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Introduction

Background: I started this site way back in 1997 - a decade ago -after seeing a posting on the Freaks mailing list. Someone with English as a second language had written their explanation of Forgotten Sons. I remember thinking, 'well, that's not what I think the song's about', and proceeded to post my own version. It struck me then that Marillion's songs often contain words and phrases that are peculiar to British English and the idea was born.

Back in 1997, my most splendid friend Matthew Anderson, one of the first people to play me Marillion, and I sat in the Tottenham pub on Oxford Street, London armed with a sheaf of lyrics and several reference books. We proceeded to get very drunk and, by the end of the evening, had between us thrashed out a rough first version of what would become this site.

What was interesting was the increased enjoyment both Matt and I got from digging into the references. We were not trying to say what we thought the songs were about. My mate Pat has a nice analogy about sitting in dim classrooms poring over an author's intention behind one particular word for hours until, at the end of the lesson, you'd taken a butterfly of a poem, gassed it and pinned to a board before realising it was no longer beautiful. That sums it up pretty succinctly; people's own ideas of what Marillion's songs are about are as valid as what the author thinks. What I hope we've managed to do is illuminate the songs, making them more readily understandable. Lest that sounds incredibly arrogant, I'd like to add that there was much in the songs which neither Matt nor I had appreciated before and it took digging into the references to reveal quite how much we'd missed!

Sources: There has been no direct input from band members, unless from printed material or conversations on Marillion.com, Freaks or The Opium Den, and it should not be assumed that any information contained within this document has the sanction of anyone connected with Fish or Marillion, although I hope they approve of what we've tried to do here.

Each album is preceded by a page giving general information about the album including information about the explanations and the cover and related stuff. Far more detailed information about the Fish-era covers can be found in the beautifully-put-together Masque book by Mark Wilkinson and Fish. This can be ordered from Fish's website. A huge amount of information about the discography, chart positions etc. is available by looking at Bert ter Steege's Discography. Bert was kind enough to host the first Explanations for a year or so, back in the dark days when HTML was still a foreign language to me.

Additionally, I should definitely mention Scott McMahan’s Genesis Discography. I freely acknowledge that without his almost exhaustive work, I'd not have put the Explanations in this form.

Another special thank you is to Jeroen Schipper, former maintainer of The Web Online who generously let us quote from his FAQ.

Finally, I'd like to say thanks to Marillion: Fish, Steve Hogarth, Ian Mosley, Steve Rothery, Pete Trewavas and Mark Kelly for the soundtrack to so much of my life.

Contributions & Caveats: Any additions, omissions, or suggestions regarding this page would be gratefully received, and fully credited if used, although we reserve the right to edit your contribution. Please email me. You can also email me by hitting the link in the menu on the right.

Finally, the fault for any mistakes is mine. If you notice any, please let me know.

I hope you enjoy poking around as much as I've enjoyed putting the site together.

Cheers,

Fraser Marshall
06/01/07

P.S. 2007: I've been pretty lax about updating the site the last couple of years, for which I apologise. I'll try and keep it up to date as Marillion's 14th Studio album Somewhere Else starts working its magic. I've finally got around to converting the site out of frames, so each page has an easily-determined URL. This should make it simpler to find individual pages, and also for links from search engines to drop readers straight onto working pages, which may not have happened with the framed version!