Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Paard van Troje / The Hague / the Netherlands
Concert date: November 29, 2011
Attendance: 800
Ticket price: €45.00
As part of a Western European autumn ramble taking in Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands, the progressive rock legends of the eighties and nineties also made a stop in The Hague. Three days earlier they’d kicked off the Christmas Tour 2011 in Amsterdam. It wraps up in mid-December with three shows on home turf in England, and then next June they’re heading off on an American tour too. A few days before our show in The Hague, the fifty-somethings finished the German Marillion & Saga tour.
What gets a trio of Slovenes to drive 1,270 kilometers from Ljubljana to The Hague to see a band that gets finer with every passing year is a matter of long debate. Maybe it’s a coincidence that we only found out on the day itself about the show in Munich three weeks earlier, on November 11, and the fact that The Hague is also home to quite a few of our countrymen (and relatives) who work for the United Nations. So, a road trip with greetings to Mladić ran from Tuesday, November 29 to Friday, December 2, we clocked 2,700 kilometers, and the heart of the story is Wednesday’s concert at the Paard de Troje club in the center of The Hague. The fact is, the Dutch are a special breed — gigantic, arrogant and weird too, though not necessarily in that order — but a few sharp debates while we were hunting for good photo spots ended in mutual understanding.
The club, which holds up to 1,000 people with a big floor and balconies on two levels, was a fitting venue for Marillion, who don’t really need a bigger audience anyway. Setting aside the support act, who spent a good half hour playing Pink Floyd covers and whom we pretty much didn’t hear (after we finally got our press accreditation, we had to run a few streets away for the camera gear), Hogarth, Rothery, Mosley, Trewavas and Kelly hit the stage at exactly 9:15 p.m. and in a good two hours played 12 songs, with an emphasis on title tracks and the bigger hits from the newer albums. Compared to a few days earlier, part of the iron repertoire of older material had vanished from the setlist, and the varied program of different songs and styles once again stirred only the deep-core fans.
H walked onstage to the standard template of Splintering heart, which opens all their shows, and the rest of the band joined in during the intro. Instead of Cover my Eyes, which also regularly takes slot number 2, Hogarth announced The Release, and then they carried on with the usual King.
Hogarth once again delivered the standard show and entertainment for the crowd, who always lap up the fact that the Marillion guys still have a lot of kid in them. There was the clowning around with drilling a hole in his ear, out of which a monitor earpiece fell, and the announcement that they’d promised Beautiful to a lady they met at soundcheck but won’t play it because they’re “mean old bastards”. The crowd, whose average age was well over thirty, played along attentively and responded to the gags. Man of 1000 faces perhaps also revealed the only real flaw, as H forgot some of the lyrics in the middle of the rather long song. Then came good old This Strange Engine and, to close, the fantastic Neverland. H’s voice is a bit more rasping than it was years ago, but he’s practically lost none of his range, and the biggest treat is watching Rothery, who from behind racks of fancy gear worth tens of thousands of euros gets handed one guitar after another and with every move shows the joy and devotion he brings to his exceptional virtuosity and above all to the sound.
The guy is well over fifty by now, and 50 kilograms heavier than in Marillion’s golden age, but that simple, distinctive guitar tone weaving into the bed of keyboards and vocals convinces more than a hundred percent. In general, the guys still feel and play like a truly unified band.
For the first encore they played the entire The Invisible Man, complete with H’s wan, office-clerk costume for the overlooked man, and after we called them back a second time, the legendary Sugar Mice from the Fish era (judging by earlier setlists we’d expected Kayleigh too), which you can watch in the video, and finally, to close, Three minute boy, which H seasoned with a big dose of humor like falling off the keyboard and declaring he was introducing pantomime to rock (H mimed the melody with his fingers over his Yamaha while Kelly supplied it from behind on his three keyboards). At the end they bid farewell to European stages until further notice, and Rothery also gave some attention to a member of our crew, Matjaž (Iron Median), personally handing him a pick.
Despite the prog label, Marillion are still logical and openly romantic, easy to take in — the polar opposite of the by-now overly virtuosic Dream Theater — and it was a real pleasure both to listen to and to watch them. The acoustics, finally, were superbly set up too. Compared to last year’s show near us in June in Mogliano Veneto as part of ExProg, they sounded far more club-like and polished, with a lot more effort put in.
The irony was that at the same time that day, only 80 km away, also in the Netherlands, Fish was playing too. His show the next day at the same venue had been sold out for weeks — and the reason is obvious, since plenty of Marillion fans surely went to hear the legendary first singer of the English band the following night as well.
In short, the long trip, 12 hours of driving each way, wasn’t for nothing, because we really did see a huge amount of energy from a lineup that enjoys what it does just as much as it did 30 years ago, if not more. Still, it’s clear the years will sooner or later take their toll on H, who we can’t say wasn’t generously padded already at the start of the show, as well as on Rothery. Meanwhile little bassist Trewavas kept bounding from one side of the stage to the other with incredible energy, to say nothing of the nearly sixty-year-old drummer Ian Mosley. And the ageless keyboardist Mark Kelly, as always, kept to his own world off to the side.
photos: Artur Švarc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2ze3Dh4cyA
Setlist
1. Splintering Heart 2. The Release 3. King 4. Fantastic Place 5. Somewhere Else 6. Beautiful 7. Man of a Thousand Faces 8. This Strange Engine 9. Neverland —encore I— 10. The Invisible Man —encore II— 11. Sugar Mice 12. Three Minute Boy
Photo gallery
