The Assassings’ Guild
It was when the guy burst into the studio holding a machete that Mark Kelly knew things had got silly.
Marillion’s keyboard player was holed up in London’s Odyssey Studios, racing against the clock to get his band’s second album, Fugazi, finished. Kelly, producer Nick Tauber and engineer Simon Hanhart had been working through the night in an attempt to mix the last few songs, but they still weren’t quite there. The only snag was that the studio had been booked by another producer, who was currently waiting outside and becoming increasingly annoyed.
“He was there to record a session with an orchestra,” says Kelly. “Basically, there were 40 people waiting for us to finish.”
The Marillion team were acutely aware that they were biting into someone else’s time. But they were even more aware that their deadline to finish the album was hurtling towards them at an alarming speed, and they needed to get these mixes nailed.
“We basically paid this guy a thousand quid to hold off and give us another few hours,” says Kelly. “And then eventually we ran past that point.”
That’s when the stonewalled producer’s patience finally snapped. He stepped into the studio lounge and announced that he had served in Vietnam, and that he had a machete in his bag and he was willing to use it.
“I was sitting there thinking, ‘Wait a minute, we’re in this studio costing a grand a day and we haven’t written the title track of the album yet. That can’t be good.’”
Ian Mosley
“That was it,” says Kelly, laughing at the memory. “We basically had to go, ‘Right, that’s it, we’re leaving then. Bye.’”
An aggrieved man making threats with a machete pretty much sums up the fraught, wired and occasionally unhinged process of recording Fugazi. A record that cost £120,000 to make and should have anointed Marillion as one of the biggest new British rock bands of the era instead turned out to be a disappointment to the band and their label. Its title couldn’t have been more appropriate: ‘Fugazi’ was US army slang for ‘Fucked Up’.
“It was a strange time,” says Fish, Marillion’s original singer and lyricist. “We were riding on the back of [debut album] Script For A Jester’s Tear, we’d done our first American tour, it was all wonderful. And then we hit Fugazi.”
In the summer of 1983, Marillion had every reason to be confident. Script… had reached No.7 in the UK Albums Chart when was it released that March, turning the Aylesbury band into unlikely pop stars. Its success inevitably sparked off a surge of interest in like-minded bands.
“Record companies would go, ‘Bloody hell, that seems successful, let’s sign another band’, so suddenly all the majors are looking for their version of Marillion,” says Kelly of this unlikely prog revival. “Bands like Pendragon and Pallas were getting record deals, where previously they wouldn’t have been able to.”
Marillion weren’t wholly comfortable in the role of figureheads for this ‘neoprog’ movement. In fairness, many of the other bands felt the same way.
“We didn’t want to be lumped in with the likes of IQ and Pendragon,” says Kelly. “I remember when we played the Marquee once, a couple of IQ were down the front heckling us. They resented the fact we were having success and they weren’t, even though they’d been around longer than us.”
Marillion’s peers weren’t the only ones who
