MARILLION - Fugazi (1984)

Even with the shorter (on average, not universally) record lengths in those days, I've never understood how bands in the early years of their career can pump out a record, tour constantly, and then release another record the next year.*  Somehow between 1983 and 1984 Marillion went through about twelve drummers between firing Mick Pointer and recruiting the great Ian Mosley, did a big tour, wrote a batch of mostly new songs, released Fugazi, went back on tour, and seemingly immediately got to work on the prep for what would become Misplaced Childhood the following year.  Nothing like being young and energetic.  Or so I've heard.  Not convinced that I was ever either of those things.  So, speaking of energetic things...

Track One:  "Assassing"

Opening with a weird vaguely Arabian intro that seems to mostly be an excuse for the revitalized rhythm section of Pete and Ian to show that they rock.  Although the rest of the song still has a groove to it that one doesn't generally associate with '80s prog.  Eventually the intro resolves into an iconic riff and we're off, with Fish proclaiming himself an assassin of sorts with words.  I don't know if I'd have had any idea where the song was coming from had I not read that it was specifically inspired by Fish feeling that he had to be the one to personally kick his friend out of the band in the early days (and that the topic was on their minds after having just kicked Mick out of the band).  Or that he has since sorta-apologized for the title's cringy attempt at a portmaneau of "assassin" and "sassing."  "Assassing" goes hard - in large part thanks again to the rhythm section of the band - and gets some catchiness from the way the soaring chorus, the keyboard fanfares, and the repetition of "my friend" play off each other.  I can't quite recommend "Assassing" whole-heartedly - I think it's like a lot of songs on the debut record in that it's too shrill, too messy, and too occasionally off key to be total classic.  I do like the song, and it sets the stage nicely for what's to come.  

Track Two:  "Punch And Judy"

Marillion's attempt to be short, and, uh, punchy.  We go dark pretty quickly with Fish's imagined view of married life.  There's a gentle bridge that contrasts how things started - "whatever happened to pillow fights?  Whatever happened to jeans so tight, Friday nights?" with the aggression of the rest of the song, featuring a couple who've reached the point of literally wishing for each others' deaths ("just slip her these pills and I'll be free").  Truly written like a man who'd go on to get divorced something like three times.  The lyrics about little fights are a bit cringeworthy when read but they're delivered too quickly to dwell on and the song is over within about three and a half minutes.  "Punch And Judy" is a caustic slice of hard - by Marillion standards - rock, and it works as such.

Track Three:  "Jigsaw"

Coming off the heels of maybe the record's nastiest song about relationships, "Jigsaw" gives us the ballad and a more mature look at the end of a relationship.  Six and a half minutes of high-pitched wailing isn't always a winning recipe, but "Jigsaw" is a triumph for two reasons: sonic appeal and writing.  Sonically there are two main elements, a sparse keyboard par for the beeps-and-vox verses ad a killer hook that makes for a powerful chorus.  The song is incredibly wordy yet makes it work in its favor; I love the contrast between the soft rambly verses:

We are pilots of passion sweating the flight on course
To another summit conference, another breakfast time divorce
Screaming out a cease-fire, snow-blind in an avalanche zone

with the directness of the chorus, with the band dropping in to cut through all that:

Stand straight, look me in the eye and say goodbye

From there, amazing use of a key change to bring us into the outro.  I'll admit that I'm not sure how to take "I'll be seeing you again" here.

Track Four:  "Emerald Lies"

Not a favorite of many.  I gotta say, I do like it, despite its uneveness.  The contrast between the pastoral keyboard parts and medieval metaphors and the ugly story about accusations and innocence appeals to me.  Once Steve gets ahold of a good riff midway through the song, he's able to steer it to a conclusion that resists attempts to jam it off track.  

Track Five:  "She Chameleon"

And then that happened.  Why?  Why would anyone in their right mind record this?  The first half of the song consists almost entirely of an irritating repetitious high-pitched organ part that would have been a perfect choice if looking to torture detainees in borderline illegal prisons and not for much of anything else.  That's paired with a whiny theatrical vocal from Fish that's almost as annoying.  Then there's a bridge surrounding a guitar solo that I guess is okay... but hey, the organ part is back, and more theatrical caterwauling vocals about being "betraaayed!" as if the encounter wasn't portrayed as a hookup from the beginning.  Women just be evil, amirite, guys?  Oh, and the fucking thing is almost eight minutes long.  

Most seem to agree that the song is mostly about groupies, but one bit of information I heard somewhere and can't source is that "She Chameleon" arose from an attempt to respond to the accusations of sexism from "Three Boats Down From The Candy."  How on Cthulhu's Earth do you react to an assignment of "write something that's not sexist" with fucking "She Chameleon?"  I think what Fish, if it's a real statement, presumably meant is that where "Three Boats" depicts a male character using and discarding a female character, this song has the female in complete control from start to finish.  Personally I'd be more interested in a song that doesn't start with the basic assumption that men and women are inherently in conflict with each other, but what do I know, I'm not the sort of rock star who inspires fawning blog posts about everything I've ever written.

The thing that blows my mind is that "She Chameleon" was a bit of a groupie itself, hanging around the periphery of Marillion-land since the very early days and refusing to go away.  There's a mostly guitar-based version on the Early Stages box set that's equally dull but shorter and less annoying.  At that point there was a totally different vocal melody, and really only a few motifs that would survive to be part of the album version.  What was so special about this crappy lyric that they were so determined to turn it into a song?  Thankfully this seemed to get it out of their system, as I can't see any evidence that anyone involved ever performed the song live once it was released, except for a snippet as part of a medley Fish did during the Internal Exile era.  Still baffling.  Complete misfire, as far as I'm concerned.  

Track Six:  "Incubus"

Well, can Marillion write a track that's even more a collection of bits than the stuff on Script and even more bitter than "Punch And Judy" or "She Chameleon?"  They're determined to try.  And you know what?  "Incubus" mostly works for me.  The "whoa-ah" chanting at the beginning really shouldn't work; it does.  That guitar riff does a lot of work carrying us through the early portions of the piece, even with the slower parts.  I'll say that the song has me until about 4 min in, when it finally hits a tedious rambling slow patch that doesn't really follow from what came before, killing the momentum.  It wins me back with the ending from the "waiting for the prompt" scheme.

Lyrically I don't know that there's much to dissect.  The spurned narrator sees himself as an incubus, tormenting an ex and making her life a living hell, with a strongly sexual overtone to the whole thing.  Yeah, ugh, but a lot of this is metaphorical, heavily drawing on the language of photography and film.  The wordplay is actually pretty enjoyable ("that would only be developing the negative view, and you had to be exposed..." etc.), culminating in the way the phrase "you've played this scene before" both starts and ends the song (and finds its way into the middle).  Fish generally introduces the song live as an ode to porography, but a few of his rambling song intros make it sound like the specific scenario he had in mind was the joy of holding the threat of revenge porn over someone one hates.  Again, ugh.  I feel a little dirty enjoying "Incubus" as much as I do.

Track Seven:  "Fugazi"

Some songs make me wish I had the language to better describe why one piece of music is better to me than another.  I comment often that too much of prog rock from my perspective consists of a bunch of barely connected musical ideas mashed together and a bunch of instrumental noodling rather than, you know, real songs.  (Fish himself famously thought Marillion was going that way around the time he decided to leave the band.)  "Fugazi" is a song consisting of a bunch of elements and non-repeating musical phrases that I love as a song.  If I were better at this I'd explain exactly why it works where so many others fail.  Maybe it's just that each bit works so well on its own, or maybe it's the way the lyrics, which see a narrator who's finally looking outward rather than inward, tie it all together into one worldview.  The mournful and memorable slow intro followed by the resolution into Mark's pulsating and lively keyboard part as Fish sing-sings and speak-sings in exactly the right proportions as his disgust with the world comes through, followed by the descent into the low notes and echoey effects, followed by the way Fish uses the "do-do-do-do you realize" repetition to vocally build into his more musical declaration that  "the world is totally fugazi" followed by a final note of almost hope on the deliriously catchy "where are the prophets?" part that actually benefits from being held off until the very very end of the song.  Love all of those elements, while also feeling that somehow each one is the logical progression from what happened right before.  "Fugazi" is the rare eight-minute song in which every note seems to have a purpose, with nothing wasted.  Absolutely greater than the sum of its parts.  Brilliant.

NON-ALBUM:  "Cinderella Search"

Famously** not finished at the time of Fugazi's release and often cited as one that really ought to have been on the record proper.  It was a little hard to track down an appropriate version of "Cinderella Search" to review on the streaming services since it was released in various cuts of various lengths for various releases, including a four-minute single edit that cuts out the whole ending.  Based on how they were playing the song on the live recordings from the time, I think I more or less know how "Cinderella Search" sounds.  And... uh, I don't say this often, but this is a song torpedoed by Fish's vocal performance.  Obviously, about heartbreak, what else is new.  And quite a nice riff and melody during the first few minutes... unfortunately with Fish mincing about all over it doing his tuneless affected falsetto in giant chunks.  I find the music rock solid in most of its sections.  I find the vocals almost unlistenable.

Lyrically there are some good moments, as the narrator thinks he may have found a soulmate and learns otherwise.

Maybe it was infatuation or the thrill of the chase

Maybe you were always beyond my reach, and my heart was playing safe

But was that love in your eye I saw?  Or the reflection of mine?

I'll never know for sure, you never really gave me time

 

I think the song overall calls for more vulnerability and less anger, both in the performance and the writing.  I actually understand why there are ongoing (occasional) calls for longstanding Marillion frontman Steve Hogarth to take a crack at "Cinderella Search" (he's sung abbreviated versions in the past).  Ol' "h" actually has a voice with the right mix of soulfulness and intensity to do something worthwhile with a lyric like this.***

Overall thoughts:

I'm probably going to write a little more about this in future posts when I talk about my own discovery of Fish's music, but Fugazi was the first Fish record I ever heard (and "Assassing" thus the first Fish song I ever heard).  That was in the name of exploring Marillion, since I'd heard a smattering of their post-Fish material.  The podcast I was listening to at the time was doing a few eps about Marillion and profiled a "trilogy" of Marillion records from 1984, 1994, and 2004, to show their development as a band over the years.  In contrast to something like Brave, Fugazi sounded not only dated, but also jerky and harsh (although I really liked the title track even then).  I did recognize right away that "Fugazi" (the song) was a classic.  The rest didn't really click.  I later committed to a full Marillion run through (kinda wish I'd been blogging then, heh) which ended up, to my surprise, becoming a Marillion and Fish runthrough.  On this later listen Fugazi still sounded harsh and out of place, coming between its less angry brother-albums released in adjacent years.

I'm actually kind of surprised at how much the record has grown on me.  Or I guess really more surprised at the fact that it took so long given my affinity for hard rock and howls of pain in musical form.  I think there's a lot of vitality here that occupies a sweet spot between polished and intense.  The songs hit more than they miss, and hit harder than the ones from Script.  One has a record that's composed just tightly enough to sound as though it's raw and primal.  Before or after, Marillion wouldn't have been able to give us a song quite like "Fugazi."  Fugazi (the record) is overall the sort of album that'll always be there for the angry young man in all of us.  A little uneven, sure, but that's youth.  Do the self-obsession and the amount of anger get a little trying?  Sure, but thats also youth.  

And honestly, if too much self-obsession and anger are a turn off, maybe Fish isn't the artist for you?

Favorite track [album only]:  "Fugazi"

Runner up:  "Jigsaw"

Least favorite track:  "She Chameleon"

Overall rating:  4/5

Definitive running list of records by Fish/Marillion that I have profiled so far, in order of what I have decided is unambiguously their quality

1)  Fugazi

2)  Market Square Heroes (single)

3)  Script For A Jester’s Tear

We continue with Misplaced Childhood whenever I get around to it!

*"Because cocaine" is the tempting answer, but that's both glib and only part of the story.

**"Famous" among the tiny subset of nerds that cares about Marillion/Fish

***This is the only time anyone ever has suggested, or ever will, that h would do better than Fish on a song from this era.***

****Chill, I'm just kidding.*****

*****Sort of.