the CDs, holding on to the rest until they had been shipped.
We now had over £200,000 in our account and we hadn’t signed our lives away. Having experienced the world of the indie record label of the late 1990s, we thought favourably of EMI once again. Lucy set up a meeting with her old boss, Nigel Reeve, and she, H and I went to see him with an offer to license the new Marillion album. No advance, we simply wanted the promise of a decent marketing
budget and worldwide distribution, which he accepted. Win-win, or so we thought. We learned that not having an advance to recoup meant the record company didn’t have as much incentive to sell the record. Their lacklustre approach to promoting the album meant that we resolved to utilise a much more hands-on approach when it came to our next record.
There was also the matter of the album cover. We really liked Carl Glover’s work but felt it was time for a new approach. We pitched the title to a few different artists. One, Matt Curtis, came back with the cute guy in an anorak with a coat hanger in his hand. We thought it was perfect and told him so. He then, perplexingly, proceeded to change it. We spent the next few weeks trying to get him to give us the anorak guy (who we christened Barry) we first saw and liked so much. It was as if he was deliberately trying to change the design we had initially approved. Eventually, after much haranguing, we got him back to where he had started, and the cover was given the green light.
A few months after the album was released, we found out why Mr Curtis was so desperate to change it. Barry was a car thief! In a plot twist you would scoff at if you saw it in a movie, he had stolen the image from an antitheft poster belonging to Toyota. The coat hanger was the thief’s method of entry into the cars. Toyota threatened to sue for copyright infringement.
EMI settled with them and went after Curtis for the money. We stayed out of it and got to keep Barry in the end.
While we waited for the album to reach the shops and our subsequent European tour, Lucy booked us a short set of university shows to see if we could reach a new and younger audience. The tour lost money as the ticket price was kept deliberately low in a bid to attract the student audience. We tried to discourage our usual fans from buying up all the tickets, but it was an impossible task. They went after these new, cheaper tickets the way dogs pursue squirrels in the park, but with considerably more success.
One good thing to emerge from all this was that Lucy discovered she had a talent for booking tours and, what’s more, she enjoyed it. She asked to be excused from her marketing and PR duties to concentrate more on the management side of things. The sky hadn’t fallen in after John Arnison’s departure but there were some big holes in the day-to-day management that Lucy stepped in to fill. Things were on the up.
In September 2001 The Stranglers played a fan convention over two nights at Pontins holiday camp in Somerset. Lucy had been contemplating the idea of Marillion possibly trying something similar, so she asked Andy Rotherham, a longstanding friend of (and occasional guitar tech for) the band and keen Stranglers fan, to go along and check it out. Andy reported back that he believed the model could work for Marillion. The Stranglers’ convention was organised by the band’s manager, Sil Willcox, who Lucy knew from her EMI days, so she asked him to help to organise a Marillion weekend in return for a percentage of the takings.
The band were sceptical, and we told Lucy so. I was probably the most unsure, mainly because of the chosen venue. The British holiday camp was derided even in its 1960s heyday and its reputation had not improved with the passage of time. If you haven’t experienced one, imagine a series of breeze block buildings leading to a function room staffed with grinning staff pushing forced hilarity and entertainment down your throat.
And a swimming pool populated with bobbing plasters. And imagine it all in an endless grey rain. That’s Butlin’s in my mind’s eye, in case Mr Butlin decides to send in the lawyers.
Pontins is a step down from that. I should add that I had never visited one as my parents couldn’t even afford that when we were kids. I joked with Lucy that if we sold more than 1,000 tickets that I would eat a bowl of tripe. We sold all 1,650 tickets, but the tripe remains untouched.
Even Lucy, the most enthusiastic advocate of the weekend idea, couldn’t have predicted how successful they would become. Like crowdfunding, which grew into a multi-billion worldwide industry and spawned numerous companies and copycat projects, the Marillion Weekend has changed our lives. Every two years we devote four months to preparing for the weekends in multiple countries (five in 2019 and possibly six in 2022).
In 2007 we moved the main weekend to the Netherlands. There is nothing quite like the atmosphere of Center Parcs at Port Zélande; fans come from all over the world to be part of it. It has grown into something much more than three Marillion gigs set over one weekend. It’s a party of reunited friends, it’s a music festival,
it’s a family holiday, it’s a weekend piss-up depending on your personal preferences. In truth, it’s all of these things and more.
It’s also a lot of hard work, worry and stress before it happens. But the payoff is that it’s equally rewarding and magical too. Plus, it brings in enough money to enable us to spend more time in the studio between albums and tours getting the next record ready. I’ll always be grateful to our fans for making this possible and Lucy for pushing past my cynicism and dragging us through those holiday camp gates that first time at Pontins Brean Sands in Burnham-on-Sea in April 2002.
The format of the weekends was set from the start with the decision to play Brave in its entirety. We really do test our fans. Brave, like lunch, is best consumed in one sitting. When we first performed it live, the audience hadn’t even heard the album. I can still recall those quizzical faces looking upwards at us. Over the intervening years many people had grown to love that album but regretted never seeing it played in its entirety. We thought it would be a good draw to announce that we were playing it again as a special one-off for the weekend.
That set the mould for every subsequent weekend, where we would elect to play one album in its entirety on the Friday night. We also wanted to make the Saturday night something special and have tried several ideas over the years. People say there are no stupid questions. They don’t say that about ideas though and there’s a reason for that.
“Even Lucy Jordache, the most enthusiastic advocate of the Marillion Weekend idea, couldn’t have predicted how successful they would become. Like crowdfunding, it has changed our lives.”
Over the years, it’s been a pet project of mine to come up with a different theme for the Saturday night. For the debut Marillion Weekend, my great idea was Marillion bingo. This involved randomly choosing numbered balls from a bucket where we had to play the song that corresponded to the chosen ball. I’ll be honest, I hadn’t properly thought this through because we had to learn and rehearse about five hours of material to compile a credible list of songs. Knowing how much we hate rehearsing, you can imagine how that went down. As Pete once remarked:
“I’d rather be worse than rehearse.”
There were a few ‘dummy’ songs on the list too, not least Grendel. We had no intention of playing it and consequently there was no corresponding ball in the bucket. In any event, the songs that came up randomly were mostly songs we usually play live, which made the whole thing appear to be rigged. What’s more, three balls with the number for Grendel had been secretly added to the bucket by the crew in the hope that it would surface. Thankfully, the prog gods were smiling on us that night and Grendel remained languishing in the bucket. We quietly filed Marillion bingo away and moved on to the next thing.
Something else we introduced that first weekend and have repeated ever since was Swap The Band, where we invite members of the audience up to replace one of us for a song. Five members, five songs. There was some scepticism from certain quarters that this was not our brightest idea, so we indulged in a bit of damage limitation by mostly inviting people we knew. Rick Armstrong played guitar on 80
Days; Jan Henrik Ohme, the singer from Gazpacho, performed Afraid Of Sunlight; and Phil Harrison played drums on Sugar Mice. I first met Phil in 1997 in San Francisco where he was working for Sony PlayStation. He invited Rothers and me to his office with the promise of some free swag and we instantly struck up a friendship. We’ve been best friends ever since.