REVIEW

Marillion With Friends From The Orchestra

Symphony Hall, Birmingham ★★★✩✩

FOR a band who once described their own perennially unfashionable brand of neo-progressive rock as ‘musical leprosy’, Marillion seem to be doing remarkably well.

Having smartly created a fan-funded online business model at the dawn of the millennium, these veteran Middle English outsiders have amassed an impressively loyal cult following beyond the reach of dismissive critics and record label bosses.

Currently packing out large venues nationwide, their latest tour features a six-piece chamber orchestra who added strings and woodwind to their guitar-heavy arrangements to mostly positive effect.

To older pop fans, Marillion will forever be synonymous with their 1980s chart hits featuring former singer Fish, aka Derek Dick, even though he departed decades ago.

His replacement, Steve Hogarth, has actually fronted the Aylesbury-based band for 30 years, steering them in a more soulful, melodious, prog-lite direction that is closer to Radiohead than Genesis.

With a shaggy black mane and swashbuckling greatcoat, he cuts an agreeably louche figure — like a rock version of Lovejoy.

Drawing heavily on recent albums, this show opened with Gaza, a 15-minute mini-opera about Palestinian suffering which managed to sound even-handed and compassionate rather than Roger Waters-level preachy.

The New Kings — a four-part symphonic epic about political greed and corruption — was not so subtle, with its declamatory chest-thumping and hackneyed visuals depicting despotic oligarchs. But windy bombast was balanced by tender, romantic, soft-rock power ballads such as The Sky Above The Rain and The Great Escape.

Judging by their overwhelmingly white, male, grey-haired crowd, Marillion are unlikely to win many new converts. That said, the orchestral rearrangements added refreshing new shading and textures to sometimes bloated, overwrought, baroque’n’roll songs.

It may be too late for lepers to change their spots, but this show was a commendably ambitious, polished spectacle.