Marillion – Marbles
“The open road is infinitely hopeful”
Armed with a new sense of freedom and a DIY approach, the band embarked on a 39-date tour in support of their first album as free agents. The tour included Europe and the UK and was comprised of two legs, one from May 4 – June 6 2001 and a second from September 15 – October 26. The setlists, though diverse, focused mainly on material from the new Anoraknophobia album, Brave and Afraid Of Sunlight. The only Fish era material performed was Sugar Mice at eight of the shows. From this tour came the live album Anorak In The UK, a play on the Sex Pistols Anarchy In The UK album title. Recorded mostly in May 2001 and the first live official live album since Made Again in 1996, it was released as a double album through the band’s Racket Records label but a single release via retail…which would also be the case for their next album. Overall, the live album is a solid and well recorded document that captures the energy of the live shows though…I wouldn’t really know first-hand…as this was still just over halfway through the 7-year drought of live Marillion in North America. Sounded fun though.
As the band were beginning to write material for the follow up to ANP, they were working out of a facility owned by the manager for the band The Stranglers (you better watch out…). He mentioned to them that The Stranglers had done a fan convention recently at the holiday camp Pontins and that it had been a great experience for everyone involved. So, the band took up the gauntlet and decided that maybe they would give it a try. The marillionweekend.com site went live in November 2001 announcing a three-day convention for fans from April 5-7 2002 at Pontins Brean Sands in Somerset, UK. This first formative event set the foundation for another aspect of sustainability for the band in their post-record company existence. The itinerary for this first kick at the convention can was as follows:
FRIDAY 5 APRIL
Arrivals during the afternoon.
Evening entertainment to include:
Aziz Ibrahim
Robin Boult
Marillion ‘Brave’
After-show Party!
SATURDAY 6 APRIL
Daytime activities to include:
Swap the Band (Play on stage with Marillion!)
If you are interested in taking part in ‘Swap the Band’, please send a tape of yourself playing (or playing along to) any Marillion song to: Swap The Band, PO Box 252, Aylesbury, BUCKS, HP18 0YS, UK. Please be sure to include your full name, postal address, email address (if applicable), and daytime phone number; we will disqualify anyone who does not include this complete information. We will be choosing winners in the following categories: Singer, Guitarist, Bass Guitarist, Keyboards, Drummer. Don’t worry – winners will be notified at least 2 weeks in advance, and given a selection of 5 songs to choose from and practice!
Quiz / Raffle / Band Signing session
Don’t forget to bring your tape recorders or MiniDisc recorders for personalised answerphone messages!
Evening entertainment to include:
The Wishing Tree
Francis Dunnery
White Buffalo
Cry No More
Marillion
After-show Party!
SUNDAY 7 APRIL
Marillion Lottery Live!
Marillion Lunchtime Acoustic Show
ADDITIONAL EVENTS
The ‘Marillion Museum’ on-site will feature Marillion memorabilia, including instruments, lyric sheets, posters, vintage T-shirts, and even the Strange Engine itself!
A special Marillion television channel will be broadcasting throughout the resort, showing live concerts, interviews, live on-the-spot interviews, music videos, and more.
The Racket Records merchandise shop will be unveiling several new releases, including the new ‘Anorak in the UK’ live album, as well as a number of new T-shirts and other goodies!”
By all accounts it was an awesome weekend and fans travelled from all over the world to attend. The venue itself was apparently a bit of a dive, though. Here is a great archive of photos from that first Convention weekend worth checking out – http://www.studiomlive.com/artists/marillion2002/. There is also a great first-hand account from this introductory event by Bart Jan van der Vorst and Derk van Mourik that you can read all about here – https://www.dprp.net/concrev/mar14.htm
In July of 2002 the band announced they would be doing a second convention, this time at Butlins Minehead from March 14-17 2003, seeing as work on their new album was moving at the pace of a dead snail stuck in molasses. The previous weekend was managed through the venue itself but this time they decided to take it all upon themselves to organize and run. The band did a couple festival shows in the summer of 2002 and then a seven date Web Christmas tour which I believe may have been the first actual tour by the band not to feature a single song from the Fish era. At this point details for their second weekend were pretty much hammered out. This was also the time that Jon Collins released his well-received biography on the band titled Separated Out.
On December 17 2002 the band rolled out their proposed plan for their new album.
“WE INTEND TO TAKE THE ESTABLISHED IDEA OF “FAN POWER” AND BLOW IT THROUGH THE SKY!
Now some of you out there may be interested enough in Marillion to have subscribed to our mailing list, but get a little bit irked when we try and sell you something. If this is you, we still appreciate that you want to hear our news but you probably won’t be interested in reading much further…..
This email is intended for the believers. For the people all over the world who don’t doubt our honesty, our aims, or our reason for making music and words. We know that we’re addressing most of you because you have already proved this to us again and again. Thank you.
When we asked you two years ago to take a leap of faith and BUY an album we hadn’t even written, 13,000 of you stepped forward, placed your trust in us, and helped launch an idea that is still being talked about in music industry circles and in the press over two years later, and YOU made this possible.
We are currently in the studio writing and recording our new album (with Dave Meegan in the producer’s chair). We think it’s our most important album ever and we’ve decided the time has come to make a big noise about it.
Once again we need a new strategy and we intend to break all the rules and do something revolutionary. We can’t do this without you, our fans. We have an idea of what we want to do and we need your feedback because your views are very important to us AND you might have an even better idea!
As you know, with Anoraknophobia we were signed worldwide to EMI Records. We were very happy with EMI’s distribution. We were disappointed, however, with EMI’s marketing and promotional strategy. In some countries around the world, very little money was spent and so therefore we had no chance of selling records outside of our existing fan base, and sometimes we didn’t manage to reach some of those fans either! We have decided we must address this problem before a point in the future where Marillion’s very existence comes under threat. As the old saying goes: “If you want a job doing properly DO IT YOURSELF!”
The solution is to “push” (ie promote and market) this band ourselves. To do this takes a lot of money and a lot of promotion. We have the capability to do the promotion but we unfortunately don’t have the money…yet.
THE PLAN
What we are planning to do is to sell the new album through the INTERNET ONLY for the first few months (with the intention of securing a distribution deal to have it out in the shops 6 months after the initial release).
We would like to take out adverts in magazines that we know our fans read, advertising on radio stations that we know our fans listen to, reaching all the people who don’t necessarily visit our website or receive our Eweb and to potentially reach NEW fans too! Radio advertising is a very important medium for us as we are sure you will agree – if people can hear our music then they generally love it. As radio stations will not play Marillion songs (politics and playlist restrictions – DJ’s have told us they’re not ALLOWED to play our new music!), then this seems an obvious route for us.
The other obvious route is to spend more time ON TOUR and to play new countries as well as the places we’ve been forced to ignore for a while.
A worldwide marketing campaign of the size and structure that we envisage would take about £350,000 and the recording of the album, an additional £150,000. That’s half-a-million quid! D’you reckon you’re up to it? We think so…
A rough outline of the plan (and we have to say that we are still throwing ideas around and are NOT taking ANY orders yet) is:
We take orders for the next album at some point next year – probably 3 to 6 months before it’s INTERNET release.
IDEA 1
A choice of 2 versions of the new album:
(a) You can buy the 1CD album from us at the proposed price of £14.99
OR
(b) You can buy a 2CD (the “Campaign” CD) for £30. This CD would have the ‘normal’ album plus a 2nd CD of additional new songs, plus some other material, such as extended versions of the album material, remixes, etc. all in special packing with a special booklet.
We also propose to have other “Campaign” merchandise available to buy. This would obviously raise a LOT of money towards our goal These could maybe take the form of dedicated gold discs, soundcheck passes, limited edition signed prints, possibly a chance to have dinner with the band! ..and any ideas YOU might suggest. (!..)
We can honestly say that ALL the profits from both versions of the album and all the campaign merchandise, will go towards the making of the album and a full worldwide marketing campaign.
If you pre-order either the standard 1CD or the 2CD by a certain date (to be decided) then your name will be printed in the thank you list in the booklet of the 2CD.
IDEA 2
We only release a standard single CD but have a “Promotional Fund”, where people send in whatever they feel that they can afford.
We prefer Idea 1, simply because it gives you more for your money and enables us to predict with more accuracy how much money we will have to use as a marketing budget, in order to plan ahead. The downside is that the plan could be seen to favour the richer fans, something that Marillion is uncomfortable with, but may well be an inevitable part of trying to raise money.
All the money we make will be spent on making the album and mounting an intelligent worldwide marketing campaign. This campaign includes touring. The campaign will be managed and overseen by Lucy Jordache who has a wealth of previous experience in marketing and advertising. We will keep a dedicated page on the website, updated to tell you where we are spending the money – we’ll account for EVERY penny we get. Your money can and will make a difference and allow us to reach more people, TOUR more countries and help invest in the future of Marillion.
Just to give you an idea that we mean business, we are ACTIVELY looking at including the following countries on our tour to support this album: England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Holland, Spain, Portugal, Germany, France, Belgium, Italy, Switzerland, Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Norway, Sweden, Russia, Finland, Denmark, USA, Canada, Mexico AND South America.
Our question is, WHAT DO YOU THINK? Would you take part in this? What is your opinion of this idea? Do you have better ideas?
PLEASE EMAIL US at newalbum@marillion.com with all your comments. We expect thousands of emails so we may not be able to reply to each and every one, but be sure we’ll read them ALL and carefully consider your opinions and ideas. We will unfortunately not be able to answer any questions about WHEN we will go ahead with ANY ideas, because nothing is available to pre-order yet! We promise to keep you updated with the plans, but we’re just sharing our ideas with you at this time. We also ask that you please respond in English – we will not be able to translate your emails.
We look forward to hearing your thoughts and ideas. Once we have read and digested all your emails we will publish a response on the web site letting you know what we intend to do. We will also try to address the negative views as well as the positive so that, even if you don’t agree with us, you will at least understand our conclusions regarding the way forward for Marillion.
Phew! What a mouthful! Thank you for reading all this. We await your thoughts..”
…and you thought MY posts were long…
So, with that in mind the band continued working on the new album, began planning for the second Convention Weekend, and practicing material for two and half days of fun. This second weekend featured Gazpacho and White Buffalo on the Friday night prior to the Afraid Of Sunlight album being performed in full. It was followed by 5 songs from the album still in progress. Faith (which would end up on the follow up album Somewhere Else), Angelina, Neverland, Don’t Hurt Yourself and Ocean Cloud (then titled Pacific Rower) all saw their live debuts that night. Saturday night support featured Aziz, Martin Grech and John Otway followed by Marillion performing a top 10 set. This was fan voted based on songs the band had performed live since 1989 as well as any studio album track from that point as well. In the end the setlist ended up being:
1. A Few Words For The Dead
2. Dry Land
3. When I Meet God
4. White Russian
5. Estonia
6. This Town/The Rakes Progress/100 Nights
7. Sugar Mice
8. Berlin
9. Warm Wet Circles/That Time Of The Night
10. Script For A Jester’s Tear
11. E1: This Strange Engine
12. E2: Cover My Eyes
13. E3: The Space…
The Sunday events included Swap The Band due to overwhelming demand and they also did something called Marillion Jambalaya which saw random groups of fans selected to perform with the band on a few covers, followed by a second outing for the new songs Angelina and Neverland. I had a fucking great time at this weekend which was a blast….actually that’s a lie I have no idea…I didn’t go…remember…Canada…far…expensive…plus my first daughter had just been born and I had yet to enter the “testing out the strength of my marriage by going to see Marillion concerts for days on end” phase. Not yet anyway. But by all accounts, everyone had a smashing time Baby…YEAH! But those would be the last live shows the band would do until the Marbles Tour begin in April of 2004.
On July 28 2003 the band announced on their website, the title and official plan for their new album:
“THE NEW ALBUM CAMPAIGN
After much deliberation, we have finally decided on a name for the new Marillion album – it’s going to be called Marbles. This album will also be a Marillion first – it is a double album! Yes, that’s right, a full 2CD’s of new music.
Since we first announced our initial ideas about releasing the album over 8 months ago, we have been flooded with emails full of your comments and suggestions. With help from your feedback, we have now formulated the final plan! As before, sit down with a cup of coffee, as there is a lot to read!
What is the campaign about?
Shortly, we will be putting the new album on sale for pre-order from our website. For every copy of Marbles that is pre-ordered, profits from that sale will go into our Campaign Fund. Using this money, we will take out adverts in magazines that we know our fans read, advertise on radio stations that we know our fans listen to – in short, try to reach all the people who don’t necessarily visit our website or receive our eWeb, and potentially reach NEW fans too!
Radio advertising is a very important medium for us, as we are sure you will agree – if people can hear our music then they generally love it. As radio stations will not play Marillion songs (politics and playlist restrictions – DJ’s have told us they’re not ALLOWED to play our new music!), then this seems an obvious route for us. The Campaign Fund will allow us to take control of our marketing and destiny.
When will the album be finished?
MARBLES is now on sale for pre-order only through Racket Records at this website.
The Marbles Deluxe Campaign Edition (a 128-page hard-bound book!) will be on sale through Racket Records at the special pre-order price of 27.99 UK Pounds (inc VAT). If you purchased the Deluxe Campaign Edition by the end of 31st December 2003 you will be directly helping our Campaign Fund, and as a “Thank You” will we print your name in the album credits**, AND ship the album to you at least a month before the currently planned release date of 3rd May 2004*. Remember, this is a double album – 2 full CDs of new Marillion music!
As of 1st January 2004 onwards you will still be able to buy the double album, but your name will not be in the credits and it will not be shipped to you until the release date; but it will still be the Deluxe Campaign Edition special hard-bound book.
For those of you who want all the music but don’t want to pre-order and take part in the Marbles Campaign, we plan to release the full double album in a standard CD box (price to be decided) from the planned release date of 3rd May 2004*, available from Racket Records.
The current planned release date for Marbles is 3rd May 2004*. From this date, there will be a 1 CD version of the album for sale in retail shops around the world (the full 2 CD double album will NOT be available in retail shops, only from Racket Records). When this 1 CD version has gone on sale in the shops, we will also consider selling it via our website.
A major world tour will begin at the end of April 2004, and confirmed dates are available in the TOUR section of this website.
We will also be selling special Marbles Campaign Merchandise, which will also help raise money towards the Campaign Fund. You will also have a chance to enter a special prize draw to win chances to get backstage passes for the next tour and chances to attend listening parties around the world.
As for Marbles, we don’t have a full track listing yet, but you will be able to find sound clips and album updates on the Marbles Album Page and Studio Journal. But one thing is for sure: it WILL be 2 full CDs of new music – it is a double album without a doubt!
Marbles is still taking shape, but the few outside the band who’ve heard it are buzzing. Thanks again to all of you for your faith and continued support.
H, Mark, Ian, Steve, and Pete”
Finally, four days shy of three years after the release of Anoraknophobia, Marbles was officially released on April 7 2004. It was mixed by Dave Meegan who also recorded the album, plus mixing assistance from Mike Hunter and one song by Steve Wilson. As noted, it was a double album for the 14000 pre-orders and via Racket Records, but a single album in regular retail stores (which still existed at the time). A promotional push led by the band and fed by the fans gave the band their first top 10 UK chart success since Incommunicado when lead single Your Gone managed to reach #7. The second single Don’t Hurt Yourself reached #16. The age of fan power had officially arrived, 18 years before K-Pop and TicTok fans found a way to fuck with the fabric of modern society via social media…cheeky little fuckers…they’re gonna rule the planet soon so be nice…they’re the ones who will be picking out your retirement homes.
I’m going to go through the double disc version of the album as I personally consider the single disc a neutered abomination of something that deserves to lose none of the content. It is almost like what I attempted to suggest for my pretend Radiation.com album…except this one actually exists. If you’ve never heard the two-disc version of Marbles then I guess you don’t know what you are missing…but from the vantage point of a 2 disc junkie…the single album can only disappoint by omission.
Marbles is bookended by two songs which many fans consider to be of the very best the band has ever recorded. And there are two others contained within that many also rank in their top 20. The first of the two is The Invisible Man which starts out the album on a particularly earie note with scraping guitar strings, muted bass, and distant clapping before h mumbles the first line “the world’s gone mad and I’ve lost touch” which for the first…maybe 10 years I thought was “The world’s gun whipped, and I’ve lost touch”. The Invisible Man is one of 4 or 5 songs that I have no problem declaring at any point as my favourite, along with as previously noted, Afraid Of Sunlight, This Strange Engine, and The Great Escape. The lyrics and the music are perfectly in sync…probably more so than any other song by the band before or since. There is a universally disturbing sense to this song that feels both like something many have felt…the feeling of total isolation and separation from the world that most feel as they get older…but at the same time it is like a window into one someone’s worst emotional low. It feels like a brutally harrowing journey into grief and loss of self and family…like the pits of sadness put to music. Except the music is an astounding work of art. If you took the desperation of Prayers For Rain by The Cure and mixed it with the high of Tower Of Strength by The Mission you would find yourself in Invisible Man territory. It is an incredibly moving, almost unbearably emotional piece of music that twists and turns and raises and lowers in intensity over the course of almost 14 minutes. Every note that makes up the music are as important as the space left between them on this song. I often will tell people to listen to this song if they have never heard the band. If they can connect with this one, I feel like there might be hope. If not, I tend not to bother trying any further. Here is a link if you’ve never heard it – https://youtu.be/YeG5c5y8IpY. If you don’t like it… come back in a week – I’ll be posting about Kim Mitchell and The Monkees. If you are a Marillion fan and don’t like it…I don’t think we can be friends.
Marbles is not so much a concept album as it is one with themes running through it, much like other great Marillion albums such as Afraid Of Sunlight and Clutching At Straws. This one deals loosely with the idea of age and madness. Madness from the world and from life, with the idea of marbles themselves referring both to youth, as well as the idea of losing one’s marbles, as an individual, or a more broadly in the scope of the world. There are four songs on the album titled Marbles I-IV that loosely bind the album together. Each one is about 2 minutes or under and are similar in style and effect but unique enough to stand on their own each with their own vibe. Marbles I is a well needed palate cleanser after the emotional behemoth of the opening song. The lyrics allude to both youth and age and touring:
“Did anyone see my last marble
As it rolled out and over the floor?
It fell through a hole in the corner
Of a room in a town on a tour
It’s lonely without your last marble
I miss it not rattling around
As I lie in my bed there’s a space in my head
Where there used to be colours and sound.”
Marbles I cross fades into the song Genie which didn’t make the single CD release. It has slowly become a fan favourite over the years which once in a while the band airs with glorious results. It is a gentle, beautiful melody with a lyric full of yearning and sadness and desire and self-doubt. It is probably the closest song on the album in relation to something similar in feel to the Anoraknophobia album, drawing from similar musical well as This Is The 21st Century and When I Meet God, though more succinct. It is a great five-minute build up to the first of the embedded stellar tracks.
Originally the germ of the song Fantastic Place was something Dave Meegan pushed the band to continue working on despite none of them feeling it worth pursuing, and lucky for us he did. It is an absolutely beautiful piece of music that deals with escape, pure and simple. For me it is a perfectly constructed song that starts very quiet (and mumbly) and builds gradually and gently over six minutes into an absolute epic. When performed live you can hear a pin drop at the beginning and by the end what you got is a room full of weepy eyed men and women. There is something universally sad and hopeful about the song at the same time. Plus, you know…Rothers just can’t fucking help laying down golden flourishes of greatness that just tug at the heartstrings. It is one of Marillon’s most beautiful songs, hands down. So subtle and so grand in scope. In some ways it reminds me of The Great Escape from Brave in how effectively it builds in intensity over such a short song (for them…for my kids a 6 minute song is like a 20 minute song for me).
Next up is the second song that didn’t make the single disc, The Only Unforgivable Thing which again touches on the idea of infidelity but also inspired by the second Gulf War. It is another very slow-paced, but gorgeous song that floats by on the gentle rhythm and delicate guitar motifs. It never says specifically what “The only unforgivable thing” is by name but it is pretty easy to tell draw conclusions. That being said the fact that it doesn’t actually define the act, be it personal or broader in scope, allows the song to take on a bit more of a universal tone. It has a wonderful bridge which serves the song well, and helps elevate it beyond its basic structure.
The song cross-fades effortlessly into Marbles II, which is a truly gorgeous piece of music based around the piano but utilizing Hogarth’s falsetto to amazing, yet subtle, effect. It evokes a yearning sense of reflection of childhood memories.
“When I was a child I had marbles
They brought admiration and fame
They were pretty to look at and marbles
Was always my favourite game
We played all the summer days
In the stony alleyways
In the playground after class
We would trade the coloured glass
More valuable than diamonds
More magical than diamonds
Did anyone see.
Did anyone see.
Does anyone see?”
Then comes Ocean Cloud which runs an astonishing 18 minutes in length, the longest song in the band’s catalog to this point and to date second only to The Leavers from 2016’s FEAR. Originally titled Pacific Rower, Ocean Cloud was initially inspired by a news story h heard years before about Tony Bullimore who was rescued by the Australian navy four days after his boat capsized during a race around the world. Years later thinking about the story, Hogarth began searching around the internet and discovered the story of a guy named Don Allum who is the only person to ever have rowed across the Atlantic Ocean in both directions…yet is almost unknown. On his return trip from Newfoundland back to the UK he ended up hit by two storms which almost destroyed his boat. He ended up losing all of his supplies, surviving for two weeks on sea water and fish blood. It is a song that speaks to the ultimate struggle for survival, as well as a certain dissociation from the world, similar to The Invisible Man. Marillion have written a lot of very long songs over the course of their career. I would argue that as far as a singular, linear story, Ocean Cloud is their greatest achievement as it marries the lyrics and music better than any of their other long songs. I’m not saying it is their best long song, though it very likely is for many…but as far as the merging of music and lyric into one singular idea and thread, I don’t think any other song by them comes close. It is an incredibly powerful piece of music and it manages to repeat the key chorus of the song in several places. It doesn’t abandon it which is something that some of their longer songs can tend to do to varying degrees of success (to some). This one stays on target despite multiple, vastly different, sections of music, and feels like a fully realized journey. It is an astounding song in scope, scale, style and execution. If you want to read about this guy, his diaries are posted in all their detail on The Ocean Rower Society’s website at http://www.oceanrowing.com/logs/don_allum.htm.
Disc 2 starts with Marbles III which is the most different sounding of the four mini pieces. If anyone as a kid ever whacked rocks or marbles into the air with a tennis racket…you’ll know exactly the memories referred to in the lyrics…but you know…just like bullets…what goes up…must come down.
“There were almost four hundred until the black day
I discovered how high they would fly to the sky
If you used them for tennis instead of a ball.
Zinging glass satellites crueller than fate
Whacked with a racket up into the blue
I’d smashed all the greenhouses on the estate
And a crowd formed a queue at the gate.”
The Damage follows Marbles III and is the shortest song on the album, mini marbles aside. It is also the most straightforward song on the record. By its very nature, and by comparison to everything prior, it feels almost plain, but it is a great little English Settlement XTC inspired rocker that breaks up the intensity of the album nicely. It is like a better executed version of some of the upbeat songs from Radiation and Dot Com that fall short for me. Some people absolutely hate this song…as in they feel it is one of the worst songs they have ever recorded. I mean I can understand to some degree but honestly it doesn’t actually bother me the way songs like Rich and Deserve do. Lyrically it is the counterpoint to the song Genie, hence the shared lyrics. I actually think it is songs like this that bring balance to the force on this record. It needs variation in song length and style and this song is an important part of that equation, as is the follow up song Don’t Hurt Yourself. As mentioned, this was the second single from the album, and it didn’t do too badly in the charts. It’s a song which touches on h’s struggle with his personal life at the time, within the context of the insignificance of the time we have to live. It relates to not taking our time on Earth for granted. Overall it is a decent nice song, which showed the band’s ability to still write a catchy alternative pop song. Again, it adds some dimension and counterbalance to the longer, heavier songs.
You’re Gone was the first single from the album and as noted was the band’s first top 10 chart success in 17 years. I recall people criticizing this song when the album was released saying it was derivative of electronic music that had been done for many years by other bands and yadda yadda yadda. I could give a shit what anyone has to say about that kind of pedantic crap. The question is, ultimately, is it a good song? That’s the only thing that ever matters. And the answer is yes…You’re Gone is a fucking great song. I loved it when I first heard it and my love for it has only grown over the years to the point that I consider it one of the best singles the band has ever released. It is pretty simple, dealing with loss more than anything, in a very melancholy way, but also celebration when it hits the chorus and just soars. Don’t be sad it is over, be glad it happened at all is probably the best description. At six minutes it feels effortless and drifts by on the bed of a great groove by Mosley and Trewavas.
Angelina is the second longest song on the second disc and starts out with some radio talking that always ALWAYS makes me think of the beginning of Wish You Were Here by The Pink Floyd before tuning into what seems like a song already in progress. It is a clever little twist on an idea used many times in Prog. The song is actually about a DJ so it actually doesn’t feel contrived as much in that manner. This song is definitely the most different sounding on the album, but it doesn’t sound out of place at all. Musically it is the other song on the record that sounds like it could have been derived from the same sessions that produced When I Meet God and an This Is The 21st Century from ANP but with a bit of House from Radiation thrown in. It is a very chilled out, bluesy tune that I always find myself enjoying much more than what I think I think of it.
Like its counterpart The Damage, Drilling Holes also seems to divide fans. This time the song mines a more tension filled, jittery Beatles inspired Drums and Wires era XTC vibe. I personally love all the pieces of this song though it ultimately comes off as perhaps the flattest song on the album production wise. I honestly think it desperately needs a better mix as it sounds more like an exercise in mixing than a proper album mix. The inspirations for the song are clear but the song has too much going on for a simple song, and the effect is actually a bit of a wash in headphones. It works much better the more lo-fi the speakers. For many it works best with no speakers. It is the weakest song on the album for me though I appreciate the idea…just not the execution.
The final of the four mini marbles follows, which is a more chilled out extension of Marbles I. This time part IV precedes the final track whereas the first part followed the opening track.
“That was almost the end of my marbles
Confiscated, I choked back the tears
I hung onto a handful of favourites
That disappeared over the years
Did anyone see my last marble
I swear that I had it before
Sometimes I think I should go see a shrink
In case he can find me some more
Did anyone see my last marble?
I’d saved it to give it away
Since I was a youth
Now I don’t have no proof
Only words
Only words
Only words.”
Marbles IV powers down directly into the opening piano chords of the final song on the album which is Neverland, which effectively serves to bookend the album with two of the finest songs they have ever recorded. It is the other song on this album I can easily slot into my top five, and is actually quite a simple song in structure, but immensely powerful in execution. It is one of their greatest achievements in controlled tension and gradual build. Rothery’s guitar flourishes slice through sections like lightning strikes but at the same time there are gentle breakdowns of acoustic guitar and piano that help set up what is arguably the best ending to a song and by extension album, they have ever recorded. The first half of the song deals with unconditional love while the second half is about the idea of escape through the lens of Peter Pan. As a vocalist and lyricist, I must say the ending of Neverland is one of single most incredible things I’ve ever heard. Apart from the music that manages to wring out every single possible ounce of desperate emotion from every single note played, the vocals Hogarth sings are simply mind-blowing. Not just a little mind-blowing but full on blow your fucking mind they are so incredible. What he does vocally is one of my favourite moments in music…any band…any song. With lyrics derived from the story of Peter Pan (and hence the song title), Hogarth stutters and morphs words and lines of text into a tapestry of sounds that actually sounds like it is the product of various recording effects like delays and echoes…words expanding and contracting as they are sung…except every single sound is sung without any effects at all. It is a breathtaking six minutes that I can’t really think of any equal in music I’ve ever heard. It may very well be the best six minutes they have ever recorded. I will never EVER get tired of this song. I’ve seen it performed live many times and it never ceases to literally manage to suck all the air out of the room. You need a moment to collect yourself and relearn how to breathe when it is over. Hands down Neverland live is one of my peak live music experiences … every time…and without fail. Even on record the song ends with almost 90 seconds of gentle wind chimes as if there needs to be a break between this song and anything else that one might listen to next. It isn’t just wasted space…it is giving time to recover from one of the most emotionally intense songs I’ve ever heard.
In the end the single disc version of the album was as follows: The Invisible Man, Marbles I, You’re Gone, Angelina, Marbles II, Don’t Hurt Yourself, Fantastic Place, Marbles III, Drilling Holes, Marbles IV, Neverland. Omitted from this version were the songs Genie, The Only Unforgivable Thing, Ocean Cloud, and The Damage.
Prior to its release h described the album as “a little like “Brave” in as much as it’s a “trip” as well as a collection of songs…Musically and lyrically this double-CD possesses a depth and intensity to rival “Brave”. My only worry is that, overall, it might be TOO intense. It’s emotionally pretty-damned heavy, and I know that a lot of people have enough weight in their lives already, and look to music to be uplifted. Having said that, the individual songs are full of good tunes and stand up well in isolation, and “Drilling Holes” and “The Damage” provide light relief (in a disturbed sort of way..). If you’re willing to give this one time to get as deep beneath your skin as the lyrics came from under mine, then I imagine this one’ll rattle you in a very good way.” Considering that many fans rank this album in the top 5 releases by the band, some as high as number 1, it is pretty clear that the time spent letting it sink in has allowed it to earn its place in the upper echelon of the band’s output. It ended up being both a commercial success and a monumental creative work by a band at their peak…well at least one of their peaks…they’ve had quite a few…You may not love all of it but there is no arguing that the album contains some of the finest music the band has ever recorded before or since.
Recommended Listening: The Invisible Man, Genie, The Only Unforgivable Thing, Fantastic Place, Ocean Cloud, You’re Gone, Angelina, Neverland
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