Afraid of Sunlight : December 1998
During the Brave tour, I remember us sitting in the Cirkus Café in Stockholm with manager, John Arnison, trying to decide whether to make one last album for EMI, or to knock it on the head and go "indie". Brit pop was the talk of the industry and over at Manchester Square, all eyes were focused on Food record's hot property, "Blur". Both EMI and Marillion were still reeling from the relative commercial disappointment of the "Brave" album. We thought it was a masterpiece. We just couldn't understand how the world hadn't noticed. We'd spent a lot of time and money on "Brave" and we knew that, if we stayed, we were going to be under pressure to make an album quickly and cheaply. No more sprawling country houses or Gothic castles for us! We bit our lip and stayed, knowing that this was probably going to be the last one. Everything was changing. Everything must.
We moved The Racket Club round the corner to a bigger building and decided to write AND record there. To speed things up, someone had the idea of getting Dave Meegan to come over and help during the writing. He did so by sitting in on the jam sessions, disciplining us to work longer hours and meticulously cataloguing the emerging ideas. To some extent Dave imposed his taste upon the direction of the music by selecting HIS favourite moments from the jams. Opinion in the band is still divided as to whether this was the right thing to do. Personally, I think it helped. For my own part, I needed all the help I could get.
The "Brave" album and the tour that followed it had made mincemeat of my psyche and I was pretty much a lost soul.
Racked by self doubt and emotional turmoil, I was feeling my life coming unstitched before my eyes. Little wonder then that this album was to repeatedly examine show-business and the damage done. We did this through the eyes of the boxer, the footballer, the rock 'n' roller and the speed-king. All had famously self-destructed. You should be able to guess their names. We also threw in Brian Wilson and Phil Spector for good measure. As time went by down at the Racket Club the songs took on an American soul, both musically and lyrically. Nobody knows quite where this came from. John Helmer (my occasional co-lyricist) started it perhaps... And it just drifted off in the general direction of Arizona...
There never has been an initial "vision", or a master-plan..Like the others, "Afraid of Sunlight" was another product of flailing around in the darkness.
I think it's the best record we've made.
