One of the highlights of Marillion’s second album Fugazi was its top 30 second single, Assassing, which remains regarded as a high point of the band’s Fish era. Its video, however, was less well-received – especially by the band. When they spoke to Prog n 2021 they seemed as bewildered about it as they’d been when it was released in 1984.
The early 80s was the Wild West when it came to the emergent art form that was the music video. But even by the maverick standards of the day, the clip for Marillion track Assassing was something else.
The second single from 1984 album Fugazi was accompanied by a promo that yoked state-of-the-art digital effects to a plot that was somewhere between would-be spy thriller and office training video. The results were both visually striking and utterly incomprehensible.
It was directed by Simon Milne, who’d overseen the eye-catching clips for He Knows You Know and Garden Party. This time, the filmmaker was determined to try out the new chroma key technique, aka green screen. The only problem was, no one had quite got a handle on how it worked.
“Because they were inexperienced, they didn’t light it properly, so they weren’t able to superimpose the images on the screen,” says keyboardist Mark Kelly. “That’s why some of the time you just see a plain blue or green screen.”
The ‘plot’ featured Fish joining a group of dark-suited office workers – possibly spies – gathered in a dim room to watch a woman give a presentation, in which footage of the band playing is accompanied by lines of computer-generated data, mainly describing the colour of the text that’s appearing
“What the fuck they were doing with all the computer-generated graphics and Jimmy Bond spy stuff, I have no idea,” says Kelly. “It was just rubbish.”
At one point, the woman finds herself trapped in the middle of screens showing separate performances by the each bandmember. There’s also a moment of high comedy on the set when a car is driven through one of the giant green screens.
“The stunt driver was, like, ‘Oh yeah, I can do that,’” says Kelly. “So he drives through this screen – then bounces through the warehouse and crashes into a wall on the other side of the room.”
Fish recalls: “The first time Ian Mosley saw the video for Assassing, he said, ‘What the fuck was that all about?’ I had to agree with him.”
