location: Vienna, Gasometer, Austria
date: Wednesday, 05.12.2018
Marillion are considered, and not just today but always have been, one of the finest art rock bands of all time that Great Britain has ever produced. They’re also one of the best “guarded musical secrets” to come out of there, and the people who usually find their way to them are music lovers searching for sonic and compositional perfection, wrapped in a vibrant atmosphere often shot through with melancholy and with that typically insular Celtic mysticism. Marillion released their latest studio album »Fuck Everyone and Run (FEAR)« two years ago. It’s their eighteenth studio record in total, a reflection on the general (and rapidly advancing) moral decay of human society and values as we’re living it in this “brave new world”. A socially critical document, the kind Marillion hadn’t produced since the days of the album »Brave« (1994), it can also be read as an expressive “extension” of the track Gaza from the previous album »Sounds That Can’t Be Made«. The audience embraced it with open arms, and more than two years after its release the band is still thoroughly presenting it on tour. In that sense, Marillion simply never stop. They play, they perform, constantly. The problem for those “five or six” Slovenian fans of the band is that, when it comes to Marillion shows, we’ve always been forced to travel long distances.
The December 2018 tour of Europe was also billed as the Theater Tour, and at these shows the band devoted a third of the set to the current studio album »F.E.A.R.«. Marillion shows are a chapter of their own. The quintet has always been famous for its sonic and performance perfectionism, so the expectations of the audience are always high. And Marillion keep delivering that high quality, time after time. The Gasometer, a famous hall in the Austrian capital, was almost completely sold out. The floor was packed tight, with only a few scattered seats left empty. Some 2,200 people came to see the show.
The Marillion spectacle ran for over two hours, two hours and ten minutes to be precise. But before it began, Steve Rothery’s daughter Jennifer Rothery and the Italian keyboardist Riccardo Romano appeared as special guests. That same Romano saved the Marillion show in Essen, Germany, a few days earlier, when the band’s keyboardist Mark Kelly had to be rushed to the ER after being hit by a car in the middle of the city during an afternoon jog, leaving him with four injured ribs. Jennifer and Riccardo together presented pieces from Romano’s album »B612« and from Jennifer Rothery’s upcoming EP »OPIA«. A neat synthesis of two musical worlds, with Jennifer Rothery’s gorgeous vocals at the center of attention. The young woman, who goes by the stage name Sylf, won people over with her subtlety and emotional depth, her fragility and grace. Atmospheric, dreamy music. Soft, tenderly yearning sonic nuances and compositional “shifts”. Floating in a Celtic sonic mist. So a good 40 minutes went by. For a true Marillion fan, certainly too long. Waiting for Marillion is always hard, and this is a band so special musically that no act could be a fitting “warm-up” for Marillion.
Marillion remain exceptional. In the opening progressive epic, the twenty-minute El Dorado, the band immediately showed off all of its compositional and performance finesse. The ever-calm Rothery on the left side of the stage, like the band’s boss, kept one eye vigilantly on what his bandmates were doing the whole time. Steve remains refined in every respect. A singular guitarist in whom you can feel the influence of Andrew Latimer, and especially Steve Hackett and David Gilmour, he once again enchanted with his unique, mystically wailing guitar sound, which, as always, blended fantastically with the rustling veils of Kelly’s synths and keyboards. Pete Trewavas’s piercingly rattling bass was clear and loud throughout. Then there’s the always remarkably precise and punchy Ian Mosley, whom you of course again have a hard time spotting amid his fortress of cymbals. And the little pebble in the mosaic that keeps things fun in the band is, naturally, the essence of the brilliant Steve Hogarth. A vocalist of incredible charisma, in both stature and voice. He had the crowd in his pocket right away. Hogarth is a real imp. Just the way he shoots glances with his eyes, and then all of his stage antics, the gesticulating, the mugging, all those grimaces… A magnet. “H” is unbelievably infectious. He got under your skin immediately. Vienna was hypnotized.
The twenty-minute opening epic is an extremely demanding composition, and playing it demands relentless, strict concentration from the quintet. The stage was enriched throughout with film projections and a play of spotlights in vivid color gradients. The hall fell completely silent, drunk on the mood. People were loving it. This stupor was then abruptly cut short by the hit No One Can, which woke the crowd up good and proper, so that alongside an uninhibited Hogarth they joined in more fully on the infectious chorus. For the solo, Rothery didn’t pick up the National Steel guitar (as on the original recording). An exceptional atmospheric catalyst that woke the hall up. And those seats. Everywhere the eye could see. More than once they felt completely superfluous. Next comes a funked-up, groovy leap that puts bassist Pete Trewavas in the spotlight as the band tackles Quartz from the excellent »Afraid of Sunlight« (1999). We’re already in the second third of the show, which was made up of “shorter” pieces (shorter than ten minutes). The band then went back to »Holidays In Eden« and surprised with an excellent The Party. Melancholy, mysticism and a sense of solemnity, but also of calm. In this melancholic ballad Hogarth’s sensuality and vocal chameleonism shone, which his unique vocal presence is known for. The audience goes stiff, and the band deepens the melancholy with the second surprise of the night, Seasons End, a superb closing mini epic suite taken from the album of the same name released in 1989. Before entering the big finale, the band took on (probably) the best song on »Sounds that Can’t Be Made«. That’s the title track, a composition all its own. Exceptionally special, it therefore departs decisively from other Marillion songs (looking across the band’s discography), and in it the characteristic and highly vibrant synth curtains, handled by “H”, grab the attention. We’re entering the peak of the show, as the band sweepingly tackles yet another extremely demanding and long composition. That’s the epic The Leavers, taken from the current album “F.E.A.R.”. A signature epic suite built from five parts, full of atmospheric upheavals, shifts in rhythmic keys, sudden modulations and, of course, a fresh theater of vocal chameleonism from the brilliant Steve Hogarth. The band intensified the atmosphere further from there. The regular set wasn’t over yet. The final atmospheric crescendo went to the excellent »Brave« classic The Great Escape. Fantastic.
And »Brave« stayed on the menu in the first encore too. Are they playing Goodbye To All That? After the first part of that song, called Wave, the band had already stepped into the second, Mad… Sadly that’s where it stopped, but still. »Brave« is the breakthrough album of Marillion’s career. With it they definitively cut the ties with the Fish era and set off toward new artistic expanses, carried out a complete musical transformation and stopped chasing hits. The first encore was closed by Three Minute Boy, played in a considerably shorter version than at the band’s show a year ago that we caught in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. With his theatrical rascality Hogarth “egged on” the crowd to sing the “na-na-na-na-na-na” line as quietly as possible, which drew quite a few bursts of laughter. The audience called the band back onto the stage again. For the second encore, which was meant for a complete switch-off and a shameless party. Marillion opened it with the punchy, instantly infectious classic hit Cover My Eyes, where the whole Gasometer sang the famous »Yeah«. That “Yeah” is, after all, an important part of the song. And that piece was finally followed by a link to the Fish-era, in which the famous Deek Dick, better known by the nickname Fish, sang. Hogarth repeatedly handed the closing Garden Party over to the crowd to sing, theatrically, and they did very well with it.
Speechless. Superb sound, superb production, superb performance. Not a single note worth complaining about. Perfection. At a Marillion show you can hear a pin drop. Once again they won everyone over with their atmospheric hypnosis and sheer playing brilliance. While the band headed off to Hungary that night, where a show in Budapest was announced, the fans have already bought up every last ticket for three of the five announced Marillion weekends for next year. It really is as Marillion themselves say, they have the best fans in the world. As for the two of us, unlike Marillion after the Vienna show, we moved further north. Northeast, where after an hour’s drive we reached Czech Moravia, and started counting down the days to 8.12.2018, when Marillion stopped for the last show of their European tour, in Brno. But that’s another story.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Setlist:
1. El Dorado: I. Long-Shadowed Sun
2. El Dorado: II. The Gold
3. El Dorado: III. Demolished Lives
4. El Dorado: IV. F E A R
5. El Dorado: V. The Grandchildren of Apes
6. No One Can
7. Quartz
8. The Party
9. Seasons End
10. Sounds That Can’t Be Made
11. The Leavers: I. Wake Up in Music
12. The Leavers: II. The Remainers
13. The Leavers: III. Vapour Trails in the Sky
14. The Leavers: IV. The Jumble of Days
15. The Leavers: V. One Tonight
16. The Great Escape
—encore I.—
17. Wave
18. Mad
19. Afraid of Sunlight
20. Three Minute Boy
—encore II.—
21. Cover My Eyes (Pain and Heaven)
22. Garden Party
