But what of the band? Well this is the Marillion story and I suppose I should have spoken about them first. I suck at this! Anyhoo, Marillion got their name from the book by JRR Tolkien which is supposed to precede both "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings", and lays out the mythology used in both. It was called "The Silmarillion", under which name they played for two years, having formed in 1979 and changed the name to Marillion in 1981 to avoid any potential copyright infringements. Interestingly, the face and driving force of the band, vocalist lyricist and frontman Fish was not part of the original band, only joining in 1981. The original members were Steve Rothery on guitars, Mick Pointer on drums with Doug Irvine on bass and Brian Jelliman on keyboards. Irvine left the band in early '81 and was replaced by Diz Minnit, as well as a charismatic Scot called Derek Dick.
At the end of the year original keyboardist Jelliman had been replaced by Mark Kelly, and a year later Minnit departed to be replaced by Pete Trewavas. This, then, would be the Marillion lineup who would go on to record their debut, ground-breaking album and place progressive rock --- or "neo-progressive rock", as it would come to be called --- firmly back on the map if not back in the charts.
Script for a jester's tear (1983) produced by Nick Tauber on the EMI label
Everything about this album speaks of progressive rock at its finest, and still stands today as in my opinion not only one of Marillion's best albums, but one of the best debut albums I've heard. My first encounter with it was when a guy in work bought it, and I realised "Holy
fuck! It's out!" I drooled over the lavish gatefold sleeve with that almost oil-painting texture, the calligraphic lettering, the song titles, the lyrics printed on the inner sleeve --- ah, the good old days, when vinyl was such a tactile experience! Of course, the drawback between that and today's digital format meant that Jim, the guy who had bought the album and brought it in for me to see, could not play any of it, as we rather inexplicably (!) didn't have a turntable in the office! Today, you could rip it in the CD drive and play it on the computer, but I think the wait heightened both the anticipation and the final payoff for me.
Needless to say, once I got a chance I was into town to buy the album, brought it home, drooled a little more over its sleeve (yeah, sounds disgusting: you know what I mean!) and then plopped it on the turntable, lay back on my bed and waited for my world to change. And it did.
The thing about "Script" is that it is a very dark album. Very dark. And after a single like "Market square heroes" to launch it I was a little confused by the doomy, forlorn tone of the album, the title notwithstanding. Even the cover is dark, literally: if you look at it there's not a whole lot of lighting, the idea being of course that the Jester, who would become Marillion's sigil and symbol for the next four years, is living in a dark, dank bedsit where the sun does not often shine. It's a feeling of oppression, claustrophobia even, the idea that the air is thick and hot and it's hard to breathe, and yet there is a note of hope of sorts, as there he is, playing his violin (on the fiddle?)
and writing his mournful love songs.
So, track by track then:
Script for a jester's tear (8:44) --- The track that titles the album also starts it off, and it's a dour, inward-looking take on a love affair gone wrong, or possibly one that never began. A man is rebuking himself for not having had, perhaps, the courage to have declared his feelings: "Too late to say I love you, too late to restage the play" as he watches his lover get married. It's a slow opening with stark piano and flute, and Fish's voice comes almost as if out of a deep well or from a far distance before it takes hold of you, his sorrow and self-pity at once squeezing your heart and making you feel a little unsympathetic towards him. The song quickly ramps up on the back of heavy punching drumwork from Mick Pointer and keening, screeching guitar from Steve Rothery, as Fish repeats the opening verse with more passion and anger.
It slows down then on an introspective flute and soft bass as Fish recounts the sort of person he is, or has seen himself become: "I act the role in classic style of a martyr carved with twisted smile, to bleed the lyric for this song, to write the rites to right my wrongs: an epitaph to a broken dream". The three different meanings of the word "right" used in that line would become typical of the sort of wordsmith Fish was, using often normal phrases and occurrences to denote deep, psychological or mythological concepts, or indeed, doing the very reverse, in what I consider to be some of the very best songwriting in progressive rock in the last twenty years. When he screams "Promised wedding now a wake!" and it echoes off into the distance alongside Rothery's rising guitar he's taking the persona of a man pushed to his limits, ready to break.
But he'll do nothing as he sighs "I'll hold my peace forever when you wear your bridal gown", resigned to seeing his lover married off in front of his eyes, wanting to say something, wanting to scream that he loves her, has always loved her, but knowing that it is now too late. His last lines "But the game is over" almost jar with his final, almost desperate and presumably unsaid plea to the new bride: "Can you still say you love me?"
He knows you know (5:23) --- A much more uptempo if not upbeat song, this concerns the effect of drugs and deals with insanity, as Fish describes in graphic detail the hallucinations of a "bad trip". "Fast feed, crystal fever swarming through a fractured mind; chilling needles freeze emotion: the blind shall lead the blind." Rothery's guitar kicks and bites its way through this, showing he can rock out when he wants to, and Fish has changed --- if you want to link the two songs, something I don't think is intended but could be --- from a sad, dejected, defeated figure to a wild, crazy, borderline insane creature trying to survive in a world of drugs and seizures, and trying vainly to understand the world around him. Whereas Fish was sullen angry in "Script", he's crazy angry here.
The song builds to an almost dangerous climax and then stops abruptly. The sound of a phone ringing is interrupted as it's answered and a woman's voice says hello, with Fish snarling "Don't give me your problems!" (tying in with the lyric throughout the song "He knows you know but he's got problems!") and slamming down the phone. Indeed, the absence of a comma after "knows" in the title gives it a double meaning: is it read "he knows, you know" as in he's aware of this, you know, or should it be taken to mean "he knows you know", to say, he's aware that you know? I don't know, you know...
The Web (8:52) --- Another big epic song, this shifts the focus onto a woman, who is trying to recover from a bad or abusive relationship and has retreated to the safety of her apartment, fearing to face society. "I'm the cyclops in the tenement", sings Fish, "I'm the soul without a cause. Crying midst my rubber plants, ignoring beckoning walls." After a frenetic start and an angry vocal, the song settles down into quite a 70s Genesis vibe with more flute and soft guitar, before kicking up again and then slowing down into the second part, featuring some whispered vocals from Fish. This is the first time the jester is mentioned in the lyrics --- despite the title track there is no direct reference to any jester, or indeed a script --- but here Fish snarls "I only laughed away your tears but even jesters cry!" Soon enough though the character in the song faces the fact that she must make a break with the past and face the world again. "I realise I hold the key to freedom, I cannot let my life be ruled by threads. The time has come to make decisions."
The end part of the song almost mirrors the keyboard arpeggios from "Market square heroes", so much so that in live performances this ending part of "The Web" would often run into the single, causing much delight among the fans. The dour, dark tone of the song changes as the character stands up for herself, shakes off the past and steps into the light. It's one of the few times there's any good feeling on the album, in all honesty.
Garden party (7:19) --- If there's a more cutting song written against entitlement and the upper classes I've yet to hear it. Again uptempo but with a false kind of merriment, it's almost the idea of someone not invited to an event scaling a wall and looking over at all the people they can't join, and hating them for it. But "Garden party" is not about envy; Fish does not want to be like these people. In fact, he despises their sycophantism. It's a searing indictment of the sort of people who have to be with the in-crowd, who think a royal title or being Lord or Lady this or that, or having Sir before your name makes you a better person, above everyone else, looking down on the "ordinaries".
Through the lyric Fish pours scorn on the "toffs" as "Social climbers polish ladders, wayward sons again have fathers," and makes no bones of his disgust at the plasticity and insincerity of such people. Surprisingly, this was released as a single from the album, and got into the top twenty! The line "I'm rucking, I'm
fucking" had of course to be changed for the single release, with the offending word rather cleverly and sarcastically changed to "miming".
Chelsea Monday (8:17) --- If you consider "Garden party" as a "happy" song (it's not really, but tempowise, ok) then everything slams right back down to earth with the penultimate track. Lead in on the call of a newspaper vendor then Pete Trewavas's hypnotic bassline, it's the tragic story of a young girl who is studying to be an actress, or wants to be one, but ends up dying in a housefire. I'm not sure whether she commits suicide or if it's an accident, but the song is accompanied both by pathetic images --- "She's playing the actress in bedroom scenes, learning her lines from glossy magazines; stringing all the pearls from her childhood dreams, auditioning for the leading role on the silver screen" --- and sad, mounrful music, typified by violin-like synth and rumbling guitar. Echoey drums from Pointer add to the lonely, hopeless, tragic atmosphere and well let's just say it's not a song to play when you need cheering up.
Forgotten sons (8:23) --- One of the most powerful anti-war songs even today, this targets specifically the "Troubles" in Northern Ireland, and though thankfully they are mostly just part of history now, the sentiments expressed here could really be transplanted to Iraq, Afghanistan, Grenada or a hundred other countries where an unwanted occupying force struggles against what it sees as terrorists or insurgents. "Forgotten sons" is propelled at a fine clip by the frothy keyboard of Kelly, again similar to "Market square heroes" but with a darker tone. The song is told through the eyes of British servicemen posted to Northern Ireland, and references back the power that sent them there in Fish's gloriously macabre rewriting of The Lord's Prayer: "Minister, minister, care for your children! Order them not into damnation to eliminate those who would trespass against you. For whose is the kingdom, the power, the glory, for ever and ever, amen."
The music then stops, and on nothing more than a single, repeated bassnote, presumably meant to represent a heartbeat a soldier cries "Halt! Who goes there!" while a hissing reply comes "Death!" The soldier returns "Approach... friend." There's a big guitar and keyboard ending then as Fish bemoans the plight of those who have only enlisted to have a job --- "From the dole queue to the regiment --- a profession in a flash! But remember Monday signings when from door to door you dash." Stirring stuff, and a powerful and dark ending to a very powerful and profoundly dark album.
I found, indeed find it odd that given that "Market square heroes" was the lead-in single, it's not on the album, nor indeed are either of the two tracks that backed it. From a value for money point of view, "Script" possibly does not provide the best, having only six tracks in total, but then again four of those are over eight minutes, so that can't be bad. The album was re-released in 1997 as a two-disc special edition which included all three songs (though the versions of "Market square heroes" and "Grendel" were different to the ones on the single) and some demos of other tracks on the album. Nonetheless, as far as "Grendel" is concerned, if you wanted the original version you had to buy the twelve-inch single of "Market square heroes", which thankfully I did!