Defying The Odds

When it was released in 1997, This Strange Engine marked a different kind of Marillion. No longer were they afforded big-label advances and plush West End studios, but instead they were forced to get creative in a different way. As the album is reissued as a deluxe edition, the band look back on a period that found them writing with a new freedom and discovering that cultural appropriation isn’t the best way to win over South American audiences.

Philip Wilding

As the adage goes: “Inspiration is the act of drawing up a chair to the writing desk.” Or, in the case of Marillion’s Steve ‘H’ Hogarth, the kitchen table. It’s very late when the singer steals his way down the stairs in the half-light. Something has woken him from a dream; the memory of something. His father, he thinks. He grabs a sheet of paper and starts writing. “All the words were written quickly in the middle of the night,” says Hogarth. “I woke up, wrote it all down, went back to bed, and then got up in the morning and read it and thought, ‘Holy shit!’ It was all sort of rhyming and had a certain nature. God knows where it came from, but it came more or less…

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Prog Italia (Digital) - 1 Issue, Issue 156

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