If anyone thought that Progressive Rock was dead in the water as the 1980s began, then certainly the cowbell that had once proudly rang out was joining the fat lady in beginning to sound decidedly croaky and worn out.
By early 1983 Genesis had moved so far from the Progressive line that they were considered cool in circles they couldn’t have envisioned 10 years earlier when they bought out the pastoral sound of Selling England By the Pound. Yes were going mainstream, Supertramp were going their separate ways, Queen had long since abandoned the genre, Pink Floyd, the standard bearers of the music from 1973 onwards were about to self-destruct with what seemed one final hurrah in the opinion dividing The Final Cut and countless others such as Caravan and Camel were running out of steam.
Then seemingly from out of nowhere, a young band led by a talismanic Scottish vocalist and which contained a bass player who made his bass growl with hunger, a guitarist who made his instrument of choice sing like an extrovert angel wooing and enticing her lover to bed, a keyboard maestro whose talent and haunting melodies seemed far in advance of his young age and a drummer who would not be part of the band when the second single was released, thus was born Marillion and for those that rubbed their hands in glee at the demise of Prog, suddenly found a new band to dismiss, thankfully this was a group who were up for the music fight and despite line-up changes have continued to be the Godfathers of the genre.
Script for a Jester’s Tear was the band’s debut album and it came hot on the heels of the 12 inch release of Market Square Heroes and its lengthy and magnificent opus Grendel. If anyone who heard this release first wasn’t sure where the band would firmly lay their hat for the debut album then just by listening to the reflective tale of Old English literature’s early hero Beowulf, the Geatish killer of the deformed and animalistic Grendel, taken cleverly by the band as from the monster’s perspective would surely open their eyes and set pulses races that here was a new band ready to see off the new pop sensations that were taking over the charts.
Although both songs would sadly not be included in the album, (Market Square Heroes having only a snippet being played as the radio dial tunes into the final song and which can be seen as homage to Pink Floyd’s opening segment of Wish You Were Here) the appetite it wetted was enough to convince listeners that this was a group that would not shy away from the challenging, from the incredible nor from the idea of musical narrative, the basic elements of Progressive Rock.
The record opens with the delicate sound of the album title track, Script For a Jester’s Tear, the soft cry of lost love and lament haunts the song and stalks its lyrics with injured pride and pain. Even thirty years on the sound of hearing Fish sing, “So here I am once more” is enough to set the hairs on the back of the listeners hand stand on edge, the delicate piano notes by Mark Kelly introduces the song to the mournful and forgotten souls that we all leave behind.
The lyrics are passionate, a standard that was kept incredibly high throughout Fish’s career with the band and also into his own solo recordings. What marks them out though on the first song of the album is the thumping antagonistic, almost hedonistic in its encroaching sound of the four musicians that surround him.
The angst is palpable, the lover watching from afar as he pours his heart out to no-one but the listener is almost too much to bear. Realisation sets in that the woman will marry but it won’t be the man that is pouring his soul out who will be the groom in this unhappy but exhilarating opener.
From there the album takes these emotions of loss, anguish, bitterness and betrayal and fuses them together to make one of the strongest debuts by a Progressive Rock band ever recorded.
The timing was certainly ripe for the band and the subjects they dealt with; the second track by the band on the album was what Fish would come to call on stage, the drug song, He Knows You Know. This time though, rather than Mark Kelly’s superb keyboards coming inform the start, the listener is confronted by the heartbeat, the seemingly unstoppable rhythm and pulse of a man on the edge and riddled with a heroin addiction problem in the drums of Mick Pointer and white knuckle ride in the form of Pete Trewavas’ bass playing. The song became the first single from the album and so nearly earned them a much deserved shot on Top of the Pops. The violence is endemic, the lyrics expressive and worthy of some of the great poets and it showed, just like Market Square Heroes, that the band would not be afraid to go into deep and dark territory, something early Progressive bands strayed away from.
These were different times though, the 1960s and 70s were one of experimentation, musically and personally. The 80s saw a different culture appearing on British streets, a nastier, more damning edge as people began to feel more forgotten and neglected by the state than they had done since the dark days of mass unemployment and depression of the 1930s. In this the drug of choice it seems was ripe to have a song lambasting its negativity and horror. Unlike the so called soft drug experiments of the 60s in which it was claimed opened the thought process more into which poetry and music was more achievable, heroin was just a killer waiting to happen, its scars running very deep.
The album has as its themed bedsit tales, the thoughts and musings of a man living his solitary life in one of the faceless bedsits that appear all over the country and this is reflected in the song The Web. Moody in its relentlessness, magnificent in the way the lyrics wrap around the ever soul consuming music, The Web is perhaps the song that sums up the album’s approach perfectly. It is also the moment where arguably Steve Rothery comes into his own with the first of many guitar solos that as the decades have gone by only David Gilmour in his absolute pomp could carry off and match in the Prog world. Once again the lyrics, when read separately, read as if written by the poets of the 1930s, homage to the likes of T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland or the structured beginnings of Howl by Allan Ginsberg. The song is what frames the album’s structure perfectly; it shows the direction in which Marillion would follow, even if the songs got invariably shorter as they became popular by the time Misplaced Childhood came along two years later.
If the band weren’t averse to shying away from controversial subjects such as drug dependency in He Knows You Know, then the track Garden Party showed off their biting social cynicism all too well. Garden Party, or The Great Cucumber Massacre is enjoyable to the extreme, it picks apart certain aspects of the English country garden parties and the pretension that goes hand in hand with them, the social climbing events and one-upmanship. Towards the end of the song, Fish states that crowd have used their position in this event in such a way that their smiles have become “Polluted with false charm, locking onto royal arms”, the ultimate game in improving your lot in life whilst sneering at others who have tried to use their own connections whilst not really having anything insightful to say.
Garden Party is also the song that really shows off the dark humour that was available to the band, whether schoolboy like and charming or brilliantly underhand and impudent, it works in abundance. The play on words with the slightly whispered sentence of Othello showing the Garden Party to be hosted and enjoyed by those with jealousy in their hearts and the stanza where Fish describes one of those in attendance as enjoying such sport as beagling, reclining, rocking, punting and f*****g and that all in all “Rugger is a game for men, they say.”
The final part of this debut album sees the band step forth again into areas that other groups would not dare go at the time and to which only Pink Floyd was striding alongside them in their 83 album The Final Cut. Forgotten Sons is striking in its verbal strength and cynicism of army life especially that of those walking the streets of Belfast and beyond. The hammering home of the image of boys being sent to war that was hundreds of years old all in the name of keeping them off the unemployment figures and in the end they go from being somebody’s child to a dogtag to coming home draped in the Union Flag. Nothing really seems to have changed in that time from then to news that comes back from places such as Afghanistan where yet another soldier, a man or woman who were nothing more than boys and girls a few short years before.
In the lyrics Fish speaks of one coming home as, “…On the news a nation mourns you, unknown soldier count the cost. For a second you’ll be famous but labelled posthumous.” To use such lyrics years earlier would have sounded in some minds as disrespectful but certainly since the First World War and the advent of mechanisation as a weapon, it seems that warfare has become more glorified and those that are killed are given a moment to be remembered then only recalled by those in Government when they wish to make a stirring speech in defence of “the brave lads.” It is the families and friends that are left to mourn the real human loss, whereas in those that make the decisions to send their nations future off to war, they become a statistic, a reference number to pour over and calculate. In thirty years since Script for a Jester’s Tear was released, nothing seems to have changed.
As close to a perfect debut album that you could ever ask for, Script for a Jester’s Tear still sounds exciting, satirically biting and sensational as it did then.
Ian D. Hall