And so we come, eventually, to what is without question Marillion's best-selling album and the final one in the trilogy described by Fish as "bedsit thoughts", "hotel thoughts" and "home thoughts". It would also feature something of a change in Marillion's style, with the by-now iconic Jester being retired (you see him only on the back cover of the album, escaping out the window) and Fish using the last album as a way of tackling and dealing with his burgeoning alcoholism.
Misplaced childhood (1985) produced by Chris Kimsey on the EMI label (Capitol for the USA)
ALthough there were similar themes and ideas running though the first two albums (I've already talked about the "kitchen sink drama" on "Fugazi") this was Marillion's first actual concept album. It would also be the one that would almost --- almost! --- give them a number one hit single and which
would give them a number one album. After this, anyone who didn't already know Marillion at least knew
of them, and Fish and the boys had officially arrived. The story running through the album concerns mostly the trials and traumas of childhood, but given that Fish is said to have conceived the idea during an extended acid trip, there's a lot of allegorical, semi-autobiographical and downright weird material on it.
1. The pseudo-silk kimono (2:14) --- Essentially an introduction to, or overture of sorts to the album, it's short as you can see and it opens on a deep, heavy keyboard melody from Kelly as Fish sings of what appears to be the safety and comfort of the womb, and watches a spirit approach him in the form of a child, which either evokes his own memories or dispenses the child's, we're never sure which, as he sings "The spirit of a misplaced childhood is rising to speak his mind". The song is almost entirely driven on Kelly's synths and like every other track on this album segues directly into the next, making the whole thing one long piece of music, apart from the ending of side one.
2. Kayleigh (4:03) --- Drawn directly from his own past and now the most famous and well-recognised Marillion song despite its being over twenty years old, "Kayleigh" speaks of a doomed love affair and Fish's regrets over same, with the vain hope he could go back in time and repair the damage done. It's a bouncy, uptempo track driven on Rothery's almost poppy guitar but with a very prog rock squealy solo in the middle (shortened for the single, damn them!) and it was so well received --- surprisingly really, given that the band had had two albums prior to this whose singles had not touched the charts except in the most fleeting way --- that the single went all the way to number two, in a sad twist of fate only failing to reach the very top because there was a charity single holding the number one slot, and you can't fight a song written to commemorate the victims of a footballing disaster, nor would you want to. Still, what could have been...
3. Lavender (2:25) --- Perhaps the first ever instance I've heard of where a song had to be
lengthened in order to make the three-minute limit for a single! Almost acoustic from the beginning and driven on Mark Kelly's soft piano, Lavender takes the old nursery rhyme and updates it, becoming Marillion's first true ballad since "Jigsaw" and certainly their shortest song, at least up to then, and probably afterwards too. In order to make the song long enough to be released as a single, Fish had to add an extra verse and because it trails off directly into "Brief encounter" Kelly had to take the piano ending that appears a little later in "Blue angel". Still one my favourite songs from them, simple and innocent with a veneer of sardonicism over it, and Marillion's second most successful single, taking it to the number five slot.
4. Bitter suite (7:56) --- Marillion's first multi-part composition, "Bitter suite" is comprised of five parts, each of which I will treat separately here.
(i) Brief encounter: With an atmospheric introduction similar to the beginning of "Assassing", consisting of mostly drum rolls and cymbal flurries, it's Steve Rothery's guitar and Pete Trewavas's bass that lead the melody as Fish mostly speaks a soliliquoy, setting the scene for what is to follow. Dolorous, pealing bells in the background add to the bleak, stark atmosphere here, and in Fish's spoken vocal you can really hear his Scottish accent leaking through.
(ii) Lost weekend: A short section, in which Fish begins actually singing, the music not really changing all that much, getting a little stronger. The lyric seems to concern a father's disappointment with his less-than-beautiful daughter, as he moans "She was a wallflower at sixteen, she'll be a wallflower at thirty-four."
(iii) Blue angel: The action shifts to Lyons, in France, where Fish meets a callgirl, whom we may presume is the daughter mentioned above, and has an amorous liaison with her, noting with apparent disinterest the "ring of violet bruises, pinned upon her arm", attesting to some sort of abuse. The percussion cuts in properly at the start of this, a chiming sort of guitar from Rothery taking the melody after a soaring solo and the musical theme from "Lavender" returns, carrying the rest of this part of the song. As mentioned already, the piano ending and guitar solo to this section is the one Kelly and Rothery took to end the extended version of "Lavender" for the single.
(iv) Misplaced rendezvous: The guitar riff from "The Web" returns in part to carry the first part of this section, as Fish muses on it "getting late for scribbling and scratching at the paper", and I must admit I've often wondered that this part is about. The line "The weekend career girl never boarded the plane. They said this could never happen again: so wrong." has always confused me and I really don't know what he's trying to say here. But it's a short part anyway and really only serves to provide a short lull before we head into the closing section.
(v) Windswept thumb: This in fact segues into the next track, and opens on the piano line that begins the title track on "Fugazi", so you can see a lot of stuff is being reused here. The final part of the song seems to concern a drifter, moving on, never staying in one place too long. It's even shorter, with just piano and bass accompanying Fish's voice before the whole suite melds with "Heart of Lothian".
5. Heart of Lothian (4:02) --- Although not broken up into as many parts as "Bitter suite", this is divided in two, with the first part, "Wide boy", describing the antics of the local lads down the pub on a Friday night --- "The trippers of the light fantastic ... spray their pheremones on, this perfume uniform" --- as they try to bag a partner for their bed --- "Rootin' tootin' cowboys, lucky little ladies at the watering holes, they'll score the Friday night goals." It's basically an affirmation of life and fun, though couched in a very sad and depressed way, almost with an "is this all there is?" idea, and an opportunity for Fish to revel in his Scottish ancestry as he sings "I was born with a heart of Lothian."
If "Wide boy" is the drunken night out, then "Curtain call" is the morning after, a serious comedown where Fish just wants to be left alone to nurse his hangover, but "the man from the magazine wants another shot" and he has to play the part he's expected to play. Kelly takes over here, a big, droning, thick synth line supporting Fish's tired vocal, as at the end he sees what he has become: "And the man in the mirror had sad eyes".
6. Waterhole (Expresso bongo) (2:13) --- As its parenthesesed title implies, this short piece features a bongo rhythm from Ian Mosley, with an opening quite similar to "The psuedo silk kimono", then frantic keyboard strokes from Kelly, hard riffs from Rothery and Fish at his most manic as he seems to talk about the same subject tackled in "Wide boy"; it's almost a continuation of that song, though I think this time it concerns Fish when he is now famous as opposed to the previous song where he was a nobody trying to score, and probably failing. Now everybody wants to be his friend, and every woman wants to sleep with him, and it seems he's bored with it. A very short song, and leads into another short one.
7. Lords of the backstage (1:52) --- A sparkly keyboard line and sprightly rhythm drives this again short track as Fish seems to be gloating at an unnamed lover, telling her how successful he has become. The melody is very slightly reminiscent of "Wide boy" and is uptempo and features tough guitar and hard-hitting drums, chiming keyboards which again leads directly into the next track.
8. Blind curve (9:29) --- The second multi-composition (not counting "Heart of Lothian") and certainly the longest, at this point, studio album track (as mentioned, the live version of "Forgotten sons" runs for over ten minutes and of course "Grendel" is over seventeen, but that was never on any original album) this is also split into five sections.
(i) Vocal under a bloodlight: As everything slows down in a dark, doomy melody the basic theme from the ending of "Script for a jester's tear" comes back, with high keening guitar and slow, measured drumming, another short piece as Fish thrashes out the differences in his lovelife. "Last night you said I was cold", he sings, "untouchable: a lonely piece of action from another town", while admitting "I just want to be free, I'm happy to be lonely."
(ii) Passing strangers: The song slows down more but acquires a harder guitar edge and includes a great emotional solo from Rothery, the basic story continuing and then changing in part three.
(iii) Mylo: On a more uptempo keyboard line and then chimy guitar, Fish sings about Mylo, whomever he may be. The lyric contains a great line, a typical example of Fish's talent for mixing up concepts and yet having them sound right: "Some of us go down in a blaze of osbcurity, some of us go down in a haze of publicity". He's badgered by a reporter, ambushed and so he reluctantly starts giving the interview but the reporter seems disinterested; perhaps Fish is not saying the things he wants to hear. "So I talked about conscience and I talked about pain, and he looked out the window and it started to rain."
(iv) Perimeter walk: Like "Brief encounter", this is a spoken vocal, no singing from Fish, with a heavy, ominous synthline from Kelly and some softly crying guitar from Rothery. Fish's voice comes almost from far away for much of the piece, as if he's mumbling or muttering the lines, and there appear to be either backing vocals or a multi-track doing the same thing. As the music gets stronger in the background, the word "childhood" and then, inevitably, "misplaced childhood" come through clearly, until he's snarling the lines and we power into the closer to this song.
(v) Threshold: The most dramatic and punchy of the parts, it returns to the theme of "Forgotten sons" as Fish rails about war --- "I see priests, politicians, heroes in black plastic body-bags under nations' flags. I see children pleading with outstretched hands, drenched in napalm: this is no Vietnam!" --- and the injustices in the world --- "I see children with vacant stares, destined for rape in the alleyways: does anybody care?"
9. Childhood's end? (4:33) --- On a lovely little guitar line and a rising synth melody, this is the sun shining through after the rain, the calm after the storm, the hope amid the hopelessness as Fish realises that there is perhaps strength in the innocence of childhood. It bounces along nicely but with a soft melody, until the chorus where it gets a little stronger. "I see, it's me", Fish sings, "I can do anything! I'm still the child! Cos the only thing misplaced was direction, and I found direction. There is no childhood's end!" Great solo from Rothery and a driving beat from Mosley and Trewavas, then Kelly takes us out on a descending arpeggio, very Genesisesque.
10. White feather (2:25) --- Perhaps an unnecessary closer, I certainly thought so. A militaristic drumbeat as the song marches along and Fish recounts Marillion's rise to fame. "I hit the streets back in '81, found a heart in the gutter and a poet's crown." A rather superfluous children's choir accompanies the fadeout, but as a closer I find this very weak, possibly the only weak track on the album, which is a pity as a bad ender can totally destroy the feel of an entire album. This doesn't happen here though --- "Misplaced childhood" is too good a product for one small component to ruin it --- and I suppose "Childhood's end?" does not finish satisfactorily enough, but maybe a reprise of "The pseudo-silk kimono?" Anyway, there it is, it's the track that ends the album and I'm afraid I don't have much positive to say about it, but it's something of an aberration on an otherwise close to perfect album.
The thing about concept albums, and particularly those in the progressive rock genre, is that it's often hard to interpret what they're about. Okay, "2112", we all get that, and "Dark side of the moon" to a degree. "The wall", yes, too, but what about "The Lamb"? Wtf is that about? This then leads me into the trap of trying to figure out what these songs mean, and how they all come together to form one entity and present a vision, when in fact I could be way off. My brother's simplistic explanation, for everything from "Supper's ready" to "Dark side" was, "it's about a mad fella!" and while I'd like to use that getout clause, I don't think that would be fair.
So if someone else knows I'm wrong then by all means enlighten me, but I think if you conceive a whole album while dropping acid it's a fair bet some of it may sound better to you when you're stoned than when you sobre up. But anyway, the basic premise remains, that "Misplaced childhood" is a journey backwards though youth, growing up, mistakes made, chances missed and by a roundabout route coming to some sort of acceptance of who you are, and your place in the world.
But more than that, it's a fine example of later progressive rock, a marker to show concept albums are not yet dead, and a damn fine album. Witness the fact that it is far and away Marillion's best chart performance --- both for album and the singles from it --- and yet is a concept, basically ten pieces of music that flow almost seamlessly together, and you'll get some sense of how incredible it is that the album sold so well. Okay, probably mostly to fans, but if that were the case why didn't "Script" or "Fugazi" perform better in the charts? Certainly some people who had never heard Marillion before must have taken a chance on the album based upon what they heard on the singles. Whether they were disappointed, confused, annoyed with what they heard thereafter or whether they became fans is something I can't say. But your average singles buyer traditionally hates concept albums; they want to listen to something they can pick tracks from, listen to when they want to. They're not overly fond of having to sit down and listen to someone tell a story through music.
And that's what you have to do with this album. Yes you can listen to tracks out of sequence, but it is somewhat like only watching certain episodes of your favourite TV show, or coming in during the second hour of a movie, or leaving after the first. You lose something by not experiencing the whole thing, and the fact that enough people were willing to buy the album to send it right to the top is to me nothing short of amazing. No Marillion album after this would ever achieve this feat, although the next album would make it to number two and spawn a top twenty single, which would signal the end of Marillion's flirtation with the charts.
The end of one era --- that featuring their mascot, the Jester --- and the final album in a trilogy that began with "Script for a jester's tear", "Misplaced childhood" was always going to be hard to follow. It took them another two years before they tried, though personally I think they failed to achieve that until 1994.
But that, my friends, is a story for another post...