Holidays in Eden (1991)
Moving away from the darker, serious neo-prog of their first four albums, and continuing a sort of freedom I guess they felt they hadn't had since Fish left, this album sees Marillion probing more deeply the limits of the crossover into rock/pop/rock territory they had begun to explore with
Seasons End, and in fact Steve Hogarth has described it as their poppiest album. There is certainly still some prog going on - there's even a suite of sorts at the end - but in general you can see where Marillion were now trying to reinvent themselves, not to put the Fish days behind them, but to stretch and expand musical muscles and ideas that had perhaps received short shrift from their big Scottish frontman. They probably had also realised, or decided, that the way to chart success, if this was indeed what they wanted to pursue, was through shorter, more accessible tracks and while “Kayleigh” had been a big hit, as has already been pointed out, this was more due to chance than design. Here, you definitely get the impression of songs being written in the hope that they will be hits, rather than as before, songs being written and then unexpectedly becoming hits.
But it opens proggily enough, with what as I mentioned in the review of
Clutching at Straws was to become a sometime trademark of the “new” Marillion, a slow careful build up from almost silence, something they had tried with “The king of Sunset Town” on the previous album and even “Hotel Hobbies” on
Clutching at Straws, as “Splintering heart” opens the album with a sort of tapping percussion and a hypnotic bass before Hogarth comes in with the vocal, Kelly joining in on the second minute, Mosley timing one heavy drumbeat with the lyric
”Makes my heart want to burst” following this up with a few more, well spaced, before in the third minute the whole band pile in and Rothery takes the tune for a nice leading solo. The melody then falls back on a guitar line quite reminiscent of “The Web” as Hogarth sings
”The same sun is shining/ On the old and the young/ On the saints and the sinners/ On the weak and the strong” eliciting a powerful solo from Rothery.
A big strong and passionate vocal from Hogarth then takes control of the song, underlined by Kelly's keyboard flourishes before the whole thing fades away, as gently and softly as it began, and we're into the first of the tracks that can be really termed as Marillion's venture into the world of pop/rock. While it would be 2001 before they would really go for it and release in effect their
Abacab, the nevertheless wonderful
Anoraknophobia, this album shows the path they were prepared to tread, and while “Cover my eyes (Pain and Heaven)” is a good song, it's the first time when you really step back and ask yourself, is this Marillion? Well, yes it is: the new Marillion; much less concerned, at this point, with ranting political lyrics and exploring the dark side of the psyche as they were under Fish, and more determined to, I guess, just have fun.
Originally a song written by Hogarth for his previous band, “Cover my eyes” was not surprisingly selected for single release, and whether it confused people, diehard Marillion fans did not like it and refused to buy it, or it was just too mainstream to fall into one or the other of the two camps, it fizzled out at the top end of the top thirty and did no better. In fairness, it's not a bad song, but it could have been played by anyone. There's nothing uniquely Marillion about it, which is not an accusation that can be levelled at “The Party”, riding under a doleful, almost hollow piano sound and decrying how easily innocence is corrupted under peer pressure.
”All of the people that she thought she knew/ Were never like this when she saw them in school/ She'd never been anywhere like this before/ Everybody so out of control.” It's hard to think that such naivete could exist in a girl of school-going age (I'm assuming she at least looked maybe fifteen, due to the line
”She bought a bottle of cider/ From the shop on the corner/ They didn't stop her/ Thought she was older”) but Hogarth is determined here to paint a picture of absolute innocence and chastity, and then gleefully watch as it is shattered by the roaming lothario who, vampire-like, entices the child into her first sexual experience. In concert with the girl's sudden awakening and realisation of the real world around her, the music gets more powerful and solid, culminating in a solo from Rothery as Hogarth wails, bemoaning the taking of her virginity.
Of course, at the end, she's left and cast to one side as her lover sneers
"By the way/ Welcome to your first party.” A sobering tale, if a little trite. The next one up is another pop song, a simple ballad which while pleasant and catchy is again nothing like the Marillion I had known up to now. At this point, I had allowed the band some freedom to change with
Seasons End, and while they had dabbled a little more than I would like liked with their sound, they hadn't changed the formula too much. Here, it just seems like they went for broke, as if they thought this album might be their breakthrough, as if writing catchy pop songs might somehow make them more acceptable to the masses, most of whom remembered them if at all from the one single which would forever be linked with their name.
Don't get me wrong: I love “No-one can”, but to paraphrase Mark Knopfler, it's not what
I call Marillion. It's got a nice beat, and Hogarth sings it very well, Rothery's ringing, jangly guitar line is nice though there is less synth from Kelly than I would have preferred; it's just too, what's the word? Ordinary. That's it. Ordinary. I'm not used to Marillion being ordinary. “Holidays in Eden”, the title track, does at least get us back to some sort of semblance of prog, but it's quite confusing and I've never understood what the lyric is about. It opens nicely with the sound of birdsong and then a jet engine blasts across it before it kicks up into a really cool rocker with a nice exuberant chorus; kind of reminds me of a song that would appear on a later album called “Built-in bastard radar”. There's a pleasingly “Script”-ish guitar melody running through the verses and a lovely bass line from Peter Trewavas, to say nothing of strong, powerful organ from Kelly.
It is however just something of a break between the more poppy songs, as “Dry land”, while one of my favourite tracks of this era, and the one that follows it are pure radio fare, commercial hit single material, and indeed the first one was released. How it did I have no idea, but I'm assuming it didn't exactly scale the heights of the charts for them. It does have a really nice acoustic guitar line leading it, and Hogarth puts in one of his best performances on the album. It's kind of hard though to get used to Marillion doing ballads. I mean, real, love song ballads. They did none in the Fish era save “Lavender” and “Sugar mice”, yet on this album we have four really, this being the third. It does water down the effectiveness of the album, I feel, and seems to be something of a cynical ploy, whether by the band or their management, to appeal to a more mainstream audience. Nothing wrong with that guys, but don't forget the fans that followed you through five albums in the process!
There's a nice sort of almost
pizzicato keyboard strings sound helping this along, and it is a very catchy melody, though the lyric leaves, to me, something to be desired:
”You're an island /But I can't leave you all out at sea/You're so violent with your silence/ You're an island I can't sleep”?? Lovely expressive solo from Rothery, and then we go into, um, another ballad with “Waiting to happen”, which sadly in a way describes my feelings the first time I heard this album. Again, I will admit this is a great song and I really love it. But there's just not enough of the Marillion I've grown up on at this point to keep my interest, and [i]Holidays in Eden[/[] does not come high on my list of favourite Marillion albums. Again there's the acoustic guitar and a soft vocal which slowly builds, and it's very well constructed. I particularly like when the chorus explodes, just as you've got yourself used to the fact that this is going to be a gentle relaxing ballad. Well, it is, but the chorus took me by surprise the first time I heard it.
There's a lot of romantic nonsense in the lyric:
”I keep the pieces separate/ I clutch them in my coat/ A jigsaw of an angel/ I can do when I feel low.” Hmm. Interestingly, that line contains references to at least two of the Fish-era albums; I wonder if that was deliberate? It builds up to a nice powerful ending with a searing solo from Steve, then drops off in the last few seconds, fading out for me, a bit unsatisfactorily.
I know I said there was a suite, but I'm not sure if the last three tracks are meant to be taken as such. The two last ones, sure, they run into each other, but “This town” only gets included because it's reprised at the end of the closer, so maybe, I don't know. Anyway, if you've been waiting for a rocker, here it is. With a big, stomping drumbeat, a growling guitar and police sirens, it's probably the heaviest and most straightforward rock song Marillion have ever done to this point. It's the old story of being stuck in a one-horse town, so nothing new there, but it slides gently into “The rake's progress”, which is less than two minutes long and follows the exploits of a romeo who keeps secret assignations with married women in this small town, driven mostly on Mark Kelly's thick, cold, dark synth line and into “100 nights”, which continues the exploits of the “Rake”, as he laughs about how easy it is to fool the husbands and boyfriends of the women he dallies with.
In terms of progressive rock, this closer is probably the nearest Marillion come to recapturing the sound they pioneered on four, maybe even five albums up to this point, with a real sense of dark humour underpinned by Rothery's gentle guitar line before it powers up for the big finish, giving Hogarth again a chance to really exercise his pipes.
”You don't know I come here” he sneers
”If you did, you would know why”. A big pounding drumbeat from Mosley and a soft bassline from Trewavas and we head into the finale, as Hogarth grins
”You didn't notice me/ When I passed you on the stairs/ How could you ever guess? / Looking in my face?/ How closely I share your taste/ How well I know your face/ Even the clothes you wear/ I've seen them when you're not there.” As I said, it fades out on a soft rendition of “This town”.
TRACK LISTING
1. Splintering Heart
2. Cover My Eyes (Pain and Heaven)
3. The Party
4. No One Can
5. Holidays in Eden
6. Dry Land
7. Waiting to Happen
8. This Town
9. The Rake's Progress
10. 100 Nights
I don't want to do this album down too much, because I do like it, but I still consider it vastly inferior to Seasons End, and some of the albums that came later could kick this into next week. It is, I think, the lack of actual progressive rock on the album, or at least the dearth of it, that concerns me and colours my opinion. There are too many pop songs on this, and too many ballads for a Marillion album. I get they were trying to partially re-invent themselves, I do. But it seems to me that on this album they went too far the other way, and almost ditched their prog rock credentials, on which they had built their reputation and their fanbase, to follow the path of least resistance. The fact that this album took them to number seven in the charts cannot be taken as any indication that this strategy worked: the majority of people who bought this album would have been Marillion fans. It's unlikely too many people just bought it out of curiosity or because they liked the singles. It's Marillion's fanbase who have remained loyal to them, through the split with Fish, two years of inactivity and a rebirth, and all the changes they have gone through musically over the years, and they were not going to not buy this album.
Seasons End also reached the same spot, while the next one, the inimitable
Brave, would still make it into the top ten (just) despite being a return to the dark prog rock of their beginnings. So I doubt that going the commercial, pseudo-pop route really worked for them. Even now, with the band having been in existence for over thirty years, few people outside of their fanbase or who are not prog rock fans even know who they are, and if they do, it's via that single again. So they were never going to be pop stars, if that was their aim. I guess in fairness much of that popstar-wannabe attitude has to be blamed on their producer, Chris Neil, who had worked with Leo Sayer, Celine Dion and Sheena Easton, and who had turned Mike Rutherford's prog/hard rock sensibilities (have you heard
Acting very strange or
Smallcreep's Day?) into the almost faceless pop band that came to be known as Mike and the Mechanics. Actually, that's probably not fair, as their first album was excellent while the second began to slide, and as for subsequent efforts, well...
Meh, I suppose everyone's entitled to a holiday. But once the plane touched back down on English soil, the holiday snaps were developed and the souvenirs distributed, it was time to return to the real world. Marillion may have holidayed in Eden, but now it was back to reality, in a big way. They would show they understood this when they revisited the more mature, darker and ultimately more satisfying days of the Fish era, and created what I believe to be one of their very best albums.
Rating: 8.5/10