Marillion singer Steve Hogarth has been updating fans on the band's forthcoming album An Hour Before It's Dark.
The band recently announced the title of their upcoming nineteenth studio album, with one lucky fan who guessed the title from a simple acronym winning tickets to every gig on the band's upcoming A Light At The End Of The Tunnel tour.
"It would seem that much of the foreboding in our last album FEAR turned out to be well-founded," says Hogarth. "For this one I set out to avoid writing about the pandemic at all costs because I thought every other artist would be. When push came to shove though, it was impossible not to reference it. It has become part of life so there’s no ignoring it creatively just as there’s no ignoring it, period.
- "Chris Squire asked me to join Yes. I was extremely flattered." Astonishing revelations from Steve Hackett when we interviewed him about 2019's At The Edge Of Light
- “I thought I’d have to sell my house. The manager suggested we got part-time jobs”: Marillion were facing oblivion. Then they made This Strange Engine and found a way forward
"However, the pandemic isn’t our biggest problem, the mass extinction and the climate-gone-mad is where we really need to blow our economies - personal and national. We’re going to have to save the earth whether we’re hippies or billionaires. That’s got to be our number one priority. We’re gonna have to be hard on ourselves. It was this thought that shaped the overall lyrical arc of this album.
"Despite the bleak concept, musically it’s rich and perhaps our most upbeat work for many years. There is also a love song to Leonard Cohen and a song about a big diamond."
In related Marillion news, it was recently announced that Mark Kelly's Marathon would support Big Big Train on their upcoming 2022 tour dates.
