Market square heroes (1982) produced by David Hitchcock on the EMI label
Backed with: "Three boats down from the candy"/"Grendel"
To paraphrase Babylon 5 (what?), I was there, at the dawn of the second age of progressive rock. This is one time I can say I was right in there on the ground floor. Of course I am too young (at a mere fifty years!) to have been involved in the first wave of progressive rock, but I knew of the big bands --- Genesis, Rush, ELP, Yes etc --- and most of them I liked. Except for ELP. And Yes. Sort of. But this was new. This was vibrant. I had always assumed, up to this point, that prog rock was dead, buried under the ornate tombstones of the seventies. It was music you heard on albums that bore logos like The Famous Charisma Label and Mercury. They were old classics, certainly playable and listenable but, to be frank, they just didn't make them like this anymore. The bands I had grown up listening to, mostly Genesis ELO and Supertramp, had moved on. They had changed their sounds. By the early eighties Supertramp had abandoned their progressive rock roots for more slick, commerical rock/pop and Genesis were in the process of doing the same. ELO were coming near the end. There seemed nothing left.
Then I heard this. Well, to be honest I read about it first. One of the big staples of my teenage years and early twenties, like millions of other youths into music was "Kerrang!" and through their pages I discovered what was new, what was happening and what I could buy and be reasonably sure I would like, based on the reviewer's thoughts. Of course, that didn't always happen and an album praised to high heaven by the mag would end up getting the thumbs down from a disappointed me, but more often than not they were right in what they said. So when they started enthusing about this guy called Fish, whose band Marillion were wowing 'em across London and other parts of the UK playing what was being called a modern Genesis style of music, I was intrigued.
The very, very first thing you hear on this single is a hard, rock guitar and pounding drums, then after a few seconds Mark Kelly comes in with an upbeat, almost whimsical but powerful keyboard arpeggio that more or less carries the melody, before frontman and singer Derek W. Dick, who would forever after be known as Fish, comes in with the vocal. And what a vocal. The man makes no attempt to disguise his Scottish accent and it comes across gritty and angry, accusatory and dark as he growls "I found smog at the end of my rainbow", in one phrase dismissing certain politician's views that all was well, and going on to describe the plight of the unemployed, the dispossessed and the just plain downright angry.
Not that is to say that Fish was a Springsteen or a Dylan, fighting the cause of the common man, trying to right wrongs through music. He certainly tried this in many Marillion songs and there are few if any of the "keep rockin have a good time" style, most of them being motivated by investigations into the human condition and life in general, but Marillion would never be known for overtly political or topical lyrics. However, unlike the seventies prog rock giants from whom they more or less traced their musical ancestry, neither would their songs be all about fantasy elements. There would be few dragons, princesses, castles or magic in Marillion's music, except where they were used as metaphors for more mundane elements.
But back to "Market square heroes". It's certainly a bouncy, singalong, even dancealong song, and to some extent was perhaps a false representation of the band, as I would find when I purchased their debut album. In general, Marillion did not do uptempo, upbeat songs, and they would not really come back to this style until 1987, when "Incommunicado" would be another, not very successful, single. As a debut single this did nothing. Literally. It never even scraped into the charts. But it sounded a clarion call to those of us who had grown up with, and loved, prog rock, and we eagerly awaited the release of the album.
Despite what I just said above, this, Marillion's first single, has undoubted political overtones. The "market square hero" of the title is a revolutionary, an idealist, a fighter and a militant, who sadly has the anger and the frustration inside him but no clear idea where or how to channel that. You can view him perhaps as proudly marching at the head of a throng of followers, shouting into a megaphone "What do we want?" with his acolytes responding "We don't know!" and him carrying on, unfazed, yelling "When do we want it?" to the usual chorus of "NOW!" He's also not averse to letting people get hurt, or even die in his cause, even if he doesn't really know what he's fighting for.
There are some beautifully stark lines in the lyric: "I got a golden handshake that nearly broke my arm" and "Got rust upon my hands from the padlocked factory gates, where silent chimneys provide our silent steeples." It's certainly a song of protest, protest at the raw deal the ordinary worker received in Thatcher's Britain as factory after factory closed, people were let go and the jobless queues stretched to ridiculous lengths. In fact, Fish, as the lyricist for the band, addresses this in another line: "I left the ranks of shuffling graveyard people".
But it's when we get to the midsection that the "hero"'s impotence becomes apparent: "I am your antichrist!" he thunders. "Show me allegiance!" and then moments later "The time has come to conquer and I'll provide your end!" All through the song Kelly's keyboards keep up an almost farcical upbeat melody and Mick Pointer drives the song along with false enthusiasm, false hope and false promises from the title character. It's almost like a person who says "I hate the way the world is. I want to change it but I haven't a clue, but be damned if that'll stop me!" The sentiment is there, the plan is not.
Let's be honest here: you can NOT hear Genesis in this song. This is something new. It's short. It's snappy. It's cold, dark fun in its way. And it is in fact quite commercial, should have performed better than it did. This was not typical prog rock. The comparisons they would suffer to Collins, Gabriel, Banks and Rutherford for over five years and more would come when the debut album was released, and people began marking the similarities between the two bands. But before that, the other songs on this single would do them no favours in that respect, though one would certainly go on to be a fan favourite.
"Three boats down from the candy" (and I have never worked out what that's supposed to mean) is again keyboard driven but much harder, with an insistent opening that contains hard driving guitar and hammering drums that goes on for about thirty seconds, then settles into what could in all fairness be called a very Genesis sound, quite reminiscent really of songs like "The musical box" and "White mountain", the early, Gabriel-centric Genesis of the first half of the seventies. It seems to concern the singer reminsicing about an old love affair, and has some fine keyboard arpeggios as well as the first real chance to hear Steve Rothery's introspective side on the guitar. It's a decent song but I never took that much to it. However, in the next post I'll be talking about seventeen minutes plus of pure genius...