An album inspired by lost love and drugs, Misplaced Childhood is the dark prog masterpiece that turned Marillion into bona fide rock stars – and it’s also the record that broke the group. On its 30th anniversary in 2015, Prog reported the inside story of an all-time classic.
According to Fish, Marillion owe it all to Terry Wogan. On May 20, 1985, the band made their one and only appearance on the Irishman’s BBC chat show. Back then, Wogan was prime-time TV – the perfect shop window for any group with a single to promote.
At the BBC Television Theatre in Shepherd’s Bush, they performed what the show’s host called their “current smasheroonie,” Kayleigh. The audience applauded after the song’s drop-dead stop, and Fish gave a shy smile to the camera – and that’s when everything changed.
Malcolm Hill, EMI’s Head Of Promotions, took the singer aside. “He said, ‘That little smile you did at the end broke every mother’s heart in Great Britain.’” Soon Kayleigh was at No.2 in the charts, giving Marillion the biggest hit of their career. “The Wogan show was what did it,” says Fish. “That lit the touchpaper on the whole thing.”
Misplaced Childhood toppled Bryan Ferry’s Boys And Girls from the top of the chart in June – against all expectations, Marillion had become one of the biggest bands in Britain. “Suddenly we went from being this relatively unknown progressive rock group to a band with a big hit single and album,” Fish marvels. “Misplaced Childhood was us sticking one finger up at the business and saying, ‘Fuck you! This is a real band.’”
The band’s third album remains the biggest-selling of both Marillion’s and Fish’s careers. The singer, is planning to retire from touring while his former bandmates are writing a new record. You sense that the past – especially their past with Fish – sometimes seems like a foreign country. But Misplaced Childhood is an album they remember fondly; as keyboard player Mark Kelly admits: “It was the album that saved us.”
To their growing fanbase in 1984 it might have seemed as if they could do no wrong. They’d had five Top 40 singles and two Top 20 albums – 1983’s Script For A Jester’s Tear and 84’s Fugazi – but in fact, they were in danger of being dropped by their record company.
“We’d got ourselves into a bit of a hole with EMI,” says guitarist Steve Rothery. The hole had grown bigger after they’d spent almost as much money on the video for their last single, Assassing, as they’d done on the whole of Fugazi: “And we were liable for 50 per cent of the costs.”
“Looking back, we were on a bit of a knife edge,” Kelly agrees. “Script For A Jester’s Tear had sold about 120,000. Fugazi cost twice as much but sold a bit less. If we carried on the way we were going, we weren’t going to be financially viable.”
It was a precursor of the situation Marillion would find themselves in at the end of the 90s, which they’d resolve with 2001’s crowd-funded Anoraknophobia. In 1984, though, they did what any struggling rock band would do: they put out a live album. Real To Reel, released in November, cracked the Top 10 and sold well in Europe: “Which gave the label an inkling that it might be worth sticking with us for one more album,” Kelly says.
But they were in no hurry to tell EMI that their next studio release was a concept album. “That,” admits Rothery, “might have been the kiss of death.”
The concept for Misplaced Childhood came to Fish during an LSD trip. He’d returned to his home in Aylesbury at the end of the Fugazi tour, feeling burnt out but “knowing we had a difficult third album to write.” Then a letter arrived in the post with a note from an old girlfriend. “It read: ‘I think you might like this.’” Included was a tab of ‘white lightning’ acid. “I was bored, sitting on my own one night, so I took half of it,” Fish recalls. “Then I thought, ‘Oh, this is rubbish; it’s not working,’ and I took the other half. Aye, that old mistake!”
At seven o’clock on that warm summer’s evening, with the world around him growing increasingly fuzzy, he jumped on his bicycle and rode to Rothery’s nearby home. “In those days, Fish and I were on very good terms,” says the guitarist. “We were the two bachelors in the band. We socialised together a lot.” Does he recall Fish being under the influence? Rothery laughs: “Yes, he probably was!”
Fish remembers the pair of them watching the recent film adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s novel, Tess Of The D’Urbervilles, starring German actor Nastassja Kinski. “Steve had a particular thing about her,” he laughs. But when the drug’s effects became too much, he asked Rothery to drive him home. “When I got back to my house, I thought, ‘OK, let’s use this.’”
It originally came from me demonstrating how I wrote songs. I filed it away… and from such a little thing, our mortgage is now paid
Steve Rothery
He put on a record, crouched on the floor, grabbed a notepad and began stream-of-consciousness writing. Hee had a print of American artist Jerry Schurr’s painting Padres Bay on the wall (“I still have it; it’s hanging in my bedroom”). The image of the sea and mountains was so hypnotic, he felt he was actually inside the picture. The hallucinogenic experience paid off.
“That night I got the whole basis for what became side one of the album. Entire phrases and lyrics from that notebook ended up on the finished record.” One of which, Pseudo Silk Kimono, became Misplaced Childhood’s opening track. As the LSD wore off, and he drifted back to normality, he had to tell someone: “I phoned Steve and said, ‘I got it. I’ve nailed it.’”
Ultimately, the theme running through Misplaced Childhood was inspired by the 27-year-old singer’s life so far: watching youth fade with the passing years; the thrill and attendant pressure of being in a rock band; and, crucially, the recent demise of his relationship with girlfriend Kay. It was a concept album, yes – but one very much grounded in reality.
Writing sessions began in autumn 1984 at Barwell Court, a freezing-cold Victorian pile in Chessington, Surrey. “I’d sit in the TV room with the fire on, writing lyrics,” says Fish, “and hear the others in the next room coming up with the music.”
“My memory is that it all came together very quickly,” says Kelly. “We’re in the process of writing an album now and we were marvelling at how we managed to write most of side one of Misplaced Childhood in a week.” That’s Pseudo Silk Kimono, Kayleigh, Lavender, the multi-part Bitter Suite and Heart Of Lothian. “If only all albums were that easy!”
That’s when hey met new producer, Chris Kimsey, whose credits included engineering Peter Frampton’s Frampton Comes Alive! and the Rolling Stones’ Some Girls. “I wasn’t familiar with Marillion at all,” Kimsey says. “But their A&R man, David Munns, was a good friend of mine and told me to check them out. I went to the writing sessions at Barwell Court and immediately fell in love with them.”
“We were a bit intimidated by Chris at first,” admits Fish. “But he turned out to be such an easy-going guy… and he’d done ELP’s Brain Salad Surgery.”
Better still, Kimsey didn’t need to be sold on the idea of a concept album. “I was totally into that,” he says. “Did EMI want a concept album? I don’t think EMI knew what they wanted. They just wanted a hit.”
Fish remembers hearing the basis of that hit; he was in the TV room when he heard Rothery messing around with the riff that became Kayleigh. “It originally came from me demonstrating to the woman that is now my wife how I wrote songs,” says Rothery. “I filed it away… and from such a little thing, our mortgage is now paid.”
Initially, Kayleigh was regarded as just another chapter in the Misplaced Childhood story – nobody thought of it as a potential single. Fish’s bandmates also had reservations about the title and lyrics. The problem was that his recently ex-girlfriend Kay’s middle name was Lee, and her father’s pet name for her was ‘Kay-Lee’. There was no ambiguity about it. “The band said, ‘Er, that’s about Kay. You can’t sing that,’” Fish recalls. “I said, ‘Why?’ They said ‘It’s too personal1’”
“I was the main one that objected,” recalls Kelly. “Kay had been Fish’s girlfriend ever since I joined the band. I said, ‘No, we shouldn’t call it Kayleigh.’ And Fish said, ‘What do you want me to call it – May-be?’”
“I was a little bit uneasy about it,” Rothery adds. “I knew Kay well and she was a lovely person. But I saw the song as Fish’s tribute to Kay… and how he threw away what they had.” In any case, Fish refused to change the lyrics, which he has since claimed are about more than one of his ex-girlfriends. Kayleigh was staying put.
The studio was cheap, which made sense if the record company were thinking about dropping us
Mark Kelly
Marillion went back on the road for a pre-Christmas tour in November 1984, with a setlist that included most of the first side of Misplaced Childhood. “Kayleigh wasn’t completely finished yet, though,” says Fish, “and if you listen to bootlegs from that tour, you can hear me ad-libbing.”
They demoed the new material at Bray film studios in Berkshire, before heading to Berlin’s Hansa Ton Studio in March 85. Kimsey had just produced Killing Joke’s Night Time album and its hit single Love Like Blood at Hansa. “It was also cheap,” says Kelly, “which made sense if the record company were thinking about dropping us.” Plus, there were worst places to make an album than Berlin. It was, says the keyboard player, “like the Wild West.” Or as Fish puts it, “a playground for adults.”
Before reunification in 1990, West Berlin didn’t officially belong to the Federal Republic Of Germany. This meant its young male residents didn’t have to do national service as they would elsewhere in the country. Rothery: “So it was full of young people, musicians and artists. There was a unique feeling about the place.”
Hansa Studios, set up in a converted town hall, and was steeped in history. The main ballroom, Der Meistersaal, had been used by the Nazis to hold propaganda concerts during World War II. Bowie had recorded his Berlin trilogy – Low, “Heroes” and Lodger – there in the 70s.
Kimsey moved into a rented apartment in the suburbs. The band (Fish, Kelly, Rothery, bassist Pete Trewavas and drummer Ian Mosley) moved into the Hervis Hotel, overlooking the Berlin Wall – so each morning they were greeted by the sight of barbed wire, graffiti and sentry towers.
There were teething problems in the studio. The Neve mixing desk had been damaged when Killing Joke had set off a fire extinguisher over it a few months earlier. “It was noisy and knackered,” recalls Rothery. “In the first few weeks, everything we heard at the playbacks sounded very ordinary.” Kimsey recalls Mosley protesting that his drums “didn’t sound expensive enough.” Rothery continues: “Once Chris equalised everything we were fine. But we had a real crisis of confidence to start with.”
One A&R guy got so pissed he fell asleep during the playback. But at the end of it, he said, ‘Is that all you got?
Mark Kelly
Kimsey’s engineer Thomas Steimler soon had the band on side after demonstrating his great hustling skills. Kelly recalls; “Thomas phoned up Bösendorfer and told them there was a very famous English rock band in the studio, and could they please send us a piano?” A Bösendorfer Concert Grand – valued at up to £100,000 in 1985 – arrived at Hansa and was carried up a flight of stairs to be delivered to the not-that-famous English rock band.
Band and producer quickly fell into a comfortable working pattern. “Start late afternoon,” says Rothery. “Work till the evening, dinner, go out with Kimsey, drink a lot, come back to the studio and try and do some more work.”
‘Try’ being the optimum word. To achieve the exact sound he wanted, Kimsey persuaded Fish to stick his head inside the “plastic igloo” surrounding the studio payphone. The singer now mutters darkly about an “unidentified presence” in the studio while they were playing the Perimeter Walk section of Blind Curve one night. “The room had once been an SS officer’s club,” he says. “I am convinced something else was there besides us. I sensed it.”
Then again, Berlin offered so many distractions that it wasn’t unusual for some band members to find themselves working while in a heightened state. “The city didn’t wake up until midnight,” says Kimsey. “If we had a day off, we’d go clubbing and all arrange to meet at the Cri Du Chat, a club that only opened at six in the morning.”
Tequila became the tipple of choice, consumed in such quantities that Rothery recalls some of the band and their entourage passing out during a late-night screening of Fritz Lang’s silent movie classic Metropolis: “It didn’t help that the subtitles, naturally, were in German!”
Kimsey was to become a victim of a boozy prank: while driving through Berlin, Marillion persuaded Steimler to crash his Volvo into Kimsey’s rental car, just for the hell of it. “Chris was in this Honda Jazz,” says Kelly, “and Thomas rammed straight into him at a set of traffic lights. Then we spent the next 20 minutes ramming into him, until the car was making the most awful noise and we had to ditch it. Isn’t it strange how, when you’re 22, 23 years old, you think you’ll never end up getting into trouble? And somehow we didn’t!”
Kayleigh was seen as the best of a bad bunch. Nobody believed it was going to be a hit
Mark Kelly
“Oh, I could fill a book with stories about Berlin,” says Fish. “But you’ll have to wait for the book.” Key moments include the vocalist’s “first and last heroin experience,” stripping naked in a restaurant, and throwing bricks over the Berlin Wall to try to set off the landmines. “It was fun – in Berlin, nobody knew who we were and we could do anything we liked. And I sampled it all.”
Rothery claims that after three months at Hansa, Marillion had all “aged about five years.”
In the meantime, the label were asking about singles. “EMI were gonna get what they got,” says Fish emphatically. “They gave us no guidance whatsoever. They sent A&R guys down to listen, but we’d just shove them in a room, get them pissed and give them a couple of doobies.”
“One guy got so pissed he fell asleep during the playback,” laughs Kelly. “But at the end of it, he said, ‘Is that all you got?’”
The only other new song they had was Lady Nina, which had nothing to do with the concept. “We played him that, and he said, ‘Oh, that’ll be the single,’ Kelly recalls. “And we said, ‘No.’ So he went back to the UK, convinced there were no singles.”
Marillion were aware they had to release something, and finally agreed on Kayleigh, with Lady Nina on the flip. “But Kayleigh was seen as the best of a bad bunch,” says Kelly. “Nobody believed it was going to be a hit.”
According to Kimsey, the single was mixed at Abbey Road and the master sent to Berlin for approval. He took the tape back to his apartment. “And it sounded awful,” he sighs. “There was one of those 80s ghetto blasters in the kitchen. I put the tape in and lay there with my head between the speakers, making notes on how I could improve it. Then I went to the studio the next day and put it all into practice. I insisted that we mixed the whole album in Berlin.”
EMI needed a video to go with the single. In a wonderful twist, the promo for Kayleigh, a song about Fish’s ex-girlfriend, would star German model Tamara Nowy, who’d later become his first wife. They’d met on a night out in Berlin and he was looking for an excuse to spend more time with her. The rest of the band vetoed the idea of having her in the video, choosing two other models instead. One broke her ankle and the other contracted food poisoning. “So it was a case of, ‘Wanna be in a video, love?’” Fish chuckles.
Fish seemed to want that profile more and more,. I didn’t like that feeling of never being able to relax
Steve Rothery
Along with shots of the couple mooching around Berlin, gazing longingly at each other, the promo featured 10-year-old Robert Mead, the ‘drummer boy’ in designer Mark Wilkinson’s album cover. The image, says Fish, was inspired by another supernatural encounter: “Kay used to live in Earls Court and there was a staircase leading up to her flat; she thought she glimpsed a young boy there one night – just a presence.” The singer was fascinated by military history, so the drummer boy’s uniform would be adapted for his next stage costume: “Mine was rather tight though – they didn’t do military jackets in double XL size!”
Released on April 7, 1985, Kayleigh changed Marillion’s lives forever. For the first time they had a single on daytime radio, heard by people other than those who bought Sounds and listened to Radio One’s Friday Rock Show. It wasn’t hard to fathom Kayleigh’s appeal over Marillion’s previous singles Assassing or Punch And Judy – it was a universal love song. Better still, says Kimsey, “Steve’s opening guitar riff sounded so good on the radio.”
But the Wogan performance that really sealed the deal. “Before that, we held the record for being the band who did Top Of The Pops the most times and saw their single go down the charts,” says Rothery. “With Kayleigh, we were flown back from Europe on a Learjet just to play on Top Of The Pops.”
Inevitably, everyone wanted to know who Kayleigh really was. “The Sun went looking for her,” recalls Kelly. “But Kay was a very private person so we all had to keep quiet.”
Misplaced Childhood was released on June 17 and compounded the single’s success, eventually reaching No.1. Within a year it had sold 1.5 million copies and gone platinum. “And journalists who’d said we were a bunch of Genesis copyists suddenly went, ‘Oh, this is a happening band,” says Fish.
Listening to the album now, his rather portentous narration on album opener Pseudo Silk Kimono and the Brief Encounter section of Bitter Suite sound like a hangover from the earlier albums; and however much they resent the ‘Genesis copyist’ tag, there are familiar echoes to be found. But ultimately, Marillion had streamlined their sound and become more accessible. As Fish admits, “I’d started to move away from that forced falsetto. I was finding my real voice.”
Furthermore, this wasn’t the woolly, Tolkien-esque Marillion of Grendel ‘and his mossy home beneath the stagnant mere.’ For the most part the album addressed real life and real emotions. It was a bigger hit than Fugazi and Script For A Jester’s Tear because it spoke to more people.
In the later part of her life, Kay let it be known that the song was about her
Fish
Despite their earlier misgivings, Kayleigh was followed by second Top 5 hit, Lavender, in September. A third single, the Burns Night-meets-rock anthem Heart Of Lothian, followed two months later.
Marillion spent most of 1985 and 86 on tour, playing the record in full every night. In America they opened for Rush and were confronted by “a sea of people going, ‘What the fuck is this?’” laughs Fish. In Britain, it was a different story: the singer performed without his usual face make-up, as if he was showing his true self. The mainstream music press and daily papers flocked to talk to him. “And it rocked the band,” he says. “Because so much of the focus was now on me and I was the one with the biggest profile.”
“Fish seemed to want that more and more,” says Rothery, who admits his brush with “proper fame” made him uncomfortable: “I didn’t like that feeling of never being able to relax.”
Fish, however, had no such misgivings: “When I was a teenager dreaming about being in a rock band, this was how I imagined it would be.”
“Fish craved that celebrity,” concurs the guitarist, “and that was part of the conflict that eventually developed between us. He loved a drink and he loved to party. And some people in the band partied too hard.”
By the time they started work on a follow-up album, the cracks were showing. Clutching At Straws, released in 1987, would be Fish’s last with the band. Making it was not a happy experience. “I had a lot to deal with on a personal and professional level, including my ego,” he admits. “I floated off into my own anal world and was a bit of an asshole.”
Rothery laughs when he hears this. “I took myself far too seriously at that time too. I was all about the music and the art, man!” When asked what he thinks of Misplaced Childhood now, Rothery says he’s proud of it – but that “it represents the calm before the storm.”
In 2005, Fish performed Misplaced Childhood in full on his Return To Childhood tour. To mark its anniversary he plans to do the same. But he would have liked to play it one last time with Marillion. “It would have been lovely,” he says. “But it’s 30 years old, for fuck’s sake, so we’d have to drop it down for my voice – and Steve’s gone public and said he won’t change keys.” He pauses, sounding a little exasperated. “But who gives a fuck what key it’s in?”
Marillion clearly do. “If he can’t sing in the same key as on the album, then we can’t play the same music as on the album,” says Rothery. “You’re not giving people the same experience. It’s better to leave them with the memory.”
Misplaced Childhood is full of deeply personal memories for Fish. On the Return To Childhood tour he met up with old flame Kay. “She came to Edinburgh and I gave her a copy of the album, and she wrote back to say that she cried all the way through.” He hesitates. “I always said I would never talk about her.
”She was a pharmacist who worked at Stoke Mandeville Hospital. We’d been emailing each other back and forth, talking about our kids… and one day she told me she’d been diagnosed. Then she went off the radar.” Not long after, he learned ‘Kayleigh’ had died of cancer. “Her friends told me that in the later part of her life, she let it be known that the song was about her.”
Songs from the 1985 record still feature in Marillion’s set. “Out of all the albums we’ve done, there are a few I would rather not listen to again,” says Kelly. “Misplaced Childhood isn’t one of them. It still stands up today.”
Having made more albums with vocalist Steve Hogarth than they did with Fish, Marillion don’t dwell as much on the past. Fish, though, is allowing himself one last wallow in nostalgia. “Misplaced Childhood was a crucial album for me and Marillion, and I wouldn’t change a thing about it.”
