The early 2000s were a time of change and self-discovery for Marillion. Following the success of their early crowdfunding experiment on 2001’s Anoraknophobia, they returned to the studio to create Marbles, the ambitious 2004 follow-up that would land them back in the UK Top 10. Marking the record’s 20th anniversary in 2024, Marillion told Prog about their feelings on singer Steve Hogarth’s lyrics of the era – and H himself explained how difficult it was to do what he felt he should be doing for the band.
Marillion’s Marbles not only changed the way the band did business, but there’s an argument to be made that sonically, it was part of the musical arc from 1995’s Afraid Of Sunlight all the way to Sounds That Can’t Be Made (2012), FEAR (2016) and An Hour Before It’s Dark (2022).
It’s an idea that Steve Hogarth resists – but he will concede that Marbles opened him up lyrically the way no Marillion album had before.
Article continues belowTalking to the rest of the band now, they note the fragility and openness of the singer’s words, not least in The Invisible Man and the openly raw take on the state of his marriage in The Only Unforgivable Thing. “He talks a lot about escaping on Marbles,” says keyboardist Mark Kelly. “Those themes are there.”
“He does so much soul-searching on that album, doesn’t he?” says bassist Pete Trewavas. “And the good thing about that is that it makes everybody else soul-search too. A song like The Only Unforgivable Thing – I’ve never had the nerve just to say exactly what I think at any given time. That’s one of the beauties and strengths of Steve’s lyrics, and part of his legacy, I think: he will just lay it out. He’s unflinching like that.”
Hogarth chips in: “This was the record where I did change how I wrote, absolutely – probably more so than ever before. Perhaps Marbles marked the beginning of a sort of confessional writing. To be honest, it’s kind of become a huge rod for my back, because now when I write, unless I write something from the centre of myself, it feels a bit vacuous by comparison.”
“I have to admit,” says drummer Ian Mosley with a smile, “that if H is having a rough time or he’s in a bad place, then we’re usually in for a good album!”
“I’ve got to this point now,” Hogarth continues, “where, when we’re about to make a new album, I feel like I’m under a certain amount of pressure to come up with something super-deep, because not to would feel like a cop-out and feel two-dimensional to me. I’ve kind of backed myself into this corner.
“I wrote a song about it that we never used on the last album. I don’t know if it’ll ever appear, but it’s about going mining. Matt Johnson and The The called an album Soul Mining; it’s about going within yourself. I think it was what When I Meet God [from Anoraknophobia] was about: going down into your own mine, and having to go down deeper because you’ve exhausted the seam.
“And so, with each subsequent album, it feels like having to dig a deeper shaft to try and find whatever’s left, because what you had last time is gone now – it’s been mined.”
And yet you have to keep searching inside of yourself, giving pieces of yourself away. “Yeah, absolutely. That’s certainly true of The Invisible Man and Fantastic Place; they don’t wear me out as much as they did. These things fade away with time and where they came from fades away a little bit too.
“I remember when we were touring Brave, and about halfway through that tour I just found myself in a corner one day weeping, and I didn’t know why. But revisiting those themes and things every night wears on you. Then to find yourself in a family unit is really difficult because of this constant feeling that it’s a distraction, and it’s going to compromise what you do as an artist.
“I struggled with that, particularly when I was younger, and that’s what a song like White Paper [from FEAR] is about: building the nest, the family, and the person who stands there, watching it happen from the wings.
“There are elements of that in The Invisible Man too – I’m not good at this and I don’t know how to do it. And I feel guilty because it ought to be making me blissfully comfortable and happy, and it’s the reverse. I always struggled with that in both my marriages, you know, two children from my first marriage and a child from my second.
“People sometimes ask me, ‘What do you think is the best song you guys ever wrote together?’ And although it’s so hard, I do tend to land on The Invisible Man. I think that was such a huge statement, a huge journey and so deeply personal to me.
“But it was also a song where the band and [producer] Dave Meegan, managed to come up with something musically that was so perfectly in phase with the words. Everything I was saying, the music was saying too. If you can do that – and it’s not easy – it gives it this potency that’s irresistible.”
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