In 2009, Classic Rock consulted a panel of rock DJs, rock critics, rock photographers, rock singers, rock musicians, rock promoters and rock stars to compile the definitive guide to the 100 Best British Albums of all time. We also spoke to the people who made those records, including Marillion, whose 1985 classic Misplaced Childhood made the chart at number 88.
One evening in November 2005, in Amsterdam’s Paradiso – one of the city’s loveliest live music venues – a gentleman of a certain age is simultaneously caressing his wife’s backside and singing loudly in her ear. ‘Kayleeeeigh…’ he implores, ‘I just want to say I love yew-ah…’
The wife gazes up at her man. She sings something back.
‘But Kayleigh I’m too scared to pick up the phone-ah…’
They finish together, in perfect harmony: ‘To hear yew’ve found another lover… to patch up our broken hooome-ah…’
It’s a rather touching vignette that is being played out in various forms between any number of couples throughout the club. A tune that is about to turn 21, from an album of a similar vintage, is proving that some emotions are both universal and permanently in vogue.
On the Paradiso stage, Fish is singing the song for the many hundredth time, but tonight he seems a little lost in it, too. The famous Kayleigh, long absent, has of late been on his mind.
“You know,” he had said earlier in the day, “I hadn’t spoken to her in 23 years. And I met her. It was… really strange.”
Kayleigh had, as predicted, found another lover. She has five kids, too. And it turned out that she had never heard Misplaced Childhood, the Marillion album that her love affair with Fish had inspired. Fish shook his head and laughed.
“Christ! She hadn’t heard the fucking album that I’d written about a period that really upset me… You know I’ve always said I’ll never tell anyone who she is. She has her own life. I made the name up. It’s a combination of two of her names, Kay and her middle name Lee, and now it’s listed in the Book Of Girls’ Names. I have this hideous fear that one day I’ll be in the bar, you know, dreadful old letch, goin’: ‘Alright darlin’. What’s your name, then?’ And she’ll say: ‘It’s Kayleigh.’ Fuckin’ hell! Can you imagine?”
Holland was one of the first European countries to take to Marillion, and Misplaced Childhood was the record that did it. Fish’s decision to reprise the entire album live at the end of 2005 brought a series of full houses, and the Paradiso show will appear as a DVD in the spring. After soundcheck, he sat on the club’s small back deck that overlooked a narrow walkway and inevitable canal.
“Misplaced… changed all our lives,” he said. “I think it made the band and destroyed the band simultaneously.”
You’ll find Marillion’s studio, The Racket Club, in the countryside outside Aylesbury – but you’ll need a hell of map. It squats in a low-rise, grey-brick business park at the end of a concrete drive that’s in no hurry to get you anywhere.
Externally it’s unlovely, yet inside it’s home. Ernest young men twiddle away on computers, while Marillion guitarist Steve Rothery and keyboard player Mark Kelly take a seat on one of its many comfy sofas to talk about a record that they acknowledge still defines their band to sections of the wider public.
For some years now, Marillion’s live set has not only excluded the hits from Misplaced Childhood, but also any songs at all from the four albums Fish made with them. The band’s reinvention with Steve Hogarth, Fish’s replacement, was completed long ago. Misplaced Childhood remains their biggest commercial success, but its place in their hearts seems less distinct.
When a CD copy is produced, Mark Kelly looks at it like he has been asked to ID a particularly dreadful police mug-shot: fascinated, appalled. “When was the last time I listened to it? Oh, when it came out, probably,” he laughs. “I don’t tend to listen to them that much once they’re done.” Therein lies the ambiguity of being confronted with our younger selves.
Back in 1984, it seemed natural for Marillion to make a concept album. They had cast themselves in the great British progressive rock tradition, after all. They were named after a Tolkien novel. The song most beloved of their fans was Grendel, a 20-minute tune that had been the B-side of the 12-inch version of their first single, Market Square Heroes, and unavailable elsewhere since.
Their first album, Script For A Jester’s Tear, had been euphorically received; Fish’s self-styled ‘bleeding heart poet’ and the band’s ability to produce music that was quirky and epic, occasionally at the same time, built a fan-base of almost maniacal devotion. Script… sold 70,000 copies.
Fugazi became one of the great examples of second-album syndrome. Marillion lavished a small fortune on it; it sold 60,000 copies. EMI might have dropped them had their manager, John Arnison, not stemmed the bleeding with a successful – and cheap – live mini-album, Real To Reel, while absolutely not telling the band that their future was uncertain.
“It was quite good for us that John didn’t give us the bad news, because we were quite bullish about what we wanted to do,” Mark Kelly says. “We were like, ‘Right, we’re going to do a concept album; 45 minutes of continuous music, with no breaks.’”
Lots of concept albums had dealt either directly or tangentially with notions of rock stardom. Misplaced Childhood set out to address one very particular element of it: the dislocation of life pre-fame from life post-fame. Fish decided that he had lost himself, or at least a part of himself, somewhere in that gap and he wanted to write about it.
Lots of concept albums were opaque, their meanings implied. This was sometimes because the writer wanted the listener to project their own feelings upon it. And it was sometimes because they didn’t make any sense. Fish’s concept was different. He knew the subject inside out, because the subject was himself. Or rather it was his two selves: Derek Dick, the son of a petrol station owner, from Dalkeith in Scotland, and Fish, the character he would variously describe as ‘bleeding-heart poet’ and ‘rootin’, tootin’ cowboy’.
“I’d always wanted to be a singer, and suddenly I was a singer in a band that was getting great reviews and people were saying: ‘This is going to be a really happening band,’” he says. “What depressed me about it was I was having a problem between Derek and Fish. There was a strange kind of schizophrenia thing happening. I was thinking that Derek was the guy off stage and Fish was the guy on it, which was a really stupid thing to do.
“So I’m on the road, confused about who I am, splitting up with my girlfriend who I’m completely heartbroken about, and a lot of drugs and alcohol involved at the same time… It was not a healthy environment. Kay was a major love of my life, but I was too young, too immature…” He tails off. “Kay was just the person that Derek really wanted to marry, but she wasn’t the person that Fish needed at that point in his career.”
The split came 18 months before he even considered writing about it. “We were already wedded to the concept idea. I’d bought a house in Aylesbury so I had my own pad. It was just me. All the other guys went back to their wives and their girlfriends and I was left on my own. When you came off the road, you were away from the road crew, you were away from the circus. It used to get depressing. Someone had sent me down a White Lightning acid, in the post. And I hadn’t done it for about three years. I was in a bad frame of mind. I dropped half of it and then cycled up to Steve Rothery’s…” He laughs hard.
“About an hour after I’d dropped the first half, I did the other. I went out of it, skydiving. And Steve drives me home. ‘Well, thanks then… Bye!’ And I just had this urge to write. I knew something was coming. And I started to go a bit crazy, quite electric. I was just staring at this painting I had and trying to calm myself down.
“I remember putting on Incubus [a track from Fugazi], and again I was going through this Fish/Derek thing. I was having this internal question and answer thing with Derek and Fish, and I just started to write. And I wrote this stream of consciousness.
“I was starting to freak out. I was on my own. I remember coming back downstairs and it was like… something’s happening. I felt a presence coming down the stairs behind me and into the room – and I knew it was the boy. I didn’t turn round, I just knew he was there. It had happened before, in Earls Court with Kay, and Kay had actually seen the boy on the stairwell. And it just calmed the whole thing down.
“All the heaviness, all the tension went, and I started writing. I rang Steve and I said: ‘I’ve got the idea for the concept. I’ve worked it all out.’”
It was a universal story – man falls down, rediscovers himself, gets back up again – and around it Fish worked his major theme: the dichotomy between Derek and Fish; the rootlessness of fame; the search for meaning in the face of success. The rest of the band, however, didn’t entirely buy it.
Mark Kelly: “I had got engaged to my girlfriend, John Arnison was engaged to his girlfriend, and Fish saw that as a threat.”
Steve Rothery: “Which in a way lends the whole thing an air of tragedy, because I remember how he was with Kay and I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so happy. He probably wouldn’t agree with that. I could see why he wanted to put all these thoughts down. A lot of it came down to his relationship with Kay and the fact that they were living together and it was all going so well. He seemed to deliberately destroy it, and after that he was the tortured artist almost trying to buy happiness in some way.”
Mark: “He definitely has this idea in his head that if he was to fuck up his life he’d have something juicy to write about. We used to laugh about it, but it was true. It was a catalyst for material.”
Steve: “He was always more in love with the idea of being a rock singer or being a singer in a band; we were a lot more grounded in the music. The whole package is what he bought into. And if you live your life by those criteria, then those things are going to happen to you. He was embracing the tragedy, if you like. It was something he was actively seeking. We’ve always been aware of it.”
Marillion wrote most of the music for the album during sessions at Barwell Court, a Victorian mansion near Chessington in Surrey, and demoed it at Bray in a studio owned by Gerry Anderson, the creator of the TV show Thunderbirds. Then EMI asked the band if they would record the album in Berlin (at the time still halved physically and ideologically by the Wall). EMI owned Hanza studios, where David Bowie had made his Heroes album in an atmosphere of Weimar decadence. Chris Kimsey was to be their producer.
Mark Kelly: “The whole reason we went to Berlin for Misplaced… was because it was cheap.”
Fish: “I was a very fucked-up person. I had virtually no personal life and I was lucky that I was in an alien environment. West Berlin was the perfect culture to make an album like that. We were in a hotel just round the corner from the studio, and at the bottom of the street was the Wall. It was winter, it was bleak. You walked around the corner and thought you were going to see Michael Caine or Richard Burton playing spies. I loved it.”
It was impossible for such a setting not to work its way into the late-night feel of the record.
Fish: “The main room in Hanza was the former SS Officers’ club. How much ambience do you want? We worked all night, we were totally vampirical… I mean, some of the guys would come in during the day, but 90 per cent of my sessions were done after the hour of 10 o’clock and before five in the morning. There was a bar downstairs, and we’d drink nappa and then go and work.
"We hardly had any money. I was sent on behalf of the band to ask the EMI accountant to ask for more. There was a decadent, hedonistic atmosphere in Berlin. We were in a restaurant one night and Mark dared me to walk through it naked. I won 400 deutschmarks, and it paid for my hooker bill that week. Ha! But the thing was, no one there objected. They just cheered when I did it.
“You were walking about the Wall, you were walking about these dense, overgrown gothic parks, and it fuelled the album. The drama was there. It was a great time for making music. It was really exciting.”
Steve: “Hit singles were never talked about. Kayleigh was just part of that first side of music we came up with. Our A&R guy, Hugh Stanley Clarke, wasn’t that keen on it.”
Mark: “He came out to Berlin, went for a meal, got pissed, and Kimsey took him to the studio to play him the album, and he fell asleep during the playback… After he’d heard it – and it still wasn’t finished, of course – he said: ‘Have you got anything else?’
“The music just sort of came together. I liked the idea of having themes that repeated throughout. I remember Steve coming up with the chorus for Kayleigh; the chorus sequence was originally a little tag on the end of a song that never made it onto Fugazi. I remember joining Kayleigh and Lavender together. The first side came very quick and it felt very natural. The second side was a lot harder and it took a lot longer to shape it. We’d have a blackboard with things like ‘The Joni Mitchell Bit’ or something, identifying the sections, and we’d go: ‘Maybe this will fit with this…’ The second side, there is an up and then down, up and then down.”
With some skill, Fish created some arresting contrasts of his own. Perspectives switch from the LSD trip in Aylesbury to the doomed love affair with Kay to a night with a prostitute in Lyon. Pivotal sections on growing up in Scotland book-end the death of Fish’s friend John Mylett, the drummer in a band called Rage.
Fish: “It’s key in a way. Before that there are these sort of continual shallow collisions, trying to find some sort of real loving. Milo [John Mylett] happened when we were out on the road. Me and Mark were in Toronto with our tour manager, Paul Lewis. John Mylett was a Jim Morrison-type character, a goodlooking guy. He went away on his honeymoon and got killed in a car crash, and the irony was just horrific. I was just about to start doing interviews and Paul came into the room and said: ‘Milo’s dead.’
“John was a kind of guru for me. I used to talk to him about how to deal with stuff, and I was really, really upset. And the interviews started, and the guy would be, ‘Oh, I’m sorry… But anyway…’ And I got angry because you weren’t allowed that private space. If John had been a major star on a major label it would have been: ‘Sorry… not today.’ I thought I was being dehumanised and depersonalised. And I thought: ‘What have I really given up?’
“I had found a crossroads, and it was scary at the time. That night in Aylesbury, I think I basically did break down. And the whole album was rebuilding from that. “Lyrically the album still makes as much sense to me now. It’s like going into the attic and finding an old jacket that still fits, and it looks great and it’s back in style and it works. But I am a man now, and back then I was boy. It’s a great album, and I am really proud of it.”
Misplaced Childhood was released in spring 1985. On the album sleeve was the ‘boy’ character who Fish had envisioned during the acid trip in Aylesbury. The album became an immediate and overwhelming success. Kayleigh was a No.2 single. With some irony, the video featured Fish’s new girlfriend and future wife Tammi playing the part of Kay.
“I’ve always worn my heart on my sleeve,” Fish said. “I’m someone who came out of a culture that believed that a problem shared is a problem halved. I worked with a band who didn’t believe that. They were predominantly middle-class English, and communication within the band was exceedingly difficult. I’ve read, for example, a book about Marillion, and Steve said a couple of things in that book that made it obvious that around 1982-1983 he was having some severe grudges against me that he never let come out. And if that’s what we built our relationship on, then our relationship must have been pretty shit all the way through.”
Steve Rothery: “I was in this café bar underneath the studio in Berlin with Hugh Stanley Clarke. Basically Fish was already wanting to do a solo album. He had this idea: there were these people in Germany at the time who’d committed suicide by driving the wrong way down the autobahn until they hit something, and he thought about a concept album based on the songs this guy was listening to as he was trying to commit suicide. Hugh wasn’t that keen.
“At the same time, I approached Hugh about this project that I had, more of a rock thing. The next thing I know, Fish had me pinned against the wall, accusing me of keeping all of my best ideas for my solo album. Which was about as far from the truth as you can ever get. Everything I wrote at the time was used. His ego had been hurt and he wanted to take it out on somebody.
“That was kind of like a switch thrown in my mind, that this guy is out of control. And from that moment on I sort of emotionally distanced myself from him. Fish is a very complex personality. Sometimes you feel close to him, and at other times you feel like he couldn’t give a shit. And from that moment on that was kind of it.
“I’d had a conversation with John Arnison just after he started managing the band, and we talked then about when Fish was going to leave. That was back in 1982. You could see it coming like an express train, and it was just a case of how fast it was moving and when it was going to hit you. His ego and his drive and his ambition were such that he was going to do this at some point.”
Mark: “His whole attitude was that people he worked with could stick around for as long as they were useful to him, and then he was quite prepared to discard anybody and everybody when the time was right. Because we were so successful, people were happy and excited and it was glossed over. It was when we started writing the next album that things started falling apart. By the time we did the Clutching At Straws tour we were hardly even speaking to Fish.”
The split came in 1989. Fish went solo, and Marillion found their replacement in Steve Hogarth, then singing in a band called the Europeans.
“I always got the impression that Fish didn’t understand what was special about the band,” Steve Rothery says. “It wasn’t just all about him, it was a mutual chemistry, a uniqueness that we had together.”
The interview almost done, Rothery stands up and expresses some mild surprise at how easily his emotions had come back to him. But it didn’t really seem that strange. The same had happened to Fish when he was remembering Kay and his general alienation. Perhaps that’s where the real strength of Marillion’s Misplaced Childhood album lies – in the raw passions that it harbours.
I ask Mark what he thinks about Fish reprising the record for the anniversary, and he says: “I’d have been quite interested to have a look, actually. Our relationship with Fish has mellowed over the years apart from a few little things… It’s alright, though, it really is.”
This feature originally appeared in Classic Rock 91 (April 2006)
