WILL MARILLION CONQUER AMERICA?

It seemed strange that Capitol Records would spend lots of money to send me and other American journalists to England in early February to see Fish. After all, we have an aquarium full of ’em here in the CREEM office which J., Joanne and I feed each and every day. And speaking of food, fish fries are a popular topic of discussion around here. J. claims to be quite a fisherman, and while he never eats what he catches, he does say that beer batter makes for a tasty treat. Our comptroller Amira (who practices orthodox Judaism) says she’s never eaten shellfish, and I can’t imagine anyone going through life without sampling the joys of shrimp in its many different varieties. But I didn’t go to England to eat fish, although Fish and I did have dinner together (and I had shrimp for an entree!).

Of course, one might immediately wonder why a person would call himself Fish. Did his parents have a cruel sense of humor? Does he drink like a fish? (Fish says it stems from staying in a bathtub too long.) And won’t it be comical if he someday has small children who ask their mother what’s for dinner, and she replies “Fish”?

Actually, this Fish fronts a band called Marillion, which happens to be huge in England and other parts of Europe at the moment. His real name is Derek William Dick (no cheap fish jokes here!). He is a 27-year-old ex-woodcutter from Edinburgh, Scotland. Prior to Marillion, he was in one other band—their sole claim to fame was opening a gig for Alexis Korner. He now writes and sjngs all of Marillion’s lyrics. He undoubtedly makes lots of money doing both because he and his lyrics and Marillion are currently very big news in the U.K.

Fish and Marillion sold out seven night’s worth of concerts at London’s jHammersmith Odeon earlier this year, parts of which can be heard on the band’s new American EP. Misplaced Childhood, Marillion’s most recent LP, went straight to number one in the British charts upon its release (the LP went platinum in Germany as well), and the band’s three previous LPs went back into the charts at the same time. “Kayleigh,” the first single from the LP, sold 500,000 copies, went to number two, and created quite a stir in the daily British tabloid newspapers, as reporters tried to create a scandal by discovering the real identity of the elusive “Kayleigh,” one of Fish’s ex-girlfriends.

Carol Clerk, a writer for Melody Maker, recently published a biography of Marillion that is selling very well. Fish says that it’s a good book and mentions that Clerk is a friend of the band’s, but also mentions that he and Marillion are planning their own authorized biography which promises to be “a major book.” Marillion came out on top of almost every 1985 British rock poll. Sounds chose Fish as a “Sex Symbol of the Year.” Even Kerrang\, Britain’s heavy metal bible, voted Marillion the number two “Band of the Year”—which may not seem that strange unless you realize that Marillion isn’t a heavy metal band.

In fact, Marillion ended their week of Hammersmith shows by headlining a benefit concert for Pete Townshend’s anti-heroin campaign, during which former Genesis guitarist Steve Hackett and Mike “Tubular Bells” Oldfield joined the band onstage for a Genesis cover tune. The members of Marillion say they were joking about the British press constantly slagging them off as “Genesis impersonators” early in their career (although the joke seems somewhat less effective in light of Fish recently recording a song for the Youngblood film soundtrack with Genesis’s Tony Banks). Genesis comparisons used to anger the band almost to the point of violence. Now they can afford to joke about it. That’s how big Marillion have become in England.

“Progressive rock raises its ugly head again,” one journalist kept repeating over and over again during our trip, and it’s true that Marillion draws on elements of all those early-to-mid-’70s “pomp” bands we all knew and sometimes even despised. There were elements in Marillion’s show that recalled the Yes concert I saw in ’73, easily the worst concert I’ve seen in a lifetime of concert-going. On the other hand, Fish’s “theatricality” and the band’s occasional British minstrel-like music (not really rock ’n’ roll) was sometimes reminiscent of Jethro Tull, still one of the 10 best concerts I saw during the early-to-mid ’70s. Of course, the second part of the show was Misplaced Childhood performed in its entirety with no breaks in between songs—just like Pink Floyd did with Dark Side Of The Moon, Emerson, Lake & Palmer did with Brain Salad Surgery and Yes did (and I wanted to kill them the entire time) with Topographic Oceans. And even though he no longer paints his face and wears strange costumes onstage, Fish’s voice still sounds a lot like Peter Gabriel’s.

We’re starting to get a little bit hip now. You can mention us at parties.

Marillion have album covers that are very reminiscent of the old Moody Blues covers with colorful, surreal paintings that relate to the “concept” records each painting accompanies. Fish, who collaborates on the covers with artist Mark Wilkinson, can go on and on about how the symbols (and records) are all interrelated, and what each jester or chameleon or magpie represents in the grand Marillion scheme of things—and how his lyrics relate to each of them. To make things seem even more obvious, the band’s name is derived from Silmarillion, a book by J.R. Tolkien— although Marillion keyboardist and historian Mark Kelly claims that they inherited the name from a late ’70s unit that

included only current guitarist Steve Rothery and was nothing like today’s Marillion. (“Somewhere in the book it explains that Silmarillion means a brilliant jewel,” he says, “so we figure Marillion must mean jewel or something. But it’s really just a name we inherited. We don’t have anything to do with Hobbits or anything.”) At any rate, love ’em or loathe ’em, Marillion is the spiritual reemergence of all those bands it was hip to hate during punk’s late ’70s heyday (even though some of these “haters” would later deem hipness to, say, the Rain Parade’s debut LP or some danceoriented “new wave” music that has more to do with “progressive rock” than it does with Johnny Rotten).

Yet there is one major difference between Marillion and their musical forebears, and this is the contact they make with their audience during live performances. There always seemed to be a wall between those ’70s mega-bands and their audience (Rick Wakeman kept his back to the audience the entire night at that infamous Yes concert), but, despite a lavish show with special effects, Marillion seem to tear down the walls with Fish’s patter and the musicians’ rock ’n’ roll poses. Although some of their music threatens to put me to sleep, kids stand for the entire show, fists raised in the air, cheering and singing along with every single word. It almost looks like a Bruce Springsteen concert.

Fish tells jokes (one especially tasteless one was that American girls give better blowjobs because they grew up trying to drink McDonald’s milkshakes through straws—but the predominantly male audience seemed to find it hilarious, and the point here is that you couldn’t imagine Jon Anderson or Roger Waters telling blowjob jokes onstage in 1973). He chastised the British press for trying to “scandalize” Simon LeBon by reporting that he was out with a groupie while his poor wife sat home pregnant and barefoot. And he sings “Let’s Twist Again” to music that has absolutely nothing to do with Chubby Checker’s, leading the audience in a twist-along during their final encore. As a result, Fish seems more the jester or clown in a show that could make him potentially look like a pretentious schmuck.

The other members of Marillion (including Pete Trewavas on bass and Ian Mosley on drums) are down-to earth, unpretentious and nice people offstage. Keyboardist Kelly even reveals that, with the exception of Mosley, none of them have any formal musical training—a sacrilege for ’70s “progressive” rockers who used to talk as though they had something in common with Beethoven and Bach. They all live in Aylesbury, an hour outside of London (although Fish plans to move to Bath sometime soon), and as they prepared for an American tour with Rush that would briefly transform them from national superstars to an opening act a lot of people have never heard of, Fish reflected on the band’s past, present and future.

FISH TALKS!

Glub, glub, glub...

NO, SERIOUSLY!

On Marillion’s “Progressive” Roots: “You’ve got your Yes, Genesis, Soft Machine. A lot of Floyd stuff. King Crimson. Gentle Giant. That’s what I was brought up with. The punk thing made it embarrassing for anyone to stand up and actually say that ‘I like Genesis or Floyd.’

It’s really funny because if you ask Jim Kerr about his vocal influences, he loves Yes, Genesis and all that stuff, but he’d never admit it to the press. But we stood up right at the beginning, and said our influences are ’70s bands. I was too young for the Beatles. The Beatles and the Stones were somebody’s big brother’s music, you know? By the time I was switching on the radio, it was the new album by Tangerine Dream or Topographic Oceans. That’s when I was going through my adolescence and that’s the period when you’re very susceptible to influences. And you’re going through heavy emotions, so you tend to relate to the emotions of what you’re listening to. So when I started writing now that I was in a band, the tools I had to express myself was what I’d absorbed before—the ’70s bands.”

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On British Success: “We’re starting to get a little bit hip now. You can mention us at parties in the middle of the room, and you don’t have to sneak over to a corner. You can actually even play a Marillion album at a party. When I was 15 or 16 and you’d go to a party, the last album of the night would always be Dark Side Of The Moon. Now you’ll find it’s Misplaced Childhood or something like that. And people aren’t ashamed to like us or wear our T-shirts. There’s even a soap opera on British TV, and one of the kid characters is a Marillion freak. He’s got Marillion posters all over his room...The concerts are now like a celebration for our fans because Marillion has finally been accepted. They’ve been saying this band’s going to make it, and all of a sudden, the band has made it. So they celebrate...The fans had just gone underground. If you look at punk, the next step up was heavy metal. And from HM, you get a bit more subtle and then towards us. And then after us people will start slagging us off again, and it’ll go full circle—‘Let’s get back to the garage bands again.’”

On America: “I’m looking forward to it because we’re going in with a different weapon system. We’ve got a lot more confidence than we did before. The last time we went to the States, our morale wasn’t so much punctured as totally lacerated. We played a series of shows in which we were treated very, very badly. Record company support was minimal. Radio support was nonexistent. Nobody knew who the fuck we were...But if we were huge in every country in the world, platinum records lined up forever, and we still weren’t big in America, I’d want to make it in America. Because you’re really not a real mega rock band until you’re big in America.”

And he’s right, by cracky. Which makes you wonder why anyone would want to live anywhere else, like, oh, say, Italy. 0