(For anyone interested in hearing some of Marillion’s work, you can go directly to their website at http://www.marillion.com/music/racket/crash.htm and either have a free CD sent to you or you can simply download it…again, all for free. What have you got to lose?)
(NOTE: All quotes listed in these articles are to the very best of my memory and are not to be taken verbatim. Set lists are also via memory, and whereas I’m pretty confident that I have all the songs listed here, the nightly order might be slightly out of whack.)
Saturday, During the Day
I awoke briefly at around 9am to the sound of a French women’s voice as the lady in question was trying to enter my room in order to clean it. It seemed that I had forgotten to put the “do not disturb” ticket on my door the previous evening, mostly due to being too tired to do so or remember to do it. I had my eyes half open but my mouth was working fine. “No, thank you!!!” I yelled back at her but she seemed determined to enter, or she simply didn’t understand what I was saying of which the feeling was mutual. We interacted in this manner a few more times and then she finally went away. I looked at the clock and then unintentionally promptly fell right back to sleep.
I finally awoke at 11:30am. To say that I was exhausted was evidently putting it mildly! As much as I love my cats, it’s always a little bit of a vacation to be in a hotel and not have any felines waking me up at the crack of dawn just because the sun decided to show itself. This sort of interaction is extremely painful during the bi-annual time change since the cats fail to realize that the clocks were set backward/forward. Needless to say, when I do get the chance to sleep completely uninterrupted (or nearly, if you count the lady pounding on the door), I try to take advantage of it!
Once I got out of bed I realized that I still wasn’t feeling the greatest. I looked out the window and saw that it was drizzling rain pretty steadily under a very gray sky. It didn’t seem like the greatest sight seeing weather to begin with and coupled with how I was feeling I opted to just more or less forget about it and take my time.
My stomach was growling unbelievably. I finally got “breakfast”, if you will, at around 12:45pm, from a small coffee shop sort of place across the street. I took it back to my room and contemplated the rest of my day.
With the clock ticking and the day looking pretty gloomy, I decided to only make a brief excursion out and around Montreal. I first checked out what they call the Underground City, more or less a shopping mall type of establishment that’s a level below ground and sometimes setup to connect Metro stations and such. It was pretty uneventful. It was also really crowded, considering the weather.
The other main reason for venturing out at all this day was because I was going to need to eat dinner at some point. So far, every restaurant that I had come into contact with seemed to have their menu only in French, and when you’re searching for a vegetarian friendly establishment, well, this is a bit intimidating, or at least it was for me. I did have a couple of names of places nearby and so it was an opportunity to plan my evening’s dining beforehand in order to avoid blind panic later. I spied on a supposedly vegetarian buffet, gave it a thumbs up for later on, and then hopped on the nearest Metro, heading over to the area that’s referred to as Plateau Mont-Royal in my tourist guide.
I basically just walked around on the streets, in the rain, mind you, but with a small umbrella, looking at the various establishments and such. It wasn’t a good day to take pictures, obviously, so I skipped that idea. I stopped in a small hat shop and then continued my way looking for various eating establishments and such that I had read about. In a little over an hour’s worth of time, I ended up making a big circle and eventually hopped another Metro in order to go back towards the hotel. By then I was already mildly hungry and it was around 4:30pm so I decided to eat and just get it over with.
The buffet was interesting. I’ve never been to a vegetarian buffet before. It was like a Hometown Buffet restaurant but with everything dedicated to vegetarianism. The oddest part was that it wasn’t what I know of a buffet to be…all you can eat. Instead, they weighed my plate, which seemed slightly embarrassing and kind of personal, and then charged me by the gram! It certainly prevented me from going back for seconds and overeating! The food was okay. I wouldn’t really brag about it, nor would I probably return. I’m sure there were much better options in the neighborhood but again, the whole menu in French thing was just intimidating me and I’m not one that usually prefers to rely on communicating with wait-staff in order to be able to eat appropriately.
I then went back to the hotel and just relaxed for a bit, even closing my eyes for awhile. It seemed like a waste of a day, really, but then considering that I was unemployed and shouldn’t be spending a lot of money anyhow, maybe it was appropriate. My headache was also not much better, nor was my stomach. I watched some TV and then waited until it was time to leave for the evening’s performance.
Saturday Night Show
Originally, I thought I would arrive earlier this time around for the show but due to how I was feeling, I opted for the same plan as the night before, arriving right around 8pm, or what I thought was show time. I seemed to have no issue before maneuvering my way up to the front part of the stage so I gambled that it would be the same on this night.
It was still raining with that steady drizzle from earlier in the day. As I approached the theater, I noticed that there was absolutely no one hanging around it. I figured it was due to the rain. I entered the theater, showed my Marillion Weekend wristband, and started making my way through the crowd. I went to the same basic area that I was standing in the previous night. To my surprise, one of the opening acts, the Wishing Tree, was already performing even though it was about five minutes to 8pm. As the song came to a close, they said their “thank you’s” and left, and it was then that I realized that they didn’t just start, they had just ended. Evidently, the schedule of the performances was changed to begin earlier, unbeknownst to me.
There were two opening acts this night and next up were Sun Domingo again, the same band from the previous night. They played another really solid set, ending with a very interesting duo drum solo sort of thing, where the guitarist picked up a set of sticks and started drumming over the actual drummer, eventually changing positions and such. It was quite a way to end their set and really got everyone excited.
We went through the slideshow again as the road crew prepared the stage. About a half hour later, Marillion came out. They began with “This Train is My Life”, a track off of the newest album “Happiness is the Road”. It’s a slower tune so it was greeted with mixed energy but by the time it ended everyone was insane all over again.
What happened next is still amazing me to this very day and will probably live in my memory for as long as I’m around. What happened was one of the most amazing performances I’ve ever seen…ever. It was so amazing that I began typing this entry as soon as I got into my hotel room that very evening, even though it was 1am by then! It was so amazing that I simply couldn’t let my memory fail to capture everything 1-2 weeks later.
Let’s put this into perspective: on Friday night, the band was great... I mean, again, I’ve seen them 3 times prior to this, spaced apart nicely. In 2004 at the Chicago show, they were good but something was lacking, at least for me. Was it the venue? Was it the crowd? Lack of energy in the air? Not the greatest set list? I don’t know, something like that. I do know that Steve Hogarth didn’t move around very much at that performance, maybe due to the stage setup or something, but it made the show a little disappointing.
In 1997, at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano, it was just a totally bizarre venue to be seeing them in. The venue is more for popular “bar bands”, if you will, and they just didn’t have the space to really do their normal show nor the lighting. Also, the crowd sits at that venue, eats dinner during the performance and so on, so that made it pretty odd as well.
In 1990…well, ‘nuff said. It made my list of top 10 shows ever in my life, and I’ve seen so many shows that that’s REALLY saying something. They were phenomenal, beyond belief, amazing, and so on. Incredibly energetic. They also sounded absolutely fabulous, better than any band I had ever seen up until that point.
So, back to Saturday night’s performance, and why I immediately reached for the computer when I got back to my hotel room… Again, the previous night, they were really fantastic. It was definitely the second best I had ever seen them perform, second only to the 1990 show.
This night, however, they were f***ing incredible. I mean, absolutely f***ing incredible and I don’t swear much! The set list, the energy, EVERYTHING…oh my goodness! They played for nearly 3 hours and yet seemed to just have more and more energy as the night went on. Again, every note of every song was perfect. The set list was amazing in its’ own right, a total dream for a diehard. They seemed to focus on songs that are fan favorites, a combination of more pop oriented songs and some more obscure tracks. Strangely, they stayed away from playing any of their longer, more progressive songs. Could they be saving these for the Sunday performance? Could they do this sort of amazing performance again the following evening? Was that even possible? That wouldn’t even be human, would it?
Steve Hogarth (H), both nights really but especially this night…you would have thought that he was twenty years old the way he was jumping around. It was like 1990 all over again! And, again considering that North American audiences have only had rare occasions to see the band play, we finally got to hear a bunch of the songs that we never got to hear along the way.
The place was just crazy. Everybody was so unbelievably into this show and the energy just kept building and building. At one point (per someone else's notes, it was right after "Afraid of Sunlight"), about a little more than halfway through the performance, the audience just started clapping and applauding, as if the band had left the stage and we were trying to bring them back for an encore…but they hadn’t left. It totally puzzled the band. They didn’t know what happened or what they had done. Pete shrugged his shoulders and said sort of half into the microphone to the other guys in the band, “I don’t know…what did we do?” The cheering just went on and on and on, so much so that Mark Kelly even came out from behind the keyboards and waved to the audience. I think the band was very genuinely taken aback by the love of this audience on this night. In all my years of concert going and such I have never seen an audience love a band more…period.
Everything at these shows was perfect: the energy, the sound, the venue, the crowd, the lighting, the stage, the songs, and so on. The lighting especially was phenomenal and it was a real treat since the lighting had been pretty sparse the last 2 times I saw them live. It’s amazing the difference it makes. Steve Hogarth’s voice, as always, was absolutely breathtakingly amazing. I have no idea how he can sing so long, so loud, and so very high and never lose his voice. He truly must have the greatest voice in rock music and he can give so much variety to the music. He can go from super high crescendo styled notes to also some of the prettiest, most lush sounds I’ve ever heard in all of my years of listening.
Ironically, earlier that day when sitting in my hotel room, I actually did have a few doubts about coming on this trip, mostly due to the rainy weather of Montreal and again just not feeling the greatest, causing me a lack of motivation to sight see. I really didn’t feel well going into this night’s performance at all; somehow the show cured me (coupled with the Advil, of course). It was on this night that I completely got my money’s worth and then some. I think this night was what a Marillion Fan Weekend is supposed to be.
There were some interesting crowd moments to be had. Right before the show began, I was slightly nervous about the arrangement of people around me. A man in his late 40’s/early 50’s and I’d assume his wife had been standing just a tad in front of me and to my right. As show time got closer, somehow they had changed positions and the wife was now directly in front of me. This was fine because she was rather short and I could easily see over her without an issue. Oddly, though, she started backing up little by little for no apparent reason, all the while leaving some space in front of her. She just kept doing this over and over until she eventually bumped into me. Then, she turned around, looked at me funny, moved up a little, and then did it all over again. After the third or fourth time of this routine, she turned around and gave me a dirty look and so I said, “I’m not moving…”, simply because I thought she was looking at me strangely, like I was the one moving closer and bumping into her although my feet hadn’t even moved once. To my shock, she responded harshly in a light French accent, “Yes, but can you a little please?! You’re breathing on my neck!” I had no response for this. Evidently, I shouldn’t breathe in public places! To make it even more odd, my nasal passages were fairly open and clear so I wasn’t even breathing heavily or anything. Needless to say, I did my best to slowly work my way to the left and then finally in front of both of them. If my breath was annoying them then maybe having to look at the back of my 6 foot 1 inch body and head would be better! Of course, then I got stuck behind a guy who insisted on swaying from side to side in an abnormal fashion for ¾ of the show, constantly coming in and out of my sightline. Luckily, he was just short enough to not completely block my view.
It was announced at the beginning of the show that the idea for this night’s performance was that the band would count backwards from the years since Steve Hogarth had joined and play one song that they had written in each year. There did appear to possibly be a few minor discrepancies, such as I do believe they skipped a year here or there. There were also some minor details that were a bit off, like when H stated, “…from 1996…here’s “Afraid of Sunlight””, and yet that album came out in 1995. Still, considering the outcome and how awesome the evening was, who cares! They basically began in 2008 and then worked their way back to 1990.
Again, I won’t go through every single song and instead comment only on the standout moments for me. One of my favorite songs and moments was “Somewhere Else”, a truly gorgeous tune that seems to perhaps have some personal roots in it as well. During the bridge area, H brought out a megaphone, ala Tom Waits, and sang, “…Mr. Taurus ate a thesaurus…made the girls cry and skipped straight to the chorus…Mr. Taurus had a great fall…all the king’s horses were no good at all…” It had a awesome look and sound to it.
“Out of this World” was also fantastic, and extremely eerie. It was one of the tracks that I had most wanted to hear, being one of my all time favorites, and it truly didn’t disappoint, although it affected me differently than I was expecting. H explained that the song’s lyrics had been building within him for a long time prior to actually writing it down and were based around a time when he was fairly young. Evidently, he was flipping channels on the TV with his mother and they happened upon a story about a man who was, as the songs says, traveling “300 miles an hour on water in your purpose built machine no one dared to call a boat…”. As they played the song, actual film footage of the original news story played on the back screen, showing the man in question, Donald Campbell, who had piloted the Bluebird K7 watercraft on January 4th, 1967, at an amazing speed of approximately 320mph and ultimately died after the craft took flight, crashing head first into the water. This also included some chilling shots from the funeral procession during the closing verse, which I now understood why the keyboard droning notes were there in such a sad manner. It added a really chilling affect to the track and I understood the song in a whole new way than previously. I don’t think I’ll ever hear this song the same way again and it truly moved me. There is some excellent information on Donald Campbell on the web and a great blog entry about the raising of Bluebird K7 on the Marillion website. Both Steve Hogarth and Steve Rothery attended the event since the song "Out of this World" actually inspired the project of the raising of the watercraft in 2001. You can read about it at http://www.marillion.com/news/2001/20010308.htm.
At some point, H mentioned how most of us didn’t get a chance to see the band on the recent “Happiness is the Road” tour, and mentioned that it was “great” and that we should have been there. A crowd member yelled out, “You should have been here!” H was speechless for a moment, slightly embarrassed, and said, “Yes, you’re right, we should have been here…but we were too busy buying powder blue guitars and so we couldn’t…” referencing his new-ish Rickenbacker 360 Blue Boy guitar that he was holding at the time (see below). Being the Rickenbacker fanatic that I am, this really tickled me.
The set ended with the dismally triumphant “The Great Escape” from 1994’s “Brave” album, one of their true masterwork albums. When the band reappeared after the break, H dedicated the next song, which was “No One Can”, to a couple in the audience that evidently had gotten married in Vegas one or two days prior and then flew out to the Marillion Weekend to spend their honeymoon. As H put it, “…that’s diehard!” The refrain of “…no one can take you away from me now…” seemed absolutely appropriate.
After playing “The Party”, the band took another break in preparation for the encore. I think it was about 12:00am by this time and yet you would have thought that it was 8pm from the energy and livelihood of the audience. Once again, just like on the previous night, the audience broke into the stomping chant of “Play! Play! Play!!!” The band remerged and the cheers shook the foundation of the theater, as if the audience had never seen the band before.
It was at this time that a woman’s voice could be heard echoing throughout the theater loud and clear. Her pitch was absolutely shrill and not one word of what she said was audible. I feel confident that she was actually saying something specific but all that could be heard was “Aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhh!!!” H heard this and said, “What was that?!” Again, “Aaaaaaaaaaaahhhh!” rang out. H laughed to himself and said something like, “I didn’t get one word of that!!”
There were other amusing moments of audience interaction as well. There was a lady who was yelling for the song “Beautiful” and someone evidently tried to even bribe H to play it earlier that day in his hotel. H commented on it, claimed he took the bribe, and said, “…but we’re not going to play it anyway,” with a big smile on his face. Right afterwards, someone yelled out another song title of which I didn’t hear and H said, “No, but we are going to play it tomorrow! I promise!”
The encore began with the final song in their countdown, from the year 1990. It was “Cover My Eyes”, one of their earlier singles, and the crowd was just roaring along with H through the refrains, trying their best to hit those insanely high notes. H, meanwhile, was running around the stage crazily, jumping up and down, etc., so much so that I couldn’t possibly snap a good picture of him since it kept blurring. Again, major flashbacks to the 1990 show!
Then, it got even more intense when the band launched into two old Fish (pre Hogarth) era tunes: “Slainte Mhath”, and then finally ending on “Garden Party”. I seriously thought that the building was going to fall down due to how much everyone was going crazy. There wasn’t a soul in the house that wasn’t singing at the top of their lungs, without their arms raised into the air to the beat of the music, clapping, dancing, you name it. It truly was a party in all senses of the term.
All I can say was that I was seriously completely blown away by this night’s performance; by everything. I’ve never experienced anything quite like this on this level. And to think that there was yet another night to go – oh my gosh?! Job or no job, how could I NOT have come to this??? Marillion have been my favorite band for a very long time now, nearly 20 years worth of time. If I hadn’t already known, it’s nights like this one that really make me understand the deep connection that I have with their work. There is no other band like them, period.
To be continued…
(Saturday Night’s Set List)
(2008) This Train is my Life
(2007) Somewhere Else
(2006) Real Tears for Sale
(2005) A State of Mind
(2004) The Damage
(2003) Genie
(2002) Fantastic Place
(2001) When I Meet God
(2000) Map of the World
(1999) A Legacy
(1998) Cathedral Wall
(1997) Estonia
(1996) Afraid of Sunlight
(1995) Out of this World
(1994) The Great Escape
(1993) Falling from the Moon
(Break)
(1992) No One Can
(1991) The Party
(Encore)
(1990) Cover My Eyes (Pain and Heaven)
Slainte Mhath
Garden Party
They also looked fabulous. With the string of “older” bands getting back together and touring over the past couple of years, ala Genesis, the Police, and so on, I was mildly afraid that Marillion too would look, well, older. Surprisingly, they looked no different, in fact, maybe they looked better than they had 5 years earlier. Lead singer Steve Hogarth’s voice was clearly no less magnificent, with his amazing singing range and sound echoing through the place with soaring intensity as always. The lighting also was incredible, drenching the stage in colors and adding visual depth and atmosphere to perfectly compliment the music. It was positively dreamy.
I won’t go through every single song of the set, which can be found below, by the way, but instead I’ll mention highlights. The title track of “Seasons End” was as amazing as always, one of their truly gorgeous tunes and one of my personal all time favorites. “Berlin” really sounded fantastic and for some reason stood out to me more than usual as it echoed throughout the theater.