Marillion and Me
Icons of Independence
If you’ve known me for any length of time—a week, a day, an hour—no doubt you’ve heard the name Marillion pop up. I’m a fan. Whatever Swifties are to Taylor Swift, I’m one of those for Marillion. Call me a fan, a shill, or someone with too much time on his hands, it won’t bother me much. I have loved this band’s music for more than thirty years, and when I finally shuffle off this mortal coil, I fully expect everyone who ever cared about me to play their song Estonia at least once.
I’m not the only one. Marillion fans are a cult. They are the definition of die-hard. Marillion more or less invented crowdfunding in 2001 when they lost their major label contract with EMI and were flailing, close to losing everything they'd worked with, and asked their fans if they would—without hearing a single song—pre-purchase the album so they would have the money to record it. The fans came through with flying colors, as you would expect they would, and we got the album Anoraknophobia.
Swifties might be passionate, but Marillion fans are an entirely different breed.
Marillion released a couple of new concert albums a few weeks ago, The Remains of the Weekend. They released one of the three shows from their three-night Marillion Weekend at Port Zelande in 2023 as a live album for their newest record, the very brilliant An Hour Before It’s Dark from 2022. However, the other two days were recorded and have finally been spit into the world as releases on their own.
Being the fan that I am, I had to listen with all due haste. On the Friday night show, they brought out one of their most popular songs, Sugar Mice. Every Marillion fan knows this one. It was on their landmark Clutching at Straws record from 1987, and it’s a beautiful song about how unemployment affects self-worth and personal relationships. (Coincidentally, they also mention Milwaukee in the song—but that’s a tale for another day.)
During this rendition of Sugar Mice, as the crowd so often does for a favorite song, their voices rose as one, taking full rein of the lyrics and drowning out lead singer Steve Hogarth (called “h” colloquially by fans to prevent the two Steves in the band from being mixed up), who relinquished the microphone and let the crowd have at it.
Now, this is nothing new. The crowd at a Marillion show isn’t made up of casuals. Everyone with a ticket is a fan. Marillion isn’t getting a lot of traffic from people who just happened to decide to go to a show. Every Marillion fan knows every lyric. It’s just how we are wired. Obsessed? Yes. Driven? Definitely. It’s just how they roll.
However, during that first listen while I was driving in my car, I felt myself being moved. I felt a swell of emotion and got a wee bit verklempt (as Mike Meyers’s Linda Richmond would say). Sugar Mice isn’t even one of my favorite Marillion songs. It’s a good song, but I wouldn’t suggest it to anyone who wanted to get into the band. It just struck me that this song is almost 40 years old. The lads from Aylesbury have been playing it for almost 40 years. It still has the power and emotion to move an audience. It connects with audiences on a metaphysical level at this point. It is no longer a mere song—it is beyond that.
It was never a hit. It never made the Billboard charts in America. It only made it to #22 in the UK. No one is busting it out for karaoke, and even if they do, they’ll be greeted with a roomful of people looking at them strangely because none of them have ever heard it before. It’s a minor song that’s only impactful to the ardently loyal fans of a neo-prog band from a small town in the south of England. But none of that matters.
It’s important to that group of people in that crowd. It’s important to those of us who buy the albums. Even if the major labels don’t get it, even if the radio stations don’t get it, even if the majority of music fans the world over don’t get it—we get it.
And isn’t that enough?
Marillion has persisted. They had one minor hit in America (Kayleigh in 1985—the year after that, they were Queen’s opening act on a successful tour of the US). They have had minor success on the UK charts. They don’t get radio play. They got dropped by a major label, ignored by a minor label, and now they’re on their own, under their own label, making music the way they want to make it and screw everything else that would seek to stop them. They are doing things their own way—and it works.
They’re not living wild, extravagant rock star lives. They are very humble, scraping by on modest wages from a music career that has never brought in embarrassing scads of cash1. They are monetizing everything they can to keep the machine going, the very definition of working musicians. They are grateful to their fans for keeping them afloat and letting them live a life doing what they love to do.
But they are doing it their way, by themselves, often continuing to find modest success despite an industry that feels like it would much rather they dry up and blow away.
And still they keep going.
I guess I’m a Marillion fan because any indie writer can look to them as a beacon of hope in this silly game. They’re the blueprint. They’re the success story. They are the pinnacle of doing what they want to do without gatekeepers preventing them from doing it.
As someone who has been in this game for nearly 20 years now (with the last five or so giving a few very modest tokens of the first tastes of what some would call success), I keep thinking about how Marillion has persisted, and I use their journey to fuel my own.
If they can do it by themselves, then so can I.
At least, that’s what I tell myself.
Just keep writing.
My favorite example of this was a couple of years ago, Stephen Rothery (who is in his 60s) finally saved up enough money to buy his dream car: a very nice BMW. —he bought it used, not new. And only because he got a really good deal on it. These are not guys buying mansions and pet tigers. These are blue-collar musicians.
Thanks so much for this! Have to admit to ignorance. I've never heard of them before. Just listened to "Estonia", and am blown away. Music is healing. Will be listening to more.