Tuesday, July 27, 2004
E-Communicado
I'm afraid I have some bad news for you. Marillion are determined to continue to record and their fans are determined to continue to piss you off by putting them into the charts again and again until you get used to the fact that they are here and here to stay.
So it's nice to know that the band apparantly only exists to annoy us, which lends credence to our theory that the entire purpose of the world is to make our life a misery. We felt that that was going to be that and, while we were mildly amused that our throwaway snide comment had caused a reaction, we weren't going to bother about the e-mail as, let's be honest, as pieces of hate mail go it's hardly the worst the world has ever seen.
Clearly the writer thought much the same thing, as 15 hours later we recieved a second e-mail from the same fan, which begins as follows:-
Marillion, for your information, are roughly the same age as Morrissey, U2 and REM and are considerably younger than Elton John.
He opens, apropos of very little. U2 and Elton John are both as interesting as an Open University documentary on outdoor mining, while REM haven't really done anything earth-shatteringly fantastic since Stand. While the fact that Morrisey is releasing fantastic new music should surely teach Marillion the lesson that you don't have to be rubbish, just because you're in your forties. Of course, the fact that, unlike Marillion, Morissey was quite good in the past may explain why he's quite good in the present, but never mind. He continues:-
Your comments prove that you are a fool. You claim to have had talent in a previous life, but I find even that to be dubious. Marillion are going to continue to have hits because their fans value their musicianship and the effort they put in. Get used to it.
We're quite chuffed by being called a fool, and we do hope that we eventually get upgraded to the level of 'bloody idiot'. We would like to point out that calling a song which limped into the top 30 before boomeranging straight back out again a "hit", is a somewhat unusual use of the word. We are going to take his advice on board and try and "get used to it", though. We don't reckon it's going to be too hard to get used to the concept of a band continually selling to the same, ever-dwindling, group of fans, briefly appearing in the top 40 once every few months and only ever troubling our own ears if we actively search out the song for review purposes as radio play, for some strange reason, appeared to be very thin on the ground.
Younger readers, i.e. anyone who's yet to discover the joys of a comfy pair of slippers, Radio 2 and grouting, may well be wondering exactly who the hell Marillion are, so for their benefit and, quite frankly, to annoy our e-mail correspondent, here's a brief history of the band.
Marillion were Prog Rock, a style of music that has, thankfully, joined the likes of Topless Darts and Actually Caring About The Royal Family in the box marked embarassing things of our past that we don't like to talk about. Prog, for those who are unaware of the style, at best consists of taking a normal length tune and stretching it out to unbearable lengths, at worst it doesn't even bother to include the tune part. Marillion hit the height of their fame in the mid-eighties when they released Kayleigh, cursing thousands of prog-rock daughters with a hitherto unconsidered christian name. Eventually though even their vocalist, Fish, got too embarassed by their music and left the band. Remember, this is a man who considers calling himself Fish to be a non-embarasing thing to do (We realise that as we post under the name of 'Flum' we're very much pebble-dashing a greenhouse here, but never mind). After that Steve Hogarth took over and, with this new vocalist, they decided that the lower reaches of the charts were very much where they wanted to make their home. With the advent of the internet, they've done remarkably well in mobilising their fan base to actually get off their arses and support the band, even getting them to actually pay for their recordings. With this in mind we will soon be launching Marilli-Off, a campaign to raise enough money to persuade them to stop releasing albums. We hope you'll give generously.
Right, can we get back to talking about pop music now?
