Music / Reviews
Review: Marillion, Colston Hall
Most major rock bands tend to avoid politics altogether, beyond rather vague and bland “why can’t we all just get along?” messages. That’s presumably to avoid giving offence to any section of their global audience. On the other hand, is there any more unedifying sight than an artist – we’ll name no names here – soapboxing to an adoring choir of converts?
Marillion have long been stuck with an image (“Aren’t they that Scottish heavy metal band?” runs the joke) that couldn’t be further from reality. But mostly unnoticed by the mainstream media, they’ve been challenging and provoking their audience with overt political commentary, which began with the 17-minute Gaza on their Sounds That Can’t Be Made album. Suitably emboldened by the ensuing controversy, they followed this with the extraordinary, go-for-broke Fuck Everyone and Run – one of the finest albums of 2016 – which took aim at everything from trickle-down economics and fake news to the housing crisis and the fear-driven worldview of the Daily Mail classes.
is needed now More than ever
They were rewarded with their biggest chart hit in more than 30 years. Bristol was missed out on the accompanying tour, but this long-sold-out show on the band’s latest jaunt makes amends by including two of the album’s big set-piece epics.
The gentle, pastoral ‘green and pleasant land’ Long-Shadowed Sun intro to El Dorado opens the show, accompanied by suitably bucolic images projected onto a giant screen. But the lyrical storm clouds swiftly gather as gold, war and religion corrupt this Eden, silhouetted families appearing behind barbed wire as Steve Hogarth emotes the refrain “We can’t keep letting them in”, a sliver of hope being admitted only during the coda, The Grandchildren of Apes.
The lyrics are all the more disturbing for being juxtaposed with such beautiful, melodic music. A tasteful, less-is-more player of the David Gilmour school, guitarist Steve Rothery appears lost in concentration throughout the show, only occasionally opening his eyes to acknowledge the audience.
Pete Trewavas is Marillion’s livewire – hey, he’s played in a band with Mike Portnoy, after all – and Quartz gives him a chance to shine with its driving, almost funky bass line. Underpinning it all are Mark Kelly’s understated keyboards and the precise, versatile drumming of Ian Mosley. This ain’t prog of the capes’n’dry ice variety (not that there’s anything wrong with that); all the musicianship here in service of the songs and there’s not a single showboating solo.
Naturally, much of the attention is on Hogarth, who inhabits the material not in any cheesily theatrical way but in a manner that truly enhances the lyrics, giving teeth to those occasional bursts of anger while skilfully undermining any potential for pomposity with self-deprecating humour. He also winds up looking absolutely drained at the end of the show.
Marillion revisit a selection of albums from the last 30 years – which as the ‘new boy’ frontman reminds us, is the length of his tenure with the band – picking out the evocative The Party from Holidays in Eden and, perhaps surprisingly, extracting three tracks from their first great concept album, Brave. He later smirkingly regrets not milking The Great Escape for its showbiz potential, this being a song about Bristol.
They return to Fuck Everyone and Run for The Leavers, which, despite its title and references to leavers and remainers, is a more personal song than the obvious commentary on Brexit. Nit-picking? Well, the title track from Afraid of Sunlight is a reminder of what an absolute career highlight that album was and makes us yearn to hear more of it. And it’s a shame they didn’t find room for the best song from the new one, The New Kings. But you can’t have everything, even in a generous two hour-plus show like this.
The two encores bring a couple of crowd-pleasing surprises. Marillion don’t usually play “the hit”, but do so tonight for their caterer, who’s one of 7,257,943 (estimate) women to have been named Kayleigh after Fish invented it to disguise the identity of the song’s subject. The bounce-along Garden Party is also revived from that era to close the show. Objectively, these songs actually sound better when Fish does them – they’re his lyrics, after all – but nobody’s complaining about a bit of jolly nostalgia to conclude such a sublime performance.
All photos by Mike Evans
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