Tweet Guitarist Steve Rothery has been an integral part of Marillion for the past thirty-two years. A founder member he has, bar the occasional side project, not stepped out on his own before now. Having just released his debut solo album in the form of ‘Live In Rome’, a studio album and tour are set to follow before the year is out. Here he talks to Eamon O’Neill about all this and much more, including Marillion’s ‘stupid’ decision to turn down the ‘Highlander’ soundtrack, as well as his mixed feelings about the band’s mini-reunion with their estranged ex-singer in 2007. Sounds fishy? Read on. A live album, a studio album and a tour to follow, you’re a busy man. Yes, and after this interview I have to take some tracks down for Mike Hunter to mix at the Marillion studio. He’s kind of waiting for me there. ‘Live In Rome’ is your first ‘proper’ solo project. Listening to it, it doesn’t seem that far removed from modern day Marillion. Unlike most who step outside of their ‘day job’ the expression of artistic freedom doesn’t seem to be the motivation with this release. Well it started out when we did the Plovdiv International Guitar Festival [in Bulgaria] about a year ago, and I had to write some ideas to perform there to play for an hour and a half. I also had to have a band to play them, so these tracks were kind of born out of that initial inspiration. I mean there’s a lot of ‘heavier’ type stuff that we don’t tend to do in Marillion anymore. Obviously the more atmospheric ‘picking’ kind of stuff I do that in Marillion, it’s one of the things that I’ve been known for, so you know, you wouldn’t expect me to do anything else. But this is very much a guitar band. These days in Marillion we’re a two keyboard band with one guitarist, so sometimes the music can’t help but be guided by that dynamic. In this it’s very much the two guitars that rule the roost. It’s about the sheer joy of playing that kind of music. You’ve said that the idea with the new material was to create soundtracks for movies that don’t exist. Was that difficult given the absence of vocals? Not really. I did some music a few years ago for a PBS documentary about bullying in the States and it won a regional Emmy [award]. So having to write music to suit the mood of a scene, and in that case that didn’t interrupt the flow of the dialogue, it kind of gave me some sort if insight into writing for pictures I suppose. In an ideal world I’d hire independent film makers to go and make a movie for each track and play it behind us at a gig or even little snippets of it, but I can’t see that happening unfortunately. But yeah, it’s very much that sort of idea really. I’ve always liked the idea of doing a film soundtrack. Have Marillion ever been offered a soundtrack? We were offered the Highlander soundtrack back in the mid-80s but we couldn’t do it because we were on a world tour at the time. That was a really stupid thing for us to turn down. As always in those sorts of cases you don’t get offered it again. But it always appealed to me. Some of my favourite music is soundtrack music like the soundtrack to Paris, Texas and Vangelis’ soundtrack for Bladerunner. I tend to kind of listen to that sort of music. So do you bring that element to Marillion? Songs like ‘Ocean Cloud’ and ‘The Invisible Man’ for example, are sprawling, epics that almost seem like soundtracks. Well I think that’s a combination of myself and Mark [Kelly, keyboards] really. I mean all of us, with Pete, with Ian and with Steve we have a great musical chemistry, on a good day at least(!) With Mark and I, we sort of bounce off each other and it works really well for that sort of atmospheric stuff. If you have the right track, I wouldn’t say it was effortless, but if you have the right sort of scene it almost writes itself. Does it take a long time to construct songs like that? Not really, because the other guitarist [in the Steve Rothery Band] Dave Foster is a really good friend of mine. We had a couple of two hour, three hour writing sessions. We share a lot of the same influences and we have the same kind of musical vocabulary. We literally found it quite painless and effortless, and it was a lot of fun. Dave’s got a great sense of humour and it was a great pleasure. I mean, the speed at which we wrote at, I can imagine writing a second album before the next Marillion album comes out. That must be quite refreshing. From what I understand the Marillion writing process can be quite a taxing, long-winded process. ‘Brave’ in particular took quite some time. Well that was kind of working with Dave Meegan really on Brave, which was EMI’s idea. The idea with ‘Brave’ was to put us with this young producer and we’d go down to this chateau in France for eight weeks and come away with a finished album. They obviously had never worked with Dave Meegan before, because by the end of that eight weeks we had just about got the drum tracks. It ended up taking seven or whatever months and was probably the reason we got dropped by EMI, truth be told. The A&R guy at the time got a lot of egg on his face over that. ‘Brave’ is such a dark and challenging album. It was strange, especially after ‘Holidays In Eden’, which was a great album and slightly more ‘musical’. Not ‘poppy’, but slightly more mainstream. So it was kind of like a reaction really. At the time we felt a little bit that maybe some of the rough edges had been smoothed off some of the tracks, and we felt that it, not exactly ‘blanded’ them out, but they did lose something. So we wanted to do something more true to ourselves I suppose. Ironically, it’s among the fans’ favourite albums. Yes because at the time when we did that tour when the album came out there were a lot of bemused faces. If there had have been a little bit more will from the record company, I mean there was talk about about major promotion for it as an album, but they didn’t really get behind it. So it’s just one of those things. I think it is a great artistic statement. ‘Live In Rome’ is a fore runner to your official studio release ‘The Ghosts of Pripyat’. I’m so excited to get the studio album out. I’ve been working on a track today actually, so I’m in the last literally two or three days of recording and mixing the tracks. I’ve been working on just the end section of a track today and I couldn’t nail it and I had a real Basil Fawlty moment, which really wasn’t good! That’s not like me, I’m very very calm normally. What was it that sent you over the edge!? Just not getting in the zone really. You can’t force yourself. I was kind of frustrated with various things. I mean, I got there in the end and it sounds absolutely amazing now. I really wanted to nail it because it’s the end section of one of the things where I play a solo, Steve Hackett plays a solo, Steven Wilson plays a solo and I play a little tag at the end, and you know, I wanted that to be fantastic. You only have one chance to make an album like this, your first ‘proper’ solo album. I’ve got a very understanding wife and family and we have a weekend away planned this weekend. It’s my father in laws eightieth birthday and I think my appearance is going to be brief! But its dedication really, I’m right in the middle of it right now. Your mind is focused on the upcoming release. Well I have set a deadline. I have the album launch party on the 20th September. It’s in the local theatre. It’s in a place called The Pendley Court Theatre in Tring in Hertfordshire which is about half an hour from London. One of the things with the Kickstarter campaign was people had the option to buy tickets to the launch party. There’s about thirty tickets left I think that I put on general sale. People are travelling from all around the world to come to that. What I’m doing when I go out in October, and at the launch party actually, I play the album and then in the Encore I play some of the older songs. So it is going to be a bit of a party. How did you go about choosing which Marillion tracks to play for your solo shows? Initially [for the live album], we went with what worked well with the vocalists, with Manuela [Milanese] and Alessandro [Carmassi] really. We worked out what would suit their voices. Are there any old Marillion songs that you would have loved to have dusted off but weren’t able to? Well that’s kind of what I’m doing in October and November. We’ve got Martin Jakubski form Stillmarillion [UK Fish-era Marillion Tribute Band] who’s got a fantastic voice and sings the old Fish songs incredibly well. We’re going to do ‘Incubus’ and ‘Fugazi’ and ‘Cinderella Search’ and ‘Chelsea Monday’. Was there ever a chance that you might have called up your old Scottish friend and asked him if he’d like to do it, or would that have been damaging to the current Marillion? Not really, because the thing is Fish doesn’t play those songs in that format anymore. He’s changed all the keys and dropped them right down. Basically I couldn’t play my parts in those keys. Really, this is as close as anyone can hope to hear the songs being played in their original form. It sounds remarkably like Fish. You had of course an impromptu reunion of sorts, when Marillion reunited with Fish at the ‘Hobble On The Cobbles’ in Aylesbury for a performance of ‘Market Square Heroes’ in 2007. Yes, *laughs nervously*. That was something that seemed like a good idea at the time(!) It was done because Fish had gone through a very rough period of time, and it was the anniversary of ‘Market Square Heroes’ as a single and it was being held in the Market Square in Aylesbury, and it just seemed like the thing to do. Unfortunately, *sighs* it’s one of those things that the few hundred people that were there you know, had tears in their eyes, but when it gets reported and it gets more profile than stuff that we’ve done that is so much more important, it’s kind of a little depressing too. You do it for the right reasons but when it gets that much publicity… Obviously it shows that there’s still a huge interest in the band and Fish together, but like I say that’s never really going to be an option because he no longer performs the songs in the original key, so that’s just not going to happen. So it went from a low key affair to… Well it was on the news, on the main BBC news sites, and I don’t know, it’s rather bemusing and slightly depressing really. And how did Mr. Hogarth feel about it? Yeah, he wasn’t too happy(!) Obviously, as Marillion’s vocalist, Steve Hogarth’s place is secure, having now served twenty-five years with the band. That’s right, twenty-five years. Before he joined, the band obviously split with Fish. Tell me about your feelings about that period. Well, that’s a very long and involved question. It was a very complex situation. There was a division between Fish and the band, and between Fish, the band and the management. A lot of people had various problems with substances and with alcohol, and the whole thing wasn’t handled as well as it might have been. Fish was basically very unhappy and he was blaming the band for that unhappiness when really it wasn’t anything to do with that. At the same time he was kind of making unreasonable demands and trying to really, become a dictator I suppose, which was never going to happen. So it was unfortunate, and maybe with a stronger manager they would have said, “well look, Fish; go off for two years, do your solo album, tour the world. The band; you go off and do a film soundtrack or do something else.” But the fact of the matter is that even if Fish hadn’t left the band we wouldn’t still be making albums together. I think at the most, one, two albums. The band would have been over twenty years ago if we hadn’t have had the split. So the split in effect was a rebirth, and when Steve joined us he brought his own musical and personal input into the chemistry that we have. I mean, we’ve made thirteen albums now with Steve and only four with Fish. I suppose the 1980s was a different period where the band were a huge act, playing the likes of the Milton Keynes Bowl which is maybe why people tend to focus on that period. Yeah, and ‘Kayleigh’ was such a bit hit and even now people come to gigs with their daughters and the amount of ‘Kayleigh’s in the world is just increasing yearly. It depends when people got into the band really. But the people that got into the band in the early years, it’s pretty hard getting beyond that. So yeah, it’s a different thing. We had great commercial success but not personal financial success. We saw very little of the benefits of that. We make as much money now selling a twentieth of as many albums as we did in the mid-80s when we were selling out stadiums and touring the world with gold and platinum albums. We’re in a much happier place. Why was that? It was a lot of things. It was to do with the record company. The fact that whenever you make a video for a record company you’re paying 50% of that out of your record royalties, and we spent hundreds of thousands of pounds making videos. The manager charges commission, and there’s many things. A lot of people wanted to take a slice of the pie, from promoters to publishers, so ultimately at the end of the day you have some years where you’re earning a living I suppose, but nowhere near what people might expect. They think you’d be living in a mansion with a massive driveway and a few Ferraris. But that’s not the case. Your final album for EMI was ‘Afraid Of Sunlight’, and although a supposedly ‘rushed’ album, it contains some of your most enduring material. It’s probably my favourite album. I just think that as a collection of songs it pretty much can’t be faulted. Each one on there stands up on its own merit. So yeah, that’s kind of up there for me. It was then in 1997 that you entered your ‘independent’ years. Was that a tough time? Yeah the wilderness years! After you’ve been on a major label and then you’re dealing with independents, it very much depends on which companies they’re dealing with in each territory. In some places they did a great job, arguably better than EMI, but you’re kind of missing out a lot, working the album in each territory around the world. So you see your sales drop from 250,000 down to 80 or 100,000 which is fantastic for the small independent label. It’s probably their big seller, but for the career of a band, it’s a lot less than ideal. You released a lot of albums during that period; ‘This Strange Engine’ followed by ‘Radiation’ and ‘Marillion.com’ in quick succession, which contained some varied and more left-field Marillion material. We had to make albums quicker, and we’ve always been of the opinion that we shouldn’t repeat ourselves. In a way every album is a reaction to the previous album. So that kind of continued through that period as well. For 2001’s ‘Anoraknophobia’ you hooked up with EMI again in a unique deal. That’s right. We started the first crowd funding campaign to finance the album and we raised the money, re-equipped our studio and employed Dave Meegan again to produce the album and still owned it. So we had the freedom then to go to EMI and licence it on our terms. The new lease of life seemed to reinvigorate the band. The following album, 2004’s ‘Marbles’ saw a successful campaign to get a top 10 single, and you released a concept album for the first time in a decade. Yes, it’s definitely one of our most popular albums. It’s a really strong album. It just took forever. I mean, working with Dave Meegan we kind of got to the point where there was a certain amount of frustration, and also I think Dave, maybe he got a little bit too precious. I don’t know if it was his own ego or his own perspective, but I found him difficult to communicate with. Even now I’ve got the greatest respect for Dave, but there was just some times that I didn’t agree with his decisions. He would tell me that he knew the Marillion audience better than I did, which I just found a bit of a strange statement really. Were there elements of the finished album that you weren’t happy with then? There’s just some things that were treading a certain path really, and with time you get used to it, and a lot of it is great, so you know, kudos to him for that. I just thought that maybe he was ignoring my opinion on certain things which I remember really pissed me off at the time. Is that why you swapped instruments with Pete [Trewavas, bass] on ‘Don’t Hurt Yourself’?! That was just a bit of fun actually, and I loved doing that. I really enjoy playing bass so that was kind of like a highlight for me. My sort of influences as a bass player are people like McCartney and that kind of school of playing. It was interesting because Mark [Kelly, keyboards] came in when Dave was setting up the track and was commenting on how great Pete’s bass playing was on the track! But it’s fun to do that. I mean on ‘You’re Gone’ I wrote three of the four chord sequences on that on the keyboards which is unusual as well. So there was a lot of experimentation on that album. Marillion’s output has been particularly consistent over the last ten years. You’ve released three studio albums as well as the ‘Less Is More’ acoustic project. Yeah I think so. I think we are one of the most consistent bands out there. I wouldn’t say every track is genius, but I think with each album there’s a couple of great songs on each album. If you could take one or two Marillion song that you think sums up the band best what would they be? I think ‘Easter’ probably is a favourite. ‘The Great Escape’ probably encapsulates what is special about this band. And if you had to bury one what would it be? ‘Hope For The Future’ [the Latino-flavoured track from 1997’s ‘This Strange Engine’]. That’s probably the one that I’d want to dig the deepest hole for. I just find it embarrassing because the essence of the final section on those sort of grooves when they’re done right, and you see musicians playing these grooves it’s a fantastic and joyous thing, and when white English guys try and do it… yep(!) I mean it’s really embarrassing, because we actually did play that song [live] in South America, so we were there in Rio and Sao Paulo murdering these rhythms and the locals kind of looking at us going ‘what’?! That’s a (not so) great note to end on! Is there anything you’d like to add? I’d just like to add that I’m going to make one of the tracks ‘Morpheus’, the one that Steve Hackett guests on available as a free download form my website steverothery.com for anyone that’s interested. We’ll see you on the road in October and November. http://www.steverothery.com/ http://www.marillion.com/ Photos courtesy of Roberto Scorta and Yuri Marak To visit the Steve Rothery store on Amazon - CLICK HERE