Prog Progress 1983: Marillion - Script for a Jester's Tear

Hi, everyone! Welcome to Prog Progress, a blog series in which I journey through the history of progressive rock by reviewing one album from every year of the genre's existence. You can read more about the project here. You can learn about what I think are some of the roots of progressive rock here. You can see links for the whole series here.

Over the past few posts, I've made a few passing references to "neo-progressive rock." Neo-prog is basically a prog revival; as a bunch of the bands in the original prog wave pivoted toward pop, new wave, and arena rock, a group of younger musicians who had grown up on the '70s prog canon decided that they actually still liked progressive rock a lot, so they picked up the torch and started making their own music in the style of Genesis and Yes (and a few other bands, but mostly those two), with a shade of modern '80s production. And so here we are, in 1983, at the dawn of that whole movement. And so we have Marillion. Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends, indeed.

There are neo-prog records before 1983: Twelfth Night (a major neo-prog band) had released a couple albums by 1983, and IQ (another big deal in the movement) had released a demo the previous year. But in the same way that King Crimson's In the Court of the Crimson King in 1969 signaled a watershed moment for progressive rock's first wave, when O.G. prog truly came into its own, the release of Script for a Jester's Tear is very much a coming out for the neo-prog movement at large, the coalescing of underground momentum into a mainstream (or at least mainstream-adjacent) force.

Even from the beginning, Marillion felt like a prog cliché, which makes them the perfect band to put neo-prog into drive, and the band is honestly kind of charming for that. The group was formed in 1978 by drummer Mick Pointer (who would be fired from the band shortly after the release of Script) and bassist Doug Irvine (who was dismissed from the band before the recording of Script—Marillion clearly wasn't a great band for job security in its early years) on the basis of, as I hope is the case of any self-respecting prog group, the members' common bond over the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. In fact, the band's original name was just "Silmarillion," a straightforward advertisement of nerdom bona-fides that would put even Dün to shame.

With the addition of keyboardist Brian Jelliman (who, naturally, also was replaced before Script, by Mark Kelly, the eventual long-term keyboardist for Marillion) and guitarist Steve Rothery (who—surprise!—not only made it to the recording/touring of Script but is actually still with the band as its longest continuous member), they just kind of puttered around southern England's concert scene as a fairly anonymous but evidently hard-working pub band. My impression is that things were going okay but not spectacularly for Marillion as they worked their way up the local scene ladder, and were it not for one important development, it seemed likely that they would remain one of those townie-type bands that populate a parochial circuit without ever really transcending that setting[1]. That particular development happened in 1981, when Diz Minnitt and Derek William Dick joined the band. Minnitt isn't particularly important; he replaced Doug Irvine as bassist, but, typical of an early Marillion member, was soon replaced himself (by Pete Trewavas, who still plays bass for the band to this day). But he's worth mentioning for the sole reason that he came as a two-for with Derek William Dick. And that guy: in the context of Marillion history, Derek William Dick is huge.

Marillion fans might not recognize the name Derek William Dick, and that's because he went by "Fish" instead, apparently a nickname Dick, not at all fond of his admittedly poindexter-ish given name, embraced after it was given to him by a landlord who was upset at how much time Dick spent bathing[2]. Fish is basically the Peter Gabriel to Marillion's Genesis (if not quite the Robert Fripp to their King Crimson), and an incredible amount of the character of Marillion's first few albums can be attributed directly to Fish. In 1981, though, Fish was just a working-class dude with a deep interest in poetry who had just begun performing as a singer the previous year, and after he and his friend Diz Minnitt were dead broke after having unsuccessfully tried to form a group together, the two came across an advertisement for a band looking for a vocalist/bassist. That band was Marillion, having just parted ways with Irvine, and Minnitt apparently convinced the existing members of the band not to find just a singing bassist but rather two new members: a bassist and a singer[3]. Fish wasn't just a singer-for-hire, though. Along with his reedy voice (the Peter Gabriel comparison was not just an idle parallel[4]), Fish brought with him his love for poetry and actual lyric-writing acumen in tow, which meant that Marillion was not only no longer a solely instrumental band but also a band with actual literary/thematic ambitions: i.e. Fish's. He's the final piece of the puzzle that leads us up to the recording and release of Script for a Jester's Tear. Not to diminish the considerable talents of the rest of Marillion, but from where I'm standing, Fish's contributions to the band really are what were ultimately most responsible for turning Marillion from a band that people listened to in the pub to a band that people wanted to listen to at home, a band that could get a record deal, a band that could sell a pretty sizeable chunk of records. For lack of a better word, the addition of Fish to Marillion gave the band personality.

And what exactly was that personality? Perhaps this is where I should start talking about the record itself. Fitting of neo-prog's ambitions of sounding like regular prog, Script for a Jester's Tear is basically a meat-and-potatoes prog album, with a few technical upgrades (some of these guitar tones don't sound like anything you'd hear outside the '80s). There are six lengthy tracks (the shortest clocks in at 5:07 and most of the others go upwards of 8-9 minutes) full of tempo shifts, winding instrumental passages, guitar and keyboard theatrics, and self-serious tones. The instrumentation will be familiar to prog fans: keyboards and guitars as the main melodic instruments (though a bit heavier on the guitar than a '70s prog album may have been—another concession to the '80s, I'd imagine), bass and drums making up the rhythm section, most of them given a chance to solo at one point or another. None of the tracks are officially divided into separate sections in the liner notes, but several of them are definitely multi-part compositions, with songs changing gears every few minutes: "The Web," for example, is cut in two, a palate-cleansing pair of consecutive solos (first keyboard and then guitar) dividing the ominous, wordy opening from the fist-pumping finale. The record doesn't have anything particularly epic or ambitious in terms of the format-pushing suites and 20+-minute arrangements (Marillion's signature LP-side-filling opus at this point, the 19-minute "Grendel," was left off for reasons I'll get to in a minute), but there are plenty of classic prog records without those compositional flexes, too, and Script is definitely in the spirit of prog even if it doesn't shoot for the genre's biggest flourishes.

The most nonstandard element of the record is Fish's lyrics. They are still overwrought in the grand prog tradition, with wonderfully purple turns of phrase like, "The rain auditions at my window, its sympathy echoes in my womb," from the beginning of "The Web," which is a heck of a mouthful to open a song with. However, for a band as consciously evocative of prog's past and despite the medieval allusions of the title, Script for a Jester's Tear is strikingly free of the fantasy/sci-fi tropes a lot of people associate with prog (and that someone might fairly expect from a band named after a Tolkien book). In fact, Fish goes in the opposite direction, often bending his florid songwriting toward distinctly modern concerns; "The Web" is about an isolated, self-destructive loner trapped in his "rubber plant"-furnished apartment, paralyzed by depression and malaise; "He Knows You Know" is a bleak portrait of drug addiction; "Forgotten Sons" is about homeless veterans struggling with the psychological fallout of their war experiences; the title track itself is just straightforwardly a breakup song. It's a bleak, melodramatic album, but it's also one in which the lyrics don't really feel abstracted from the material reality of the world around it. There's a remarkable lack of pretension about Fish's writing as compared with the kind of metaphysical gobbledygook that prog is famous for. As overcooked as some of the turns of phrase can sound, the simple griminess of lines like the part in "Forgotten Sons" that talks about how "your father drains another beer" or the yearning magazine fantasies of a working-class girl "living in her cellophane world in glitter town" on "Chelsea Monday" have a blunt down-to-earthness about them that feels grounded and stark. The interplay of bog-standard prog instrumentation with grim and gritty (if elaborate) realism is the fundamental personality of the Marillion that I'm familiar with[5], and this texture is Fish's biggest contribution to the group.

Well, that and his voice. So I guess we need to get to that. I've already hinted at this, but there's no point in further beating around the bush: Fish sounds like Peter Gabriel. Not exactly like Peter Gabriel, but enough that it makes you turn your head, and paired with the band's pretty by-the-numbers prog instrumentation, the result is a group that sounds an awful lot like Genesis. And they knew it, too. The whole reason why "Grendel," their 19-minute epic, was left off Script is that the band members were worried that it sounded too much like "Supper's Ready," Genesis's massive opus that fills up most of Side Two on their 1972 album Fotxtrot. I like "Grendel," but the band is right; it sounds a lot like "Supper's Ready," though I'm not so sure why they drew the line at "Grendel," since Script is pretty reminiscent of Gabriel-era Genesis anyway.

There's a delicate balance between tribute/revival and just plain pastiche that Marillion straddles in this album, and while I don't think they ever bend to Greta Van Fleet levels of mimicry, there's no doubt that this album, and neo-prog in general, lean heavily on the tribute aspect of things by design. After all, that's the whole project of neo-prog: to bring back classic prog. For Marillion, that meant bringing back classic Genesis[6].

I'll go ahead and just lay my cards on the table by admitting that I am not a huge fan of neo-progressive rock. People complain about Spotify Core, and I basically feel the same way about a bunch of neo-prog in the sense that it often sounds like a bunch of the most obvious hooks of '70s prog (literary references! Moog synths! long instrumental passages!) stitched together into a facsimile of progressive rock designed to scratch the prog itch but with little of the sense of adventure that defined the '70s heyday. Progressive rock is sometimes derided for its misleading title, with its focus on recreating classical musical motifs (or even whole classical compositions) being much more backwards-facing than "progressive" [7]. But for as much as that retrograde strain manifested itself in, like, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, prog's first decade could also be wildly unpredictable and pretty radical in terms of composition and concept. You flip on a prog record from 1972 or 1974, and while there are some tropes you could reasonably expect, there was no telling what exactly you would be in for: a cha cha breakdown? an improvised, lyric-less vocal track? I guess my point is that '70s prog is, in its own dorky way, pretty visionary. But neo-prog? Neo-prog is the first purely regressive movement in prog history, premised entirely on the idea of recreating a kind of music from ten years ago. You put on a neo-prog record (at least one from neo-prog's mainline, non-metal wing), and the ratio is flipped from their '70s prog antecedents: while there are some moments of surprise, you pretty much always know what you're getting each time. And what you get is a group of people trying very hard to sound like golden-era Yes or Genesis, only with David-Gilmour-inflected guitar work and more straightforward songwriting.I'm of course painting with an overly broad brush, but I stand by the preceding sentences as a general rule-of-thumb when approaching neo-prog.

Marillion is a fine band, and Fish brings some interesting thematic preoccupations to the table[9]. And Script for a Jester's Tear is a solid album that I enjoy when I put it on—there's no denying the melodic swing of the final section of "The Web," for example, and "Forgotten Sons" is a tremendous closing track and certified bop from beginning to end. But I also find it hard not to be distracted by just how self-consciously this album inserts itself within the prog legacy. Everything about the record seems carefully calibrated to be a throwback to the halcyon days of progressive rock: the music itself, of course, but also the LP sleeve[10] itself, whose back cover completes a panoramic look at the "jester's" apartment, on the floor of which there is a record player surrounded by some Marillion singles set next to a Pink Floyd album. It's not really subtle; these guys saw themselves as the progeny of '70s prog. They even were going to get Dave Hitchcock, producer of several classic prog records from Camel, Caravan, and even one from Genesis[11], to produce Script until he was in a serious car accident and the label, EMI, put in Nick Tauber instead, a new wave producer who is probably responsible for the few ways in which Script sounds like an album of the '80s.

I'm okay with people just really being into the old sounds and wanting to revive genres. But I can't help but feel that Marillion, and neo-prog as a whole, hemmed themselves in and made themselves a somewhat kitsch enterprise by being so ostentatious in their connections to old prog and so preservationist in their definition of what prog should sound like. In my opinion, the most interesting attempts at picking up where '70s prog left off are within '80s metal, and I regard Marillion (and neo-prog in general) to be something of an evoluationary dead-end, capable of some good moments (Script is one of them!) but also kind of trapped in amber. I may cover more neo-prog albums in future posts—it is, after all, arguably still kicking in the 21st century—but probably not many. After all, this series is called "Prog Progress." I'm interested in how this progressive rock grows.

Until 1984!

1] A good portion of the band was basically just drawing unemployment this whole time, apparently, so they clearly weren't making a ton of money.

2] The only reason I can imagine that the landlord was upset about this is that he must have pro-rated the water bill, and I applaud every effort of Fish's to not only remain squeaky clean but also stick it to a landlord.

3] He didn't convince them too well, apparently, given that the band gave him the boot after touring a little with him. Apparently Fish himself drew the short straw and had to deliver the news to Diz, which must have been a knife to the back, though in the liner notes to Script for a Jester's Tear, Fish doesn't seem too torn up about it ("The unit had to come first," he writes, which... I mean, I guess nobody was in Marillion to make friends—or keep them).

4] Fish says that Marillion basically sounded like Camel when he first heard them, actually.

5] Which basically consists solely of the Fish era, which would last though the band's fourth album in 1987, after which Fish would leave, citing the physical and mental toll of touring.

6] Genesis themselves, of course, were by this time firmly entrenched in the pop world. I'm curious what they thought about Script.

7] And to be fair, prog rock feels downright conventional compared to jazz fusion and kosmische musik, the other two major "progressive" wings of experimental, rock-adjacent music in the '70s [8]

8] This is, of course, assuming that progressive rock is meaningfully separate from fusion or kosmische musik, an assumption about which I've already expressed some skepticism.

9] Though it's worth pointing out that the class satire of "Garden Party" feels very much the kind of thing that the Genesis of Selling England by the Pound would have written.

10] Or for me, CD case.

11] None other than Foxtrot, home of "Supper's Ready," which you might know by way of Marillion's song "Grendel."