Prog Issue 54

Contents Issue 54 11.03.15

it’s on here

steve rothery

if it’s in there

Cover

feature

Even now, I wouldn’t change a thing about Misplaced Childhood.

Marillion p36 30 years on, Marillion remember their chart-topping, career-saving album.

FEATURES 80s Prog Revival_______ Pg 46

REGULARS

BLOODY WELL WRITE

pg 10

“It wasn’t cool but we said, ‘Sod them!’” What happened when prog hit back in the 80s.

Missives, musings and tweets from Planet Prog.

Christina Booth________ Pg 56

THE INTRO

“I was a lot more confident this time…”

Magenta singer back with second album after battling a life-threatening illness.

pg 12

Mike Vennart reveals his new solo venture, The Tangent release new album and the Prog Stage for Desertfest is announced. Plus Diatessaron, A Formal Horse, Fuzzy Nautilus and more…

RECORD COLLECTION

pg 30

The writer and creator of My Sad Cat, Tom Cox, along with assorted feline pals, lets us have a rummage through his record collection.

Q&A

pg 32

Rick Wakeman discusses the reissue of his classic albums, and getting roasted on stage by his kids.

THE LABELS THAT BUILT PROG

pg 52

Arena________________ Pg 58 “It sounds bloody good to me so far!” Neo proggers set for 20th Anniversary shindig.

Steve Hackett__________ Pg 62 “Last year was my best – it was breathless.”

Steve Hackett still going strong with new album Wolflight.

Sanguine Hum_________ Pg 66 “People think we’re serious, but we can get pretty silly.” A buttered cat concept album certainly backs that up…

It was the label that gave us King Crimson and Roxy Music, to name but two. We bring you the inside story of the EG label…

Renaissance___________ Pg 74

THE OUTER LIMITS

Enslaved_____________ Pg 78

pg 70

They won Grammys galore and had massive chart hits. But Toto are insistent that a prog heart beats away inside them.

THE MUSICAL BOX

pg 96

Steve Hackett’s Wolflight leads the reviews along with new releases from The Gentle Storm, Audioplastik, Magma, Sanguine Hum, Soft Machine, Von Hertzen Brothers and many more…

TAKE A BOW

pg 116

The Enid’s Bridge spectacular heads up live reviews along with The Aristocrats, Rick Wakeman, Matt Berry, Shattered Skies, Änglagård, Fairport Convention, Toundra and lots more.

BRAINSTORM

pg 130

Israeli guitarist Yossi Sassi gets his prog-entials well and truly tested.

“We were doing so well. Then Michael died.”

How Annie Haslam kept the band alive.

“Our prog influences are never-ending.”

Norwegian metallers on their proggiest yet.

Lonely Robot __________ Pg 82 “I’ve been talking about doing this for years.”

It Bites man finally launches his solo career.

Van der Graaf__________ Pg 86 “It all happened so very quickly.” How the classic prog band evolved into the short-lived Van der Graaf.

Nightwish____________ Pg 90 “This is science. It’s not done to annoy religion.” What happened when Nightwish met Richard Dawkins.

Karnataka____________ Pg 94 “Straight away, we knew she had it.” Is their latest line-up the best yet?

Childhood Memories An album inspired by lost love and drugs, Misplaced Childhood is the dark prog masterpiece that turned Marillion into bona fide rock stars – and it’s also the record that broke the group. On its 30th anniversary, we get the inside story of the making of an all-time classic.

Words: Mark Blake Illustrations and Photos: Mark Wilkinson and Steve Rothery

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A

ccording to Fish, Marillion owe it all to Terry Wogan.

On May 20, 1985, the band made their one and only appearance on the Irishman’s BBC chat show.

Back then, Wogan was prime-time TV, and the perfect shop window for any group with a single to promote.

At the BBC Television Theatre in Shepherd’s Bush, Marillion performed what the show’s host called their “current smasheroonie”, Kayleigh. At the end, lead singer Fish gave a shy smile to the camera. And after that, he says, everything changed.

The man born Derek Dick is remembering Marillion’s Wogan performance almost 30 years later.

After the show, EMI’s Head Of Promotions, Malcolm Hill, took him aside. “And he said to me, ‘That little smile you did at the end broke every mother’s heart in Great Britain.’”

Soon after, Kayleigh was at No.2 in the charts, giving Marillion the biggest hit of their career. “The Wogan show was what did it,” says Fish. “That lit the touchpaper on the whole thing.”

In June, Marillion’s third album, Misplaced Childhood, toppled Bryan Ferry’s Boys And Girls from the top of the chart. Against all expectations, Marillion had become one of the biggest bands in Britain. “Suddenly we went from being this relatively unknown progressive rock group to a band with a big hit single and album,” Fish marvels. “Misplaced Childhood was us sticking one finger up at the business and saying, ‘Fuck you! This is a real band.’”

Misplaced Childhood turns 30 this year, and remains the biggest-selling album of both Marillion’s and Fish’s 38 progmagazine.com

careers. The singer, who’s now planning to retire from touring, will celebrate its birthday by performing the album in full later this year.

Marillion, meanwhile, are busy writing a new album. You sense that the past – especially their past with Fish – sometimes seems like a foreign country. But Misplaced Childhood is an album they remember fondly. As keyboard player Mark Kelly admits: “It was the album that saved us.”

To their dedicated and growing fanbase in 1984, it might have seemed

Above: Marillion on board the Learjet EMI chartered to take them to the TOTP studios from Berlin. Top centre: With EMI Head Of Promotions Malcolm Hill. And left: Fish backstage at TOTP.

“It was the album that saved our career.”

Mark Kelly

as if Marillion could do no wrong.

They’d had five Top 40 singles and two Top 20 albums with 1983’s Script For A Jester’s Tear and ’84’s Fugazi.

But, in fact, they were actually in danger of being dropped by their record company.

“We’d got ourselves into a bit of a hole with EMI,” explains guitarist Steve Rothery now. The hole had grown bigger after Marillion spent almost as much money on the video for their last single, Assassing, as they’d done on the whole of Fugazi: “And we were liable for 50 per cent of the costs.”

“Looking back, we were on a bit of a knife edge,” adds Kelly. “Script For A Jester’s Tear had sold about 120,000.

Fugazi cost twice as much but sold a bit less. If we carried on the way we were going, we weren’t going to be financially viable.”

It was a precursor of the situation Marillion found themselves in at the end of the 90s, and which they resolved with 2001’s crowd-funded Anoraknophobia. In 1984, though, they did what any struggling rock band

would do: they put out a live album.

Real To Reel, released in November, was recorded at dates in Montreal and, less exotically, Leicester. It cracked the Top 10 and sold well in Europe: “Which gave the label an inkling that it might be worth sticking with us for one more album,” Kelly says.

However, Marillion were in no hurry to tell EMI that their next studio release was a concept album. “That,” admits Rothery, “might have been the kiss of death.”

The concept for Misplaced Childhood came to Fish during an LSD trip. The singer had returned to his house in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, at the end of the Fugazi tour, feeling burnt out, but “knowing we had a difficult third album to write”.

Soon after, an envelope arrived in the post with a note from an old girlfriend – “It read: ‘I think you might

Above: Fish’s handwritten lyrical development for the chart-topping Kayleigh.

“Before Kayleigh, we held the record for being the band who did Top Of The Pops the most times and saw their single go down the charts.”

Steve Rothery

like this’” – and a tab of ‘white lightning’ acid. “I was bored, sitting on my own one night, so I took half of it,” Fish recalls. “Then I thought, ‘Oh, this is rubbish, it’s not working,’ and I took the other half…” He pauses, then lets out a throaty laugh. “Aye, that old mistake.”

It was seven o’clock on a warm summer’s evening. With the world around him growing increasingly fuzzy, Fish jumped on his bicycle and rode to Steve Rothery’s cottage nearby.

“In those days, Fish and I were on very good terms,” says the guitarist.

“We were the two bachelors in the band. We socialised together a lot.”

Does he recall Fish being under the influence? Rothery laughs: “Yes, he probably was.” progmagazine.com 39

Rebel Sons Johnny Sharp might have started his writing career known as Johnny Cigarettes to legions of NME readers in the mid-90s, but behind his nom de plume hid a passionate prog fan who ran the gauntlet of the 80s British prog revival. Here, with some help from those who were there, he looks at what exactly happened during that heady decade, and more importantly, why it happened…

The wall backstage at London’s Marquee Club.

Words: Johnny Sharp

ical on et theatr Pallas g the Marquee. stage at

Peter Nicholls made up to be of IQ: at the Marqueeplaying .

46 progmagazine.com

elfth Night Progfest: TwFestival, 1983. g in d at Rea

“This was our own version of Anarchy In The UK. If punk was trying to shock people and cause a reaction against the establishment, this was a reaction against the reaction.” – Graeme Murray, Pallas.

n Quasar with Susa ls at Robinson on voca 85. the Greyhound, 19

Oz Hardwick

Haze double-necking it at the Marquee.

T

his wasn’t supposed to happen.

According to the official, BBC‑approved version of rock history (you know the one, featuring footage of Rick Wakeman in a wizard’s outfit and the Emerson Lake & Palmer trucks rolling down the motorway), progressive rock was consigned to the dustbin of musical history approximately five minutes after the Sex Pistols swore on live telly.

Anyone who was remotely cool immediately binned every prog album they owned, cut their hair and got with the programme.

Year Zero had arrived, and nothing that went before could ever dare to show its face again in polite society.

Nonsense, of course, but all the same, by the turn of the 1980s, there had unquestionably been a seismic shift in the UK musical landscape. All of which meant, ironically, that what had been dismissed a few years previously as the bland, complacent music of the establishment was

Pendragon premier ve live at prog’s nue in the 8 0s.

Solstice with Sandy Leigh, live at the Marquee.

“We thought we were just a lone voice in the dark, but pretty soon we found out there were bands like us coming out of the woodwork everywhere – it was like pop-up prog!”

Graeme Murray, Pallas now the ultimate outsider music. In the early 1980s, if you wanted to be a true rebel, you came out of the closet as a prog fan.

Yet if you wanted a platform for your illicit form of self-expression, you had your work cut out. “Trying to get gigs in those days was terrible,” recalls Mike Holmes, who spent the early 1980s trying to make a go of things as guitarist and co-songwriter of IQ in and around Southampton. “So many times we played to, literally, two people.”

Up in Scotland, however, things were looking more promising. Far removed from the fashion fundamentalism that has always pervaded the London music scene, Aberdeen-based proggers Pallas were pulling in substantial crowds from the silent majority that had not, contrary to folklore, obediently retuned their ears to the new orthodoxy overnight. A live cassette album, 1981’s Arrive Alive, further spread their reputation.

Meanwhile, hundreds of miles south, Buckinghamshire-based Silmarillion had culled the Tolkien-derived first syllable of progmagazine.com 47

Wild At Heart

From hanging out with a pack of wolves to embracing a dizzying array of musical styles, Steve Hackett‘s new album Wolflight shows the former Genesis guitarist is still in love with adventure.

“I have action-packed days,” he tells us…

Words: Rob Hughes Images: Kevin Nixon

Last year was one of my best ever, for all sorts of reasons. It was breathless.

And it’s a privilege to still be doing it.

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Steve Hackett: new album Wolflight ranks among the guitarist’s best work.

S

teve Hackett really doesn’t hang about. When Prog calls to get the skinny on his new album, the frankly spectacular Wolflight, he promptly announces that he’s off to the studio later to start work on the next one. At 65 years of age, you could forgive Hackett for wanting to slow down and rest easy, but he’s having none of it. Remarkably, Wolflight is his eighth long-player in as many years.

“I feel the clock is ticking,” he offers, addressing a work rate that also makes room for a seemingly endless tour schedule.

“There’s something about being able to play at your peak, and being aware of the passing of time. So, to quote the guy who wrote that ‘time seems to be slipping away into the future’ [Steve Miller Band’s Fly Like An Eagle, no less], it’s all going far too quickly.

“I have action-packed days. I’m a busy man and have been all my life. Last year was one of my best ever, for all sorts of reasons. It was breathless. And it’s a privilege to still be doing it, because many have fallen over. It’s a calling.

What can I tell you?”

Hackett’s “breathless” 2014 saw the culmination of a two-year album-tour cycle for Genesis Revisited II, on which he eloquently retooled some of his best songs from that old band of his. Last year alone involved playing in 20 different countries. There was also, as it turned out, the rather controversial BBC documentary, Genesis: Together And Apart. But we’ll get to that later.

Like Hackett himself, Wolflight isn’t short on ambition. The album’s pan-cultural reach – taking in everything from Greek mythology and post-Communist Europe to the sands of the Sahara and Civil Rightsera USA – finds a mirror in the inclusive nature of the music within. There’s an orchestra, primal drums, crying wolves and nimble smatterings of exotica: an Arabian oud, Armenian woodwinds, even the odd didgeridoo. Above all though, it’s a compelling showcase for Hackett’s lyrical guitar playing, both acoustic and electric.

Some compositions, such as the epic title track or the equally grand Love Song To A Vampire, offer a fascinating clash of folk and classical styles, albeit rippling with electric guitar textures. In short, Wolflight feels like a vast musical dialogue. progmagazine.com 63

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