TWAS 227: Runrig, Fish, Marillion
glenn mcdonald
www.furia.com/twas
This Day and Age Is Impoverished in Love
TWAS 227, 3 June 99
Runrig: In Search of Angels
Runrig: The Archive Series / Long Distance
Fish: Raingods With Zippos
Marillion: Script for a Jester's Tear (remaster)
Marillion: Fugazi (remaster)
Marillion: Misplaced Childhood (remaster)
Marillion: Clutching at Straws (remaster)
Marillion: Seasons End (remaster)
Marillion: Holidays in Eden (remaster)
Marillion: Brave (remaster)
Marillion: Afraid of Sunlight (remaster)
Marillion: These Chains
Runrig: In Search of Angels
Survive the stresses of a youth in rock, and this is the kind of fate that
awaits you: your lead singer of more than two decades, the only one you've
ever made a record with, leaves the band not in a storm of artistic
differences or a heady daze of out-of-control substance abuse and sordid
sexual collusion, but because he needs to concentrate full-time on his
political career. And here you are, the rest of you, the ones that neglected
to get other careers, after nine studio albums, two live records, a best-of
and a brief but tantalizing TV-commercial-induced glimpse of potential fame,
staring at the end of an era and trying to summon the strength to start a
new one. Your lives in music wrap around you like a deck of snapshots sewn
into a cape: an album you made when you were kids that sounded prematurely
ancient and unfathomably isolated even then, an island dance band that it's
hard to believe shared a century, much less a continent, with the throes of
punk going on across the narrow water between Skye and the rest of Scotland,
back before they gave up and built a bridge; the early Eighties on a label
of your own, a slow three album metamorphosis into half a rock-and-roll
band, half a national conscience; and then a decade as enduring as
anybody's, four records that capture the emotional tenor and romantic logic
of Celtic identity a thousand times more powerfully and eloquently than any
coffee-table photo album of gracefully crumbling ancestral fortresses and
brusque, shaggy, munificent cows, and then one more, perhaps prefiguring the
end, on which you looked around and realized that somewhere along the way
you'd grown up. That could have been enough. Runrig have already made, I
claim when I'm feeling categorical, the greatest live album of all time
(1988's Once in a Lifetime), and most inspiringly life-affirming work in all
of art (1993's Amazing Things). They have earned, if anybody has, the right
to disappear back into the hills, back to their own hearths, back to their
own families and dreams, and leave the rest of us to our noisy fascination
with mercenary, polyglot modernity. I would miss them, I knew, when I heard
about Donnie Munro's departure, but I didn't, or at least couldn't, begrudge
them their peace.
And so, holding this new album in my hand after all, the severed wires
of an abandoned telephone pole against a faded blue sky and the words In
Search of Angels across the top, I am proud and grateful and terrified
enough that for a moment I forget there are any other emotions, start to
forget that physical balance isn't an emotional function. "I'm alive again
on a Maymorning", the album opens, and in a breath I know this is how the
seasons changing will sound to me from now on. One era ends and another
begins. Of course another era begins; how could I ever have imagined it
wouldn't? If Runrig hadn't made another record, somebody else would have, so
why shouldn't they stick around to see that it's done right? Donnie's
disarmingly earnest voice was perfectly suited to Runrig's aesthetic, but
the band's charisma was an ensemble effect, not his doing. He didn't write
songs or play instruments, and it seems to me that his departure coincided
with the end of an era more than it caused it, and that replacing him,
however regrettable a necessity, was less a matter of filling a void than
filling a role. I don't have the sense, as I did when Fish left Marillion,
that Donnie tore out part of the band's soul and took it with him as a
vindictive souvenir, even though he ought to have known perfectly well that
he'd never be able to operate it by himself. I think Donnie packed his cases
and had one last look around, everything bare and white, his hat in his
hand, like a wistful Vanessa Redgrave, and walked out across the gravel
driveway to the waiting car.
New beginnings are supposed to be wobbly, that's part of their charm,
and In Search of Angels has its share of uncertainty. Cape Breton singer
Bruce Guthrie, who takes over for Donnie, fits in with admirable aplomb, but
I don't yet have the sense that he's part of the band, or vice versa. He
didn't write these songs, either, but he's the band's most obvious new
element, so he's bound to get blamed for how ordinary some of them sound.
The slow ballad "Life Is Hard", sung in a different voice, could slip right
into Jewel's Spirit somewhere. The measured, melancholy "This Is Not a Love
Song" is closer to John Waite's "Missing You" than anything else I can think
of. "Cho Buidhe Is a Bha i Riabh" wears its ethnic enthusiasm a little too
brightly for my tastes, like the Peruvian pan-flautists busking outside the
Harvard Square subway station, anxious to impress their exoticness upon
Korean tourists who seem, frankly, to be experiencing enough cultural
dissonance just from being caught in the crossfire of the endless
affectionate barker's war between the two newsstands on either side of Mass
Ave. "In Search of Angels" itself is reverent and elegant, but also a folk
song whose mournful sighs could have come from American musical history as
easily as from Scotland's. But Runrig had already begun, back on Mara, to
tear down some of the fences they used to keep between themselves and the
rest of the world, so I expect these songs would have sounded this way even
without Bruce. I'm not sure exactly, in these moments, where Runrig thinks
they're headed, but I long ago suspended judgment and agreed to follow them
anywhere.
And besides, take those four songs away and you've still got two-thirds
of a record to which nobody but Runrig could do justice. "Maymorning" is a
ringing, open-hearted Celtic anthem, like Big Country's Stuart Adamson is
always a little too self-conscious, and remembers the compromises of
wakefulness too well, to write. "Ribhinn Donn" is plaintive and Gaelic, sung
mostly by Rory Macdonald as a sensible alternative, I presume, to teaching
Bruce the lyrics phonetically. Parts of the mid-tempo "Big Sky" remind me of
Mark Cohn and Robbie Robertson, but the choruses launch themselves into the
sun like nobody ever warned them about melting wings. "Da Mhile Bliadhna" is
another in Runrig's long line of Gaelic terrace-anthems for a country in
which the sports fans are thoughtful patriots, "A Dh'Innse Na Firinn"
another in the nearly-as-long line of squarely implacable marching themes, a
song I will try to teach my children before they have a chance to discover
the hollow joys of counting beer bottles. "All Things Must Change" sparkles
with Malcolm Jones' pealing guitar, like a Dire Straits that never heard of
New Orleans or MTV. The atmospheric "Travellers", with its haunting backing
choir, picks up a thread begun by the b-side orchestral reworking of Mara's
"The Mighty Atlantic". This album's masterpiece for me, though, and so far
my favorite song of the year by a wide margin, is the first single, "The
Message". None of the individual ingredients are especially new. The
twirling guitar-, accordion- and pipe-hooks are centuries old in essence,
and have been adapted to rock many times before by Big Country and Runrig
themselves. The murmuring synth-bass/drum-loop foundation is a minor
variation on one they invented for Mara. The rhythm-guitar charge in the
choruses is basically the same one that propels every second song in
Runrig's repertoire, and the text is Runrig's favorite theme, the infinite
patience with which the landscape tolerates our frenetic disregard and then
gently reminds us of our immortality. But ah, who could possibly resent
these touches' recurrence? Lots of people, I suppose intellectually, but
with this song playing I stop thinking about individual tastes and start
thinking that this is the way all rock songs should sound, the form finally
perfected after decades of erratic progress, or perhaps how all songs should
sound, the culmination of centuries. What music rouses you so thoroughly
that you can't concentrate on anything but the elusive convictions that the
universe is sensibly ordered, and that your place within it is good? This is
mine.
Runrig: The Archive Series / Long Distance
The Runrig best-of Long Distance, released a couple years ago, was the
nominal epilogue to the band's first era. I already had all the songs on it,
so I didn't buy it (purchasing wholly-redundant compilations being a
collectors' folly I have so far succeeded in limiting to Big Country), but
apparently somebody had a few too many made, as several are being unloaded
as bonus discs with this new album of BBC recordings, so I've ended up with
a copy after all. Its selection, chosen at least partially by fan-club
votes, doesn't attempt the hopeless task of reproducing, in miniature,
Runrig's complex evolution, instead simply extracting some of the most
memorable moments. There's nothing at all from the first four albums, the
subjective history rewriting the early days, not unreasonably, as if they
were encapsulated by 1987's breakthrough The Cutter and the Clan, half of
which is present here (the pulsing "Alba", the pop-gospel "Hearts of Olden
Glory", the wiry "Rocket to the Moon", the trademark fight-song "Protect and
Survive" and the one from the beer commercial, "An Ubhal as Airde"). The
redemptive "Skye/Loch Lomond" stretch from Once in a Lifetime is included
intact, and this time the compilation actually ends with it, redressing the
sequencing anomaly that is, to me, the live album's sole flaw. The
sometimes-overlooked Searchlight is represented by the timeless "Every
River" and the tense "Siol Ghoraidh", the Capture the Heart EP by the joyous
"(Stepping Down the) Glory Road", the more ethereal The Big Wheel by the
understated "Abhainn An T-Sluaigh" (a brief flash of skepticism comes over
me at the idea that fans really picked this slow Gaelic lullaby over
Heartland's propulsive "Dance Called America" or The Big Wheel's infectious
"Edge of the World"), the twangy "Hearthammer" and the soaring "Flower of
the West". Amazing Things cannot, in my heavily biased opinion, be
meaningfully reduced, and "Wonderful" and "The Greatest Flame" don't really
represent its depth, but if you have to pick two songs from the album, as
opposed to for it, these are accessible pop on their own terms. Mara, still
too fresh in everybody's mind to compete with the older records, is given
the token nod of "The Mighty Atlantic/Mara Theme". And the compilation's one
de rigueur new recording is "Rhythm of My Heart", Runrig's surprisingly
heartfelt and endearingly innocent remake of the song popularized by Rod
Stewart, perhaps the one thing that will never sound right without Donnie.
The BBC-session disc to which the collection is attached is a stranger
amalgamation. Its first four tracks are recordings from a 1989 radio
appearance, "Protect and Survive", "Hearts of Olden Glory", an electric
rendition of Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'" (originally done as
a b-side to the Searchlight single "News From Heaven"), and the The Cutter
and the Clan road-/love-song "The Only Rose". These all sound fine, but the
studio versions sounded fine too, and these don't add much. The rest of the
disc is from a 1996 Glasgow concert, and hearing a Scottish audience's
fanaticism is part of the magic of Once in a Lifetime, but Transmitting
Live, the second Runrig live album, was just done in 1994, so this set is
necessarily less surprising, and perhaps inevitably my favorite parts of it
are the four songs from Mara, which postdates the other two live albums,
especially the humble, shuffling performance of "The Dancing Floor",
although the acoustic-guitar/rhythmic-applause/bagpipe intro to "Healer in
Your Heart" is also very nice, and I'll gladly take ten more versions of
"(Stepping Down the) Glory Road", if somebody is hoarding them somewhere.
Fish: Raingods With Zippos
Speaking both of coping with adulthood and departed lead singers,
ex-Marillion leader Fish has managed to resist the pull of politics, and is
now on solo album number six. Solo albums one through four were all
lamentable to one degree or another, I thought, but I liked Sunsets on
Empire quite a bit, and Raingods With Zippos offers further evidence that
Fish has finally found an idiom that involves neither a Miss-Havisham-like
reliving of his Marillion days, nor the dreary ambition to become a taller
Phil Collins. "Tumbledown" alternates between Mickey Simmonds' stately solo
piano and a blaring rock strut (with a guest appearance by Big Country
guitarist Bruce Watson, and a bracing harmony wail from Elizabeth Antwi),
and the cadence of the chorus explains why Fish stuck with "Zippos" in the
title, even though it meant putting a trademark symbol on the cover. The
verses of "Mission Statement" are cartoon metal-blues, but the chorus bolts
hoarsely towards "Two Tickets to Paradise". Antwi takes co-writing credit
and the second lead (and Watson adds mandolin) for "Incomplete", which might
only be a pretty duet were it not for Fish's traditional penchant for
elegies to failed romance in which we only get to hear his perspective.
Nicola King supplies silky harmony for "Tilted Cross", which comes out
sounding uncannily like folk-rock, Steve Vantiss' double-bass and Davey
Crichton's fiddle doing little to dispel the illusion. "Faith Healer"'s
arrangement, however, is massive, banks of synth strings and seething metal
guitar dueling like UFO after an invigorating weekend immersion in Celtic
Frost and Rage Against the Machine. The slow, airy "Rites of Passage" could
be Fish's belated submission for the Titanic soundtrack, musically ideal but
tragically disqualified by the anachronistic parking metaphor.
The second half of the record is Fish's first post-Marillion attempt at
an epic suite, the six-part "Plague of Ghosts". The meditative opening, "Old
Haunts", is the way Marillion might also have begun, during Fish's tenure or
even now, but "Digging Deep" is jittery and clipped, like a funk-metal Joe
Jackson. "Chocolate Frogs" is a muttering ambient collage over which Fish
reads, then howls, a monologue that appears to be about drug addiction,
although I can't quite discern whether the drugs, for which the chocolate
frogs are a metaphor, are the subject or are themselves a metaphor for some
deeper personal problem. A skittering drum-and-bass underpinning goads
"Waving at Stars", and I keep expecting it to explode into catharsis, but
the resolution is deferred through the gradual build-up of "Rain Gods
Dancing" and another sultry, preparatory minute or two of "Wake-Up Call
(Make It Happen)", and when it does arrive, it's nowhere near as heroic as I
expected. Examining the lyrics, though, I see that this makes sense. This is
a story of awakening, and so it ends not with triumph or rapture but with
quiet and slightly bleary determination. The self-help-mantra repetition of
"We can make it happen", with which the suite concludes, is a long way from
the polysyllabic rants of Script for a Jester's Tear and Fugazi, the
delirious love poetry of Misplaced Childhood or the drunken loneliness of
Clutching at Straws, but Fish sounds like he believes it, like perhaps he
owes it his life. We must be willing to try, the raingods suggest, things
that seem to be against our nature. Our nature, after all, may be precisely
our problem.
Marillion: Script for a Jester's Tear (remaster)
The grand Marillion reissue campaign, begun in 1997, has recently completed,
with the result that the band's first eight studio albums, four with Fish
and four with Steve Hogarth, are now all available in digitally remastered
form, in cases whose spines spell out the band's name, each album augmented
by a disc of bonus tracks and voluminous notes by the band members,
including lengthy reminiscences from Fish for his albums, and even notes
from cover-artist Mark Wilkinson. In a fit of consumer diligence, I have
subjected these remastered albums to my rigorous methodology for determining
whether it was a good idea to re-buy CDs I have, in fact, already purchased,
which is to put the new CD in my 1998 audiophile player with the idiotically
expensive connectors and the old one in my 1989 consumer player with the
frayed Radio Shack cables, and flip back and forth between the two with a
smug smile on my face. The new ones do sound better, actually, even with the
discs reversed respective to the players, but these albums were all
well-produced to begin with. And it hardly matters, because fans are going
to buy these editions for the bonus discs, and non-fans aren't going to buy
double-disc sets no matter how many bits they employ.
The Fish incarnation of Marillion produced a handful of important
b-sides, most of which were compiled once on B'Sides Themselves, but in the
new catalog order that collection is basically obsolete, and the b-sides are
distributed across the bonus discs for the contemporaneous albums, although
the use of subtly different versions means that completists will still want
both. The bonus disc for Script for a Jester's Tear gets two versions of the
definitive early battle-hymn single "Market Square Heroes", the histrionic
"Three Boats Down From the Candy", the sprawling nineteen-minute excursion
"Grendel" (perhaps Marillion's answer to Spinal Tap's "Jazz Odyssey"), demo
versions of the album tracks "Chelsea Monday" and "He Knows You Know", and
the halting "Charting the Single", which has one of the most charmingly
inept drum-machine loops in my awareness. The bonus tracks match the album's
demeanor, relentlessly overthought and fundamentally uncooperative, but
slipping into hauntingly lyrical asides at odd moments. As with Kate Bush's
first two albums, it took me a long time to learn to love these, and even
now part of my fondness for them is rueful, hearing all the ragged edges
that Marillion would later sand off, studying them like childhood photos of
an adult crush, and never really hearing them, regardless of the mastering
technology, because I can't clear my mind of what they would lead to.
Marillion: Fugazi (remaster)
There are only three Fish/Marillion b-sides that I consider as indispensable
as any of their album tracks. "Market Square Heroes" is one, and the bonus
disc for Fugazi adds the twelve-inch version of the second, "Cinderella
Search", the cascades of synth-bells, Fish's strained falsetto and the
chorus' weird lurch still sounding inexplicably marvelous to me, Steve
Rothery adding an early prototype of what would become his archetypical
guitar solo. There's also an alternate mix of "Assassing", intriguingly
rough demos of the album tracks "Punch & Judy", "She Chameleon", "Emerald
Lies" and "Incubus", and, for some bizarre reason nowhere explained, "Three
Boats Down From the Candy" again.
Marillion: Misplaced Childhood (remaster)
The bonus disc for Marillion's masterpiece, Misplaced Childhood, adds the
third of my three favorite b-sides, the prostitute ode "Lady Nina"
(originally the flipside of the "Kayleigh" single and later released on the
US tour EP Brief Encounter), which has another gloriously stilted
drum-machine groove but a chorus almost as buoyant as "Kayleigh"'s own. The
other b-side from Brief Encounter, the venomous "Freaks", follows, along
with an alternate mix of "Kayleigh" and the extended versions of "Lavender
Blue" and "Heart of Lothian". We then start over with a demo iteration of
the entirety of Misplaced Childhood, the third complete version of this
album now available (the second being the live one on The Thieving Magpie).
I don't listen to the live version very often, and I don't expect I'll
listen to this one repeatedly, either, as in many places these versions of
such familiar songs just sound wrong to me, but it's worth the price of the
reissue to hear it once and glean some notion of how much of one of my ten
favorite albums was in Marillion's heads and hands from the outset and how
much was only perfected at the end.
Marillion: Clutching at Straws (remaster)
The only real b-side left for Clutching at Straws' bonus disc is the
somewhat overwrought "Tux On". This arrives sandwiched between an alternate
mix of "Incommunicado" and the extended version of the original album's CD
bonus track, and later on are demo versions of "White Russian" and "Sugar
Mice", but the bulk of the disc is filled by seven half-finished recordings
from the abortive post-Clutching attempt to write another album with Fish, a
digression turned into a surreal spot-the-element game by the fact that many
musical passages from these songs ended up in different form in later
Hogarth/Marillion songs and some of the lyrics resurfaced on Fish's first
solo album. Hearing how many parts of Seasons End were already in existence
before Steve Hogarth's arrival also goes a long way towards explaining why
Holidays in Eden, for which he was around from the start, turned out so
differently. This is really one for the dedicated fans only, though, as if
you don't know the songs in which all these ideas ended up after the
diaspora, you'll have no idea what's remarkable about these sketches.
Marillion: Seasons End (remaster)
Hogarth-era Marillion haven't bothered with many b-sides, but Seasons End,
perhaps due to the backlog from the abandoned sessions with Fish, had two,
the dense and mesmerizing "The Bell in the Sea" and the shinier "The
Release". There's also the twelve-inch version of "The Uninvited Guest", and
then we're into the demos for "The King of Sunset Town", "Holloway Girl",
"Seasons End", "The Uninvited Guest", "Berlin" and "The Bell in the Sea". If
you listen to these reissues in order you're likely to end up very confused,
as between the bonus disc for Clutching at Straws, the regular version of
Seasons End, and then these demos, you will have heard most of the important
riffs three or four times each. With a little inspection and programming,
though, you can listen to each single song go through three distinct stages,
as the Fish demo evolves into the Hogarth demo and then into the final album
track. It's not quite the Pet Sounds box set, but I care about these songs,
as I don't about the Beach Boys.
Marillion: Holidays in Eden (remaster)
Holidays in Eden had a couple b-sides, too, the churning "How Can It Hurt"
and the lilting (if sinister) acoustic lullaby "A Collection", but the US
edition of the album included both of them, so they don't really count to me
any more. The cover of Rare Bird's "Sympathy" was one of two new songs on
the band's 1992 best-of, the other being the crashing, New Wave-ish "I Will
Walk on Water", included here in an alternate mix. There are also lovely
acoustic versions of "Cover My Eyes (Pain and Heaven)" and "Sympathy", and
then the by-now-familiar pile of demos, most interestingly a boisterously
mainstream "You Don't Need Anyone", which ended up never being used, and a
couple embryonic forms of later tracks that the band are shown making in the
video From Stoke Row to Ipanema.
Marillion: Brave (remaster)
The nominal b-sides from the Brave era were all just jams and outtakes, and
I have four versions of this, my least favorite Marillion record (although
"least favorite Marillion record" is wildly relative), between the album
itself, the live performance on Made Again, and the two complete demo
iterations on The Making of Brave, so I really didn't need more demos of it.
But what, was I going to not buy this? The acoustic version of "Alone Again
in the Lap of Luxury" is exquisite, and there are liner notes to read.
Marillion: Afraid of Sunlight (remaster)
Remastering an album that is only four years old is inane for any sake but
completeness, but they needed somewhere to put the "N", and if Fish was
going to get four reissues Hogarth wanted four too, so here it is. As with
Brave, the bonus disc is all demos and outtakes, which reveal, I think, the
interesting secret that except for the obvious temporary pop insanity of
"Cannibal Surf Babe", most of the difference between the meandering Brave
and the comparatively focused Afraid of Sunlight was due to more-decisive
editing.
Marillion: These Chains
Perhaps, after assembling two straight bonus discs of demos, Marillion
started to feel a little embarrassed about their lack of real b-sides. They
have a ways to go to be ready for a two-disc reissue of Radiation, as this
UK single for "These Chains" has only two other tracks, one of which, the
"Big Beat Mix" of "Memory of Water", was already a bonus on the US version
of the album, but the middle track, at least, is a b-side of the truest
sort, a live cover of Radiohead's "Fake Plastic Trees". This would have been
a perfect opportunity for Marillion to demonstrate why the
frequently-repeated idea that Radiohead are the new progressive rock is
ridiculous, but they actually play the song straight, letting the tension
between the ways in which Hogarth and Thom Yorke's voices resemble each
other and the ways that their attitudes differ drive the performance. When
Yorke sings these words, it sounds to me like the bitterness is threatening
to consume him, like the world is almost too disappointing to inhabit. When
Hogarth sings them, he sounds more like Christopher Robin, like even our
worst flaws are eminently lovable. It's hard to argue that Yorke is wrong,
but I'll admit to a preference for records, however grandly misguided, that
leaving me feeling better than I felt before they started, not worse. There
are enough ways to feel worse.
Copyright (c) 1999, glenn mcdonald
The War Against Silence is published weekly at www.furia.com/twas, and
posted to the newsgroup rec.music.reviews. It may not be distributed
elsewhere without my explicit permission.