Author: Web Rock Radio News Dept

The lizard king is dead, long live The Doors. It’s August 1971, barely a month after Jim Morrison was found dead in a bathtub in Paris, and his surviving bandmates in The Doors are putting the finishing touches to their first album without him. You might politely call this an act of professionalism. In less charitable terms it could easily appear plain cold.

Incredible as it might seem, at that time there hadn’t been a whole lot of debate about whether or not to carry on. “Of all the mysteries surrounding The Doors, the one that maybe confounds people the most is why we thought we could still be a band after Jim died,” guitarist Robby Krieger wrote in his 2021 memoir Set The Night On Fire. “It seems so ridiculous now, but there was some logic to it.”

To be fair, there was more than a little logic to it. Krieger, keyboard player Ray Manzarek and dummer John Densmore had been writing and preparing songs for the next Doors album, while Morrison vacationed in Paris. According to Manzarek, Morrison had even rehearsed a number of new Doors songs prior to leaving for France. His non-return wasn’t viewed as quite the artistic crisis it seemed. “At the time it made sense to write songs,” Krieger reasoned. “It made sense to record. Our label was behind us all the way…Why not keep it going?”

In retrospect, the trio conceded that they should’ve allowed a period of mourning. But, as Densmore rationalised in his own biography Riders On The Storm: “We were so fired up to go on before Jim checked out that we didn’t really acknowledge his death and grieve.”

The immediate fruit of their labour was the album Other Voices. None of the band seriously entertained the idea of finding a replacement for Morrison, so they decided among themselves that Manzarek and Krieger would share lead vocals. Manzarek at least had form in this department, having sung in pre-Doors outfit Rick & The Ravens. The rest of the set-up was pretty much business as usual. Regular producer Bruce Botnick was at the controls, and recording took place in the familiar surrounds of The Doors Workshop, site of the L.A. Woman sessions, in Hollywood.

Notwithstanding the enormous Morrison-sized hole, Other Voices’ other major difference was its team of bassists. Jerry Scheff returned from L.A. Woman, but shared the bass playing with Jack Conrad, Wolfgang Melz and Ray Neapolitan. The songs, at best, were serviceable. At worst, The Doors sounded like a workaday bar band.

Krieger’s Variety Is The Spice Of Life, for example, quickly lapses into deadweight boogie, hardly enlivened by trite lyrics: ‘All these pretty women with nothing to do/C’mon and help me try to find something new.’ I’m Horny, I’m Stoned sounds just as bad as its title suggests; Down On The Farm – supposedly rejected by Morrison during the L.A. Woman sessions – can’t seem to decide whether it wants to be Canned Heat or a country pastiche.

There are some worthy moments, however. Tightrope Ride rattles along like prime Stones. Lyrically it feels aimed directly at the band’s departed frontman, acting as both tribute and cautionary tale. There are allusions to isolation, madness and courting danger, while the final verse draws comparison to another doomed young soul: ‘We’re by your side, but you’re all alone/ Like a Rolling Stone, like Brian Jones.’

Hang On To Your Life finds The Doors locating their classic groove, underpinned by Melz’s sprightly funk bass line. The track accelerates, ultimately racing headlong into a manic jam. The epic Ships With Sails is similarly striking, not least for an extended instrumental passage that finds the trio truly inspired, negotiating folk-rock and jazz, and crowned by a great, open-ended Manzarek solo. It’s telling that Other Voices’ choice moments tend to be without vocals.

Released in late October ’71, the album couldn’t compete with its platinum-shifting predecessors, but peaked, fairly respectably, just outside the Billboard Top 30. Elektra Records boss Jac Holzman announced sales of 300,000, which, bolstered by a successful US tour that included sell-out dates at Carnegie Hall and Hollywood Palladium, was enough to warrant more studio time.

“[Jac] wasn’t naïve enough to think a Morrison-less Doors album would break any sales records, but he stood by us like he always had,” noted Krieger. “His undying support was, for better or worse, one of the big reasons we had to the guts to press forward.”

For better or worse, indeed. The trio wasted no time in recording a follow-up. This time The Doors opted to produce the album without Botnick, and brought in the highly respected Henry Lewy – best known for his work with Joni Mitchell and Crosby, Stills & Nash – as engineer. In turn, Lewy enlisted a clutch of session players that included another round of guest bassists, percussionist Bobbye Hall, jazz sax supremo Charles Lloyd and backing singers Clydie King and Venetta Fields. The scenery changed too, albeit none too radically, The Doors switching base from the Workshop to A&M Studios a couple of miles away on N. LaBrea Avenue.

The resulting Full Circle didn’t veer very far from its immediate predecessor. Again, Manzarek and Krieger split lead vocals. And while it’s patently unfair to compare either to Morrison, both men’s singing abilities are limited, however much spirit they try to inject. They’re hardly saved by the music, either. Get Up And Dance, with The Flying Burrito Brothers’ Chris Ethridge on bass, quickly descends into a generic chug. ‘Golden days!’ goes the lyric, as if attempting to convince themselves that they’re onto a good thing, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Hardwood Floor doesn’t help The Doors’ rapidly sliding reputation either. Here, Manzarek riffs away on rinky-dink piano like he’s playing for change in the saloon of some Western theme park. On Good Rockin’, a cover of Roy Brown’s jump-blues standard made famous by Elvis Presley as Good Rockin’ Tonight, he goes all Jerry Lee Lewis on piano while Krieger sets about channelling Scotty Moore. The less said for 4 Billion Souls’ excruciating call for world peace, the better.

Yet Full Circle also deserves credit for daring to experiment a little. The Mosquito, the album’s sole three-way co-write, offers a playful and unexpected burst of mariachi, complete with recurring hook, handclaps and party ambience. It was inspired by a holiday that Krieger and his wife took to Baja in Mexico, where they were serenaded one evening by a bunch of local musicians.

“They had a song about a mosquito that I wanted to learn,” the guitarist recalled later. “But when I got home I couldn’t quite remember it, so I wrote my own mariachi-sounding tune with simple Spanish lyrics.”

The Doors lean into it with such gusto – swirling organ runs, a Densmore drum break, jazzy outro – that you can almost forgive Krieger for rhyming ‘mosquito’ with ‘burrito’.

Full Circle packs a couple more surprises in Verdilac and The Piano Bird. The former takes a detour into New Orleans jazz-funk, dominated by Manzarek’s organ playing and Charles Lloyd’s tenor sax. The Piano Bird follows in similar vein, led out by Krieger’s light, rhythmic guitar figure. There’s a loose, carefree air to it all, with Lloyd’s jazz flute high in the mix, perhaps suggesting an unexpected way out of The Doors’ post-Morrison malaise.

Released in August ’72, Full Circle fared worse than Other Voices, peaking at No.68 in the States. Both albums hardly registered at all in other countries, despite the novelty success of The Mosquito in random parts of Europe, where it became a Top 20 single. It’s instructive to note that Krieger dispenses with both albums within two pages of his memoir. Densmore is even more dismissive in Riders On The Storm, washing his hands of both in just a couple of paragraphs.

The Doors were still a decent live draw, through. So much so that, following their subsequent tour of Europe, they flew to London in early 1973, with the express purpose of finally bringing in a new frontman. They weren’t after a Morrison copyist. Instead, as Krieger put it, they wanted “someone who could theoretically take us in a bold new direction”.

Paul McCartney, Paul Rodgers and Joe Cocker were among the names brainstormed in The Doors’ hotel room. Contrary to rumour, Morrison disciple Iggy Pop was never in contention. A front-runner soon emerged in the shape of Howard Werth, who’d recently forsaken art-rockers Audience for a solo career. “I came on the scene because Jac Holzman wanted to make Audience the new band on his Elektra label,” Werth told Classic Rock in 2014. “But after we broke up he decided to try to put me and The Doors together.”

Werth had already started work on his first solo record, King Brilliant, but agreed to take part in rehearsals with Krieger, Manzarek and Densmore in West London. “Those rehearsals were quite strong and powerful,” he recalled. “We were just ploughing through. It wasn’t a matter of them suddenly turning round and going: ‘Oh, that’s good’ or ‘You’re the one’. We were just enjoying it and waiting for the situation to happen or not. And, as it turned out, it didn’t.”

Manzarek duly flew back home with his wife Dorothy, who was pregnant and miserable in England. But not before he had rowed with Krieger and Densmore over the musical direction of the band. In simple terms, Manzarek wanted more jazz, while the other two were intent on pursuing rock.

“It was just time to put The Doors to bed,” Manzarek explained to Melody Maker later that year. “Some things can go on for a long time and others can’t. And The Doors without Morrison weren’t The Doors, were they?”

Krieger and Densmore stayed on in the UK and formed the Butts Band with singer Jess Roden and others. The group lasted through a major line-up change, relocation to Los Angeles and two so-so studio albums. It was, said Krieger, “our first lesson in trying to escape the shadow of the past”.

Meanwhile, Manzarek released a couple of ill-judged solo albums, briefly rehearsed with Iggy Pop, and in 1977 started his own band, Nite City. Nobody bought those records either. The shadow of the past, it seemed, was longer than any of them imagined.

Sometime in 1977, Krieger was sorting through some old boxes when he happened upon a present that Morrison had given him prior to leaving for Paris. Morrison had self-published a book of poetry, bound in red leather and gold-stamped with the title An American Prayer. Leafing through the slim collection, the guitarist began thinking.

Morrison had gone into the studio to record some poetry in February 1969. The idea, hatched between him and Jac Holzman, was to release a spoken-word album for Elektra. The singer returned to Village Recorders in LA on December 8, 1970 – his 27th birthday. Producer John Haeny picked up Morrison on the way, stopping off at a liquor store to buy him a bottle of Old Bushmills Irish whiskey as a gift. There was methodology in his tactic. As Haeny later explained: “[Ex-Doors producer] Paul Rothchild told me that Irish whiskey was the key that unlocked the door to the room where Jim kept the crazed Irish poet.”

In the early summer of 1971, at Morrison’s request Haeny had intended to travel to Paris to record the album in earnest. But it wasn’t to be. The producer ended up sitting on the session tapes for the duration, until Krieger called several years later. Haeny duly invited the three surviving Doors up to his house in Laurel Canyon to have a listen to the recordings.

“When Jim’s voice came out of the speakers, I instantly heard lifts and falls,” Krieger recalled in Set The Night On Fire. “Rhythms and hints of melodies. Jim had a naturally musical way of speaking, and it immediately sparked ideas in my head for guitar licks and chord structures.”

With Haeny overseeing the project, Krieger, Manzarek and Densmore once again set about the task of putting Morrison’s words to music.

Blues seemed the obvious starting point as a textural backdrop, perfectly illustrated on the sultry, bruised Angels And Sailors. But The Doors opted to mix it up, guided by the varying cadences and tones in Morrison’s speech. Curses, Invocations pivots around a discreet jazz riff; American Night is all clangy dissonance; Ghost Song dives into fusionist funk, with Manzarek vamping away while guest Bob Glaub punctuates things with snapping bass.

Other elements are drawn from audio collage. There’s dialogue from Morrison’s experimental film HWY: An American Pastoral, bits of jam sessions, excerpts from Riders On The Storm and such. An unruly live version of Roadhouse Blues is spliced from two Doors gigs in New York and Detroit from 1970. A Feast Of Friends is set to a new arrangement of classical piece Adagio In G Minor, which the band initially recorded during sessions for The Soft Parade. “Jim had always loved the recording,” justified Krieger, “so we thought it would be fitting to revive the song for him.”

Thematically, An American Prayer was both self-glorifying and conceptual. The Doors split the poems into five loose sections, covering Morrison’s formative childhood, high school years, poetic ambitions, Doors fame and, as Manzarek later put it, “a final summation, in a way, of the man’s entire life and philosophy”.

Released in November 1978, the album did much to massage the myth. Dawn’s Highway featured the oftrepeated tale of how the Morrison family – with four-year-old Jim in the back – came across a truckload of Native Americans scattered on a desert highway, bleeding to death after an accident. Looking back, he believes that ‘the souls of the ghosts of those dead Indians, maybe one or two of ’em, were just running around freaking out/And just leaped into my soul.’ Here was Morrison portrayed as rebel poet and shaman, rock’s broody leather Dionysus, mojo risin’ from the grave.

Never mind the mixed reviews, An American Prayer went platinum, becoming the biggest-selling spoken-word album in history at the time. Its success set into motion a Morrison revival that quickly morphed into cultural fixation. Within six months, Francis Ford Coppola was using The Doors’ The End to presage the dread and horror of Apocalypse Now, Morrison’s soul-purging nightmare writ large over American involvement in Vietnam.

In 1980, No One Here Gets Out Alive, by Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman, became the first Morrison biography. Criticised for Sugerman’s implication that the singer may have faked his own death, its sensationalism fed directly into the growing legend.

Elektra sensed an opportunity too. A reissue of The Doors’ debut album was a hit all over again. A hurriedly assembled ‘greatest hits’ collection went multi-platinum. By September 1981, Rolling Stone had Morrison splashed on its cover, 10 years after his death, under the editorial: “He’s hot, he’s sexy and he’s dead!” It turned out that Morrison had already called it in the words of An American Prayer: “We live, we die and death not ends it.”

Freelance writer for Classic Rock since 2008, and sister title Prog since its inception in 2009. Regular contributor to Uncut magazine for over 20 years. Other clients include Word magazine, Record Collector, The Guardian, Sunday Times, The Telegraph and When Saturday Comes. Alongside Marc Riley, co-presenter of long-running A-Z Of David Bowie podcast. Also appears twice a week on Riley’s BBC6 radio show, rifling through old copies of the NME and Melody Maker in the Parallel Universe slot. Designed Aston Villa’s kit during a previous life as a sportswear designer. Geezer Butler told him he loved the all-black away strip.

All great things have to begin somewhere. For Rush, that somewhere was Willowdale, a suburb of the Canadian city of Toronto. That was where Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee met as schoolkids – the start of an enduring friendship and musical partnership. In 2012, as the band released their swansong album Clockwork Angels, the pair looked back on story of the band’s formative years: their school days and early adventures in music, the struggle to make it, the difficult birth of the first Rush album, the tough decision to fire original drummer John Rutsey, and how the subsequent arrival of Neil Peart – drummer and lyricist – completed the classic Rush line-up that survives to this day.

Alex Lifeson: I met Geddy when were thirteen years old, in our first year in junior high school. We were aliens in a class of conformity, and we became best friends.

Geddy Lee: At school we had a blast together – we cracked each other up. And we understood where each other came from, culturally. We were sons of Eastern European immigrants who had left Europe after the Second World War to start a new life in Canada. So we were, both of us, a little bit different.

Alex: I’m first generation Canadian. Both my parents were Serbian, so of course my birth name was Serbian – Aleksandar Živojinovi. My parents actually met in Canada after the war. They had come over as refugees. My father had been married before, to a Serbian woman. They had married in Italy, and my sister was born there. They tried to get into the States, but they were denied and then sent to Canada.

Geddy: My parents were Polish Jews, survivors of the Holocaust. They met when they were thirteen at a work camp and they were both in Auschwitz for a time. My mom had such a strong Jewish accent, which is how I ended up being known as Geddy instead of Gary, my real name And basically, it stuck. Eventually my family was calling me Geddy. So a little later, when I turned sixteen, I legally changed my name to Geddy, because so many people were calling me that anyway.

Alex: It was at junior high, in that ‘getting to know you’ stage, that Geddy and I got heavily into music.

Geddy: We wanted to be rebellious, to break away from our families, like all kids want to do. And we both had a really deep passion for music and wanting to play it. Almost every day we’d go to his parents’ place after school and we’d jam for two hours.

Alex: For a long time we were in different bands, but we always jammed together. We loved to learn all those great Cream songs, play along to the record player, and play them better and better and better. It was really a lot of fun. It was just the two of us – no drummer. We’d either play along with the record, or we would both plug into Ged’s amp and just play, him on bass, me on guitar. We were beginning to look at music more seriously and really trying to figure out what the musicians were playing, how the bands worked. And we loved to play. We just couldn’t get away from it.

Geddy: The first time I ever got high was with Alex. He was just a terrific pothead, and a terrible influence on me. We went to the local public school grounds to smoke some pot. At that time I was playing in another band, and after I got high with Al, I went over to the guy in my band’s house for rehearsal. But I was a little too high to be very functional, and this guy was really mad at me. He was very straight and he was really upset with me. He was threatening to tell my mother that I was high. That was a bummer!

Alex: I had a friend named John Rutsey who played drums, and we had a little basement band called The Projection. The guy that lived next door to me, Gary Cooper, was the bass player. Gary didn’t stick around for long. But out of The Projection came the first gig as Rush. John’s brother Bill had said, ‘You need a better name for the band – how about Rush?’ And we liked it. We were offered this gig at a drop-in centre, so I called this guy I’d been jamming with, Jeff Jones, who played bass and sang. We did that gig. Twenty people showed up. The following week we were offered another gig at the same place, but Jeff said he couldn’t do it – he was already in another band at the time. So that’s when I called Geddy.

Geddy: I was a pretty shy kid. I didn’t really want to be a frontman. I was just the one with the best voice – or the most appropriate voice! So stepping out in front was not a natural thing for me. John was the leader of the band, to all intents and purposes. He was a very opinionated guy – about music, about what he thought the band should be, how we should look.

Alex: For a couple of years we just needed to learn our trade. At that time you played maybe three times a month if you were really lucky, at high school dances and drop-in centres. After a year playing clubs, the shows were packed. We were making a thousand dollars a week. Back then, that was good money.

Geddy: The problem was that when it came to making an album, nobody had even the slightest interest in signing us. There was no big rock label in Canada. Really, there were just distributor outposts for the American companies. And nobody cared anything about Canadian music.

Alex: We made a single, a cover of Not Fade Away – based more on the Stones’ version than the Buddy Holly original. The feeling from management was: let’s do something that people will get as an introduction. I think that was bad advice. Playing that song live was great. We played it quite heavy. It sounded really good. But the recorded version was terrible.

Geddy: I was so excited about doing a record and having our name on the disc, the whole deal. But to be honest, I was embarrassed by how it came out. It was so… dinky.

Alex: We were a hard rock band. We had some powerful songs – Working Man, What You’re Doing. But that record sounded so tame.

Geddy: It was so disappointing. But our manager Ray Danniels put up the money for us to make an album. We had to do it cheap, recording late at night, after hours. The problem was that our producer, David Stock, was just not that great. So we had to record that album twice. The first version had Not Fade Away on it, and the whole thing sounded as tinny and shitty as the single did. So we had to redo the entire album, and that’s when Terry Brown came in as producer.

Alex: Terry had a studio, Toronto Sound. And once we got in there with him, I think we spent another three days recording, so that whole album was done in about a week.

Geddy: It was pretty straightforward – it was only eight-track recording. And at the time, we were playing these songs a million times over and over, so it wasn’t a big deal to go in and re-record them. Terry really fixed that record. It sounded great. We were very proud of it.

Alex: The album came out on Moon Records, the label that our manager set up. The big turning point was when Working Man got picked up on a radio station in Cleveland, Ohio – WMMS. That was a time, 1974, when FM radio was still based on the DJs’ tastes.

Geddy: It was a very different time, before the consultants took over American radio. So you hear a song like Working Man, seven minutes long, on the radio. And that led to us singing with Mercury Records. Whether that deal would have come some other way, who knows? But certainly that was the breakout.

Alex: We knew early on that John had problems with his health. He had diabetes, and he was very concerned about whether it would be manageable for him on the road. In 1974, John got ill and missed out a few months of gigs. We used another drummer, Jerry Fielding, and then John came back for a month of club shows. But that was it for John. We had to fire him.

Geddy: That was hard. It was clear that there was going to be a break with John sooner or later. What he wanted to do as a musician and what we wanted to do as musicians was not the same, and eventually that would have caused the band to break. We were guilt-ridden at first, but we realised that it’s just the way it had to be. He wasn’t happy and we weren’t happy. He had personal issues. It was a complicated time. We were discussing a future and not knowing what that meant. The rehearsals were becoming not much fun. There were definitely two different views in the band.

Alex: Ged and I were listening to more progressive music – Yes and Pink Floyd. We wanted to work that into our music. John was more of a straight rocker. So we were kind of relieved that John was gone, but it felt weird without him there as we started auditioning new drummers.

Geddy: On the day that Neil (Peart) auditioned, we had five guys in – three before Neil and one after. The last guy had come a long way, a two-hour drive, and it was a very uncomfortable situation having him audition after Neil, because Neil was so fucking good. This poor guy had written charts and was playing our songs to charts. We were going through the motions. It was really awkward. I’m looking at Alex and Alex is looking at me. We were embarrassed for this guy because we were both so excited by Neil’s playing. There was no denying that Neil was the man.

Alex: We were so blown away by Neil’s playing. It was very Keith Moon-like, very active, and he hit his drums so hard. And then after we’d jammed, we chatted and he was so bright. We connected on many levels. I have to admit that on that first day I said to Geddy, ‘You know, maybe we should still hold out and see who else is out there.’ But when we talked again we were convinced he was the right guy.

Geddy: The first thing that we jammed with Neil in his audition was Anthem. That song was written, for the most part, while John was still in the band. It was very different to any of the songs on the first album – more complex. There were a lot of things that John was unhappy about, and one of them was the direction that Alex and I wanted to go in. And I think with that little bit of Anthem, our musical differences were sort of brought to the fore.

Alex: As soon as Neil was in the band, we started writing new material. We worked on most of the songs together in those days. But we were touring all the time back then, so we didn’t have any time to go anywhere and write. We were writing on the road, in the backs of cars, going to gigs, dressing rooms. And it was still experimental for us. We were still feeling each other out.

Geddy: We were still an opening act at that time, and the one beautiful thing about being an opening act is you just have thirty five minutes to play. You don’t need a show. It’s all about your chops and trying to impress in thirty-five minutes. And when you’re done, you have plenty of time to jam and to write.

Alex: What we needed was somebody to write lyrics…

Geddy: We kind of pushed Neil into writing lyrics. A lot of the songs on the first album, John had written the lyrics. But when we were on the road, we saw Neil reading books all the time. We thought, this guy is pretty smart. And the bottom line was, Alex and I didn’t want to write lyrics. So we gently encouraged Neil to do it. And what he wrote was so cool, so different to the kind of stuff that John had written.

Alex: In many ways, the second album (1975’s Fly By Night) felt like a new start for the band.

Geddy: Anthem was a holdover. Pretty much everything else on that album was written fresh. With a lot of the songs on that record, the music came first. But sometimes, Neil would have a lyric and Alex and I would put the music to it. One song that happened like that was Beneath, Between & Behind, which was the first lyric that Neil wrote for the band. There was also a lot of diversity on Fly By Night, much more than on the first album. We had the heavy songs like Anthem, but we also had that really long quiet song Rivendell, which was our first attempt at showing the lighter, ballad-y side of Rush. We liked having a bunch of different styles on that record, and that diversity was something that carried on through every album. We wanted each song to show another side to the band.

Alex: We had some cool songs on that record. Anthem was really powerful. And of course there was By-Tor & The Snow Dog, which became a really big song in the development of the band.

Geddy: The lyrics that Neil wrote for By-Tor & The Snow Dog were very tongue-in-cheek. There was a kind of comic lexicon that we had on the road – a bunch of stuff that we would joke about. And that’s where By-Tor & The Snow Dog came from. It was a joke that got out of control. Our manager Ray had two dogs, and Howard Ungerleider, our lighting guy, called them Biter and Snow Dog. So Neil took these two names and created fictional characters and we turned it into a song.

Alex: By-Tor & The Snow Dog was the first time that we tried to do a whole multi-parted piece of music. It was a pivotal song for the band. And as we developed there were bigger concepts and more space to play.

Geddy: Suddenly, it was a very different band. Once we had Neil with us, so much changed in the way we wrote music and the way we presented it. And from that point on, it felt like we could do anything…

Alex: When we finished [1975’s] Caress Of Steel we were so proud of it. We really felt like we were taking some chances and growing and going somewhere. We were experimenting.

Geddy: The problem was that nobody really understood what the hell we were doing with that record. And I can’t say we really knew what the hell we were up to either. These long songs we had – The Necromancer and The Fountain Of Lamneth – they were very complex and dark. On The Fountain Of Lamneth were talking about Didacts And Narpets. It was kind of hard for people to understand.

Alex: The intent was always pure. Maybe the execution was not. But the last time I listened to Caress Of Steel, it reminded me of how important that record was to us at that time. We really loved that record. That’s why it was really painful for us to go on the road and see that there wasn’t any interest.

Geddy: It was very disappointing. At that point, we didn’t possess the requisite objectivity to know how much was wrong with Caress Of Steel. We didn’t understand why it had failed so badly. That really shakes your confidence.

Alex: We called it the Down The Tube tour. Everybody was in a state of panic.

Geddy: When you’re in a band and you insulate yourself from reality through your sense of humour and your camaraderie. You prop each other up and say, ‘Yeah, we’re probably going down the tube.’ But really, we were so confused and disheartened.

Alex: At least we had fun touring with Kiss. I remember Gene (Simmons) telling a funny story about that tour. Gene never took drugs, but one night in Detroit he was hanging out with us, and he accidentally he ate a hash cookie. He ended up so hungry, he had to go eat. He told me later, ‘We walked in a restaurant and my head felt like it was the size of a billiard ball and my voice was the loudest thing in the room as I was asking for a sandwich…’

Geddy: After Caress Of Steel flopped, the record company made it very clear to us that we were disappointing them – that we were not delivering on our promise as an up and coming band. But at least we still had a contract, so we knew we would get one more album that they had to release before we went down the pan completely. We figured we’d be dropped if the next record didn’t do well. Deep down, I think we were all convinced that our careers were over and we would have to get ‘real’ jobs. So 2112 saved our career. There’s no question about that.

Originally published online in 2015

Freelance writer for Classic Rock since 2005, Paul Elliott has worked for leading music titles since 1985, including Sounds, Kerrang!, MOJO and Q. He is the author of several books including the first biography of Guns N’ Roses and the autobiography of bodyguard-to-the-stars Danny Francis. He has written liner notes for classic album reissues by artists such as Def Leppard, Thin Lizzy and Kiss, and currently works as content editor for Total Guitar. He lives in Bath – of which David Coverdale recently said: “How very Roman of you!”

High On Fire mainman Matt Pike is one of metal’s leading weed enthusiasts. But in 2012, as the stoner-doom linchpins prepared to release their sixth album, De Vermis Mysteriis, he revealed that he’d just come through dealing with darker drugs

Perhaps inevitably, it was drugs that nearly ruined everything for Matt Pike. Born in Denver, Colorado, in 1972, he was smoking weed by the time he was 11, dropping acid by the time he was 12 and stealing cars by the time he was 13. In fact, he got busted for grand theft auto and sent to a military academy well in time for his 15th birthday. If this was meant to sort him out and put him back on the straight and narrow, the plan backfired because this was where he met Al Cisneros, with whom he would go on to form the monumental doom/stoner metal band Sleep.

If you take one look at the rear sleeve of 1992’s Sleep’s Holy Mountain, it becomes clear that the guitar prodigy was still a big fan of the herb at the age of 20. If you peer past the song titles such as Some Grass, the lyrics mentioning ‘stoners’ and the graphic of marijuana leaves and look at the band photo, you can just about make out – hidden behind the billowing clouds of hashish haze – a callow young Matt with dreadlocks smoking a Colorado carrot that would probably give an elephant the munchies. It doesn’t take a genius to work out what the main source of inspiration was when they delivered the follow-up to their record company in 1998: a one-track, hour-long album called Dopesmoker (eventually released posthumously as Jerusalem a year later).

Likewise when Sleep disbanded later that year and he founded High On Fire, it’s safe to say it was blazing weed and not climbing extra tall, active volcanoes that was the inspiration behind the name.

Some 14 years later, Matt is allowing himself a rare relaxation day and is slouched on a sofa in the backroom of his favourite bar, sipping on a White Russian. (“Yeah, I love The Big Lebowski – who doesn’t?”). He’s speaking to Metal Hammer about his band’s excellent sixth album, De Vermis Mysteriis, and how he poured his negative drug experiences into the writing and recording of it with bandmates Jeff Matz (bass) and Des Kensel (drums). But it wasn’t hash or LSD that were the problem – it was legal painkillers that nearly derailed him and his band.

“I had some pretty dark personal shit going on during the recording of this album,” he says. “I had a really bad painkiller problem while that was going on, and I had to kick that.”

“I had some pretty bad problems with my feet. The insides of them were in excruciating pain and the outsides just numb, so even though I hadn’t been drinking I would knock into things and not even know. Then I’d come off stage and they would be bleeding. And it’s just from being overworked, from being put on aeroplanes all the time and being stressed out. I was actually seeing quite a few doctors about it, but it’s getting better now.

“One of the main things about this condition is how painful it is. I mean, I thought it was gout at first; that is how bad it was. One of the common things about this condition is that a lot of people who have it go on to develop a painkiller habit… which is what happened to me. When I was on tour, I had to go on stage every night and I didn’t want to be in a bunch of pain when I was trying to do an hour and a half concert.

“So yeah, I just kind of got hooked on painkillers and it wasn’t anything heavy. It wasn’t like Oxycontin, I was just eating tons and tons of Norco and Vicodin. It was as hard to kick as heroin, though. It was really, really bad.”

For all those problems, there’s one habit Matt is in no hurry to get rid of. It may only be lunchtime but he’s hellaciously stoned already, even if these days his means of purchase and ingestion is more befitting of a man of his age.

“You know, I don’t smoke as much as I used to and I don’t like to smoke socially, but when me and Jeff practise we burn some weed and get down to business,” he says. “You know, weed has a great influence on riffs, so it’s a good way to step out. I’ve been more into edibles recently, so I’ll eat a piece of marijuana brownie in the morning and then just kind of stay stoned all day. With all the weed dispensaries there are now you can get some pretty good edibles.

“I’ll take a bong hit or smoke a joint here or there but for the most part I’m not as avid a smoker as I was on Holy Mountain or Jerusalem. God, Jerusalem put me over the edge.” He laughs. “We were smoking serious weed. I found out exactly how high you can get. Between the three of us we were just smoking ounces and ounces of weed every day. You smoke so much it becomes hard to get high any more.”

If anything, the supremely relaxed guitarist is keen to tell us about the health-preserving properties of Mary Jane. “With dispensaries in the States you can get a lot of different strains. There are strains for cancer patients, strains for people who can’t sleep at night, there are strains for people who don’t want to be on Prozac who still want to go about their day. I do find that marijuana has benefits in regards to things like that.”

If he’s really pissed off about his prescription drug nightmare he doesn’t show it, however. He just chalks this shit up to one of the few negative things about doing what he wants to do for his whole life – be in a great touring metal band.

“I’m about to turn 40,” he says. “I can’t complain too much; it’s just that you notice weird shit happening to you when you come back off tour. And when you’re as old as me, touring definitely takes years off your life compared to most other people. When you’ve been travelling and partying that much it can kind of kick your ass after a while.”

In fact, he ended up bending the experience to his benefit by channelling it into the writing of the new album. “When you have personal shit going on, the music acts as therapy. I took the shit I went through with painkillers and put it on the album. It wasn’t an easy thing to do. I was in a dark place but I took my anger and despair and used them constructively to form some of what I was going to sing and some of the way I was playing guitar.”

The intensity, despair and anger which inform the playing have been captured ably by producer Kurt Ballou of Converge, and the sound is a perfect match for the narrative of the album, which, in typical Matt Pike style, is a mixture of world religion, vintage occult horror fiction, arcane conspiracy theory and brain-frying fantasy.

The full story, influenced by the writing in the 30s/40s fantasy magazine Weird Tales, is as difficult to follow as a 3am episode of The Killing after five bong hits of hydroponic White Rhino, but the quick version goes a little something like this: Jesus died on the cross so that his twin brother Liao could escape Nazareth (the biblical town in the Middle East, not the large-haired Scottish rock band) by means of travelling forward in time.

Thanks to some priests who rescued occult scrolls from a war between the Vernirs and the Stygians, Liao – an alchemist – made a serum from the black lotus allowing him to travel back in time, but with one catch: he would materialise inside one of his ancestors just before they were about to die and would have to escape or die with them.

“Liao gets his hands on a serum in the future after mankind has destroyed itself through Christianity, and he travels back from the future to understand why and also to deter Jesus from the creation of his religion,” explains Matt.

If that sounds bloody complicated, wait until you hear about the baby-sacrificing witches, the American civil war and the burning of the pot plants. Matt has found a handy way of explaining the story in very simple terms, however. “It’s kind of like Quantum Leap… you know, that TV show from the 80s. So the guy just keeps on waking up in these really fucked-up situations before he gets back to his brother Jesus.”

Blasphemous much? Well, it’s a good job he doesn’t believe in all that stuff because if he did, he couldn’t be blamed for thinking that God had it in for him with some serious biblical wrath shit. When High On Fire were on tour, not only did Matt get hooked on pills but they got caught up in two separate earthquakes (followed by a tsunami), one in New Zealand and the other in Japan.

“Oh man, Christchurch was some scary shit,” he laughs. “I was looking round a church and then five minutes later it just collapsed. We had basically got to the airport and I was checking in my guitars when the thing hit. Ironically, Christchurch had already been destroyed by earthquake before, because earlier in the day we’d been walking round looking at all the damage.

“Then we went to Japan on the bullet train, and the second we disembarked the Tokyo earthquake hit, too. Tokyo was a totally different story. That was a trip. We were fortunate to get out of there when we did. And it was like, ‘Whoa, dude… two big earthquakes on one tour. Is the world going to swallow us up?’ It was pretty hairy and after that there was a lot of psychological trouble. Suddenly you come face to face with your own mortality; you’re aware your body could just go at any time. I think I had post-traumatic stress disorder for a while after that. I kept on thinking there was going to be another earthquake every five minutes. Everywhere I went…”

Collapsing churches, shell shock, painkiller dependence, tsunamis, earthquakes… it’s enough to drive you to drugs, it really is. Luckily for Matt – and for us – they’re the kind that help make High On Fire the awesome band they are.

Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 231, May 2012

Considering what a fully-formed masterpiece it turned out to be, it’s ironic to think of the piecemeal creation of The Bends, an album that was made bit by bit over the course of a year. Radiohead’s second record turns 30 this month and it still sounds as startling as it did upon release in March 1995, an inventive and vital release that established the Oxford five-piece as one of the world’s most forward-thinking, dynamically talented guitar bands. But there was a time when Thom Yorke, brothers Jonny and Colin Greenwood, Ed O’Brien and Phil Selway wondered if they’d get there. The creation of The Bends was one of fits and starts, doubts and uncertainty.

There was pressure coming from every angle. They’d had a huge worldwide hit with their moping classic Creep, the success of which masked a below-par debut album in 1993’s Pablo Honey. “If we hadn’t had that success with Creep,” bassist Colin Greenwood told this writer last year, “we wouldn’t have made The Bends and we would have been dropped by EMI. Isn’t that crazy?”

But despite enabling them to make a follow-up, Creep’s success had become a millstone around their neck, one of those massive songs that makes people forget you’ve got any others. Radiohead wanted to prove they were no one-hit wonders. Their label wanted them to write more hit singles. Both roughly similar aims, you could say, but the two parties had wildly different ideas about how to get there and Radiohead weren’t yet in the position to do things their way.

Yorke has always been the group’s chief creative officer and it wasn’t like he short of material, writing a shedload of songs during the band’s draining, extensive touring to support Pablo Honey. Getting them down on tape, though, was a different matter, especially as their record label had requested they record any potential singles first and do the album tracks after. As anyone who has immersed themselves in The Bends ever since knows, it just wasn’t that sort of album.

They gave it a go, though, entering London’s RAK Studios in February 1994 with Stone Roses producer John Leckie (chosen for his work with Magazine rather than Ian Brown & co.) to begin work. It was an arduous process.

“The Bends, for me, will be tainted by a particular picture I have of a very bad time,” Yorke told Time Out’s Pete Paphides. “Sitting in the studio, thinking, ‘No, I don’t think we can pull this together. We’re just going to have to split up’. Thinking, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore’ in big letters, then in smaller letters, ‘And I’m gonna go and buy a car and drive away and I’m not coming back’. I’m sure everyone in the band was going through that.”

“It was horrible,” guitarist O’Brien explained to NME’s Ted Kessler. “We were questioning everything too much, questioning the fundamentals of what we were doing. It was horrible, but I think that’s the problem with a university education. You just end up thinking too much.”

Experienced hand Leckie was crucial in helping them overcome the hurdles. “He was so cool – he was amazingly able to deal with all sorts of stuff,” recalled Yorke. “He was getting “concerned but polite” phone cells from the record company and had to deal with that. We wouldn’t take calls from them but, because of his vast experience in the studio, he viewed everything with a lack of importance. And thank God he did! He’s been doing it for so long he realised sometimes a producer is simply someone who just creates the right atmosphere for things to happen. In a way, he was like a caring uncle.”

With the label backing away from their idea to get the singles down first, they began to gain some momentum. “The thing John Leckie used to say all the time was, ‘Do what the fuck you like’,” explained Yorke. “And nobody had ever said it before in that way. It was like being at art college: in the first year they said, ‘You can do whatever you want’. So l spent a year wandering around saying, ‘I don’t want to do any of this, actually’. Then by the second year I’d got into computers. I just needed something to start me off, and I was alright after that because I’d found a medium in which to work — and it was the same with recording.”

Recorded in spurts between more bouts of touring, The Bends owes its eventual sound to both the thrilling live band they’d become and, encouraged by Leckie, adventurous experimentation in the studio. Slowly, definitive versions of songs that would make up the core of the record were laid down: the urgent art-rock of Just, (Nice Dream)’s gently psychedelic grooves, the gloriously futuristic jolt of Planet Telex, which would become the album’s opener. High And Dry, a song they’d forgotten about, would be resurrected after they came across an old demo.

If there was one track that showed Radiohead were now operating on a whole new level, it was closer Street Spirit (Fade Out). On one hand, it’s a mournful ballad, but on the other, no it’s not, how dare you say that? It’s a bewitching spaghetti junction of arpeggio guitar parts, gentle rhythmic propulsion and quietly powerful vocals, a song that sounds like it’s slowing the world down. For Yorke, capturing it was a moment he’ll never forget.

“The whole reason to be doing this is to arrive at those moments,” he told Mojo’s Nick Kent. “It makes it worth all the scratching around for months on end in note-books and all the hundreds of thousands of ideas you compile on endless tapes. It’s the sole reason you spend your entire life in your bedroom playing to yourself. If I ever forget why I started this as a career, than that’s why I started. We spent a day going round in circles until I was thinking, ‘This is never going to happen’. Then suddenly something happened and I was transported to a place that I’d been willing myself to be in for months on end. I’d finally made the transition. Now you might only be in that place for three minutes and for ever more life will never be quite as good. But that’s fine by me.”

The importance of capturing a moment of live wizardry in shaping The Bends can be summed up in two other songs, both at the opposite end of the record’s sonic spectrum. Yorke had struggled with the vocals on Fake Plastic Trees, a swaying acoustic anthem, until going to a Jeff Buckley show inspired him. He immediately went back to the studio and nailed it in three takes. The group had struggled to nail the caged ferocity of wiry rocker My Iron Lung, until they performed it for a filmed gig at London’s Astoria and realised they could that version. It was perfect. Yorke overdubbed new vocals in the studio with the rest taken from the show.

It was a hit in the UK, going into the Top Five in the Album Charts and whilst the rest of the world was a little slow in recognising The Bends as a modern classic, everyone eventually got up to speed. Their cause was undoubtedly helped by a worldwide support tour with R.E.M., who proclaimed their genius in interviews, but there was no way this wasn’t going to happen. The Bends was the work of a generational guitar band coming of age. It was going to cut through however it unfolded.

In an interview around release, Yorke was finally freed of the year-long tension he’d experienced making the album. “The mood in the band at the moment is better than it’s ever been,” he beamed. “It’s taken us this long to realise that it’s as simple as getting together with your mates and playing some songs. Everything else is bullshit.”

Unfortunately, Yorke and his bandmates seem to have forgotten this on every album they’ve made since. Radiohead’s way is always the hard way. They’re the band whose classics are all about working your way through the bad times. As The Bends proved, it’s always worth it in the end.

Niall Doherty is a writer and editor whose work can be found in Classic Rock, The Guardian, Music Week, FourFourTwo, on Apple Music and more. Formerly the Deputy Editor of Q magazine, he co-runs the music Substack letter The New Cue with fellow former Q colleagues Ted Kessler and Chris Catchpole. He is also Reviews Editor at Record Collector. Over the years, he’s interviewed some of the world’s biggest stars, including Elton John, Coldplay, Arctic Monkeys, Muse, Pearl Jam, Radiohead, Depeche Mode, Robert Plant and more. Radiohead was only for eight minutes but he still counts it.

Can a band make a comeback album when they technically never went anywhere? If they can, then Opeth most definitely did with November’s The Last Will And Testament. Their first full-length in half a decade, it saw the Swedes charge back to their avant-death metal roots while dodging nostalgia bait, mixing their early, widescreen onslaughts with the 70s prog chug they embraced afterwards.

The result was arguably the band’s most popular release since Ghost Reveries 19 years beforehand, seemingly every corner of their broad-tasted audience finding something to love. Whether you admired the anachronistic blend of vintage prog and cutting-edge metal or just thanked God for the presence of growls again, chances are tonight’s gig at the Camden Roundhouse will feature even more of your favourite thing about Opeth.

This 3,300-capacity building being sold-out only affirms the stature of Stockholm’s finest right now, and they fittingly start with the first song on the album that un-splintered their fanbase. On record, §1 didn’t just introduce The Last Will…’s Succession-but-Victorian concept and its whole song-titles-by-numbers thing; it also weaved between balls and brains to summarise everything this lot do in six minutes. Its darkly ambitious tone is reinforced live, as screens behind, beside and before the stage show clips of abandoned mansions and ghostly shadows.

§7, §3 and A Story Never Told continue the celebration of Opeth’s newest achievement, while in between, the band re-explore their past with vision. Rather than hand out the greatest hits and cater to a nostalgia that, as The Last Will… proved, they have no interest in, they shuffle through classics and deep cuts. Ghost Of Perdition is reliably crowd-popping, getting thousands to roar ‘Ghost of mother!’ in unison, whereas The Night And The Silent Winter rewards the diehards, representing 1996’s seldom-played Morningrise with melodeath verve. There’s no shame around the divisive all-prog days either, Heritage number Häxprocess emerging in a tide of silky guitars and oddball drums.

Almost as entertaining as the music is singer/guitarist Mikael Åkerfeldt’s banter. Unabashedly dry every time he steps to the mic, he makes no bones about flipping off a fan who claims the Beatles suck, shouting incoherently at howlers in the crowd and admitting which of his own songs have “shit” bits. It’s a welcome dose of humanity between the towering suites and machine-precise lighting cues.

The night ends with a one-two punch reiterating Opeth’s range. Sorceress – the 2016 single that starts with a happy-go-lucky keyboard jaunt – gives way to Deliverance, an oldie partially inspired by the heaviest band on Earth, Meshuggah. “Haven’t we been fucking great tonight?!” Mikael asks before that closing juxtaposition of wonder and punishment.

Yes. Yes you have.

Opeth setlist: The Roundhouse, London – February 26, 2025

§1
Master’s Apprentices
The Leper Affinity
§7
Häxprocess
In My Time Of Need
The Night And The Silent Water
§3
Ghost Of Perdition
A Story Never Told

Encore:
Sorceress
Deliverance

Louder’s resident Gojira obsessive was still at uni when he joined the team in 2017. Since then, Matt’s become a regular in Prog and Metal Hammer, at his happiest when interviewing the most forward-thinking artists heavy music can muster. He’s got bylines in The Guardian, The Telegraph, NME, Guitar and many others, too. When he’s not writing, you’ll probably find him skydiving, scuba diving or coasteering.

In 2009, Classic Rock consulted a panel of rock DJs, rock critics, rock photographers, rock singers, rock musicians, rock promoters and rock stars to compile the definitive guide to the 100 Best British Albums of all time. We also spoke to the people who made those records, including Marillion, whose 1985 classic Misplaced Childhood made the chart at number 88.

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One evening in November 2005, in Amsterdam’s Paradiso – one of the city’s loveliest live music venues – a gentleman of a certain age is simultaneously caressing his wife’s backside and singing loudly in her ear. ‘Kayleeeeigh…’ he implores, ‘I just want to say I love yew-ah…’

The wife gazes up at her man. She sings something back.

‘But Kayleigh I’m too scared to pick up the phone-ah…’

They finish together, in perfect harmony: ‘To hear yew’ve found another lover… to patch up our broken hooome-ah…’

It’s a rather touching vignette that is being played out in various forms between any number of couples throughout the club. A tune that is about to turn 21, from an album of a similar vintage, is proving that some emotions are both universal and permanently in vogue.

On the Paradiso stage, Fish is singing the song for the many hundredth time, but tonight he seems a little lost in it, too. The famous Kayleigh, long absent, has of late been on his mind.

“You know,” he had said earlier in the day, “I hadn’t spoken to her in 23 years. And I met her. It was… really strange.”

Kayleigh had, as predicted, found another lover. She has five kids, too. And it turned out that she had never heard Misplaced Childhood, the Marillion album that her love affair with Fish had inspired. Fish shook his head and laughed.

“Christ! She hadn’t heard the fucking album that I’d written about a period that really upset me… You know I’ve always said I’ll never tell anyone who she is. She has her own life. I made the name up. It’s a combination of two of her names, Kay and her middle name Lee, and now it’s listed in the Book Of Girls’ Names. I have this hideous fear that one day I’ll be in the bar, you know, dreadful old letch, goin’: ‘Alright darlin’. What’s your name, then?’ And she’ll say: ‘It’s Kayleigh.’ Fuckin’ hell! Can you imagine?”

Holland was one of the first European countries to take to Marillion, and Misplaced Childhood was the record that did it. Fish’s decision to reprise the entire album live at the end of 2005 brought a series of full houses, and the Paradiso show will appear as a DVD in the spring. After soundcheck, he sat on the club’s small back deck that overlooked a narrow walkway and inevitable canal.

“Misplaced… changed all our lives,” he said. “I think it made the band and destroyed the band simultaneously.”

You’ll find Marillion’s studio, The Racket Club, in the countryside outside Aylesbury – but you’ll need a hell of map. It squats in a low-rise, grey-brick business park at the end of a concrete drive that’s in no hurry to get you anywhere.

Externally it’s unlovely, yet inside it’s home. Ernest young men twiddle away on computers, while Marillion guitarist Steve Rothery and keyboard player Mark Kelly take a seat on one of its many comfy sofas to talk about a record that they acknowledge still defines their band to sections of the wider public.

For some years now, Marillion’s live set has not only excluded the hits from Misplaced Childhood, but also any songs at all from the four albums Fish made with them. The band’s reinvention with Steve Hogarth, Fish’s replacement, was completed long ago. Misplaced Childhood remains their biggest commercial success, but its place in their hearts seems less distinct.

When a CD copy is produced, Mark Kelly looks at it like he has been asked to ID a particularly dreadful police mug-shot: fascinated, appalled. “When was the last time I listened to it? Oh, when it came out, probably,” he laughs. “I don’t tend to listen to them that much once they’re done.” Therein lies the ambiguity of being confronted with our younger selves.

Back in 1984, it seemed natural for Marillion to make a concept album. They had cast themselves in the great British progressive rock tradition, after all. They were named after a Tolkien novel. The song most beloved of their fans was Grendel, a 20-minute tune that had been the B-side of the 12-inch version of their first single, Market Square Heroes, and unavailable elsewhere since.

Their first album, Script For A Jester’s Tear, had been euphorically received; Fish’s self-styled ‘bleeding heart poet’ and the band’s ability to produce music that was quirky and epic, occasionally at the same time, built a fan-base of almost maniacal devotion. Script… sold 70,000 copies.

Fugazi became one of the great examples of second-album syndrome. Marillion lavished a small fortune on it; it sold 60,000 copies. EMI might have dropped them had their manager, John Arnison, not stemmed the bleeding with a successful – and cheap – live mini-album, Real To Reel, while absolutely not telling the band that their future was uncertain.

“It was quite good for us that John didn’t give us the bad news, because we were quite bullish about what we wanted to do,” Mark Kelly says. “We were like, ‘Right, we’re going to do a concept album; 45 minutes of continuous music, with no breaks.’”

Lots of concept albums had dealt either directly or tangentially with notions of rock stardom. Misplaced Childhood set out to address one very particular element of it: the dislocation of life pre-fame from life post-fame. Fish decided that he had lost himself, or at least a part of himself, somewhere in that gap and he wanted to write about it.

Lots of concept albums were opaque, their meanings implied. This was sometimes because the writer wanted the listener to project their own feelings upon it. And it was sometimes because they didn’t make any sense. Fish’s concept was different. He knew the subject inside out, because the subject was himself. Or rather it was his two selves: Derek Dick, the son of a petrol station owner, from Dalkeith in Scotland, and Fish, the character he would variously describe as ‘bleeding-heart poet’ and ‘rootin’, tootin’ cowboy’.

“I’d always wanted to be a singer, and suddenly I was a singer in a band that was getting great reviews and people were saying: ‘This is going to be a really happening band,’” he says. “What depressed me about it was I was having a problem between Derek and Fish. There was a strange kind of schizophrenia thing happening. I was thinking that Derek was the guy off stage and Fish was the guy on it, which was a really stupid thing to do.

“So I’m on the road, confused about who I am, splitting up with my girlfriend who I’m completely heartbroken about, and a lot of drugs and alcohol involved at the same time… It was not a healthy environment. Kay was a major love of my life, but I was too young, too immature…” He tails off. “Kay was just the person that Derek really wanted to marry, but she wasn’t the person that Fish needed at that point in his career.”

The split came 18 months before he even considered writing about it. “We were already wedded to the concept idea. I’d bought a house in Aylesbury so I had my own pad. It was just me. All the other guys went back to their wives and their girlfriends and I was left on my own. When you came off the road, you were away from the road crew, you were away from the circus. It used to get depressing. Someone had sent me down a White Lightning acid, in the post. And I hadn’t done it for about three years. I was in a bad frame of mind. I dropped half of it and then cycled up to Steve Rothery’s…” He laughs hard.

“About an hour after I’d dropped the first half, I did the other. I went out of it, skydiving. And Steve drives me home. ‘Well, thanks then… Bye!’ And I just had this urge to write. I knew something was coming. And I started to go a bit crazy, quite electric. I was just staring at this painting I had and trying to calm myself down.

“I remember putting on Incubus [a track from Fugazi], and again I was going through this Fish/Derek thing. I was having this internal question and answer thing with Derek and Fish, and I just started to write. And I wrote this stream of consciousness.

“I was starting to freak out. I was on my own. I remember coming back downstairs and it was like… something’s happening. I felt a presence coming down the stairs behind me and into the room – and I knew it was the boy. I didn’t turn round, I just knew he was there. It had happened before, in Earls Court with Kay, and Kay had actually seen the boy on the stairwell. And it just calmed the whole thing down.

“All the heaviness, all the tension went, and I started writing. I rang Steve and I said: ‘I’ve got the idea for the concept. I’ve worked it all out.’”

It was a universal story – man falls down, rediscovers himself, gets back up again – and around it Fish worked his major theme: the dichotomy between Derek and Fish; the rootlessness of fame; the search for meaning in the face of success. The rest of the band, however, didn’t entirely buy it.

Mark Kelly: “I had got engaged to my girlfriend, John Arnison was engaged to his girlfriend, and Fish saw that as a threat.”

Steve Rothery: “Which in a way lends the whole thing an air of tragedy, because I remember how he was with Kay and I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so happy. He probably wouldn’t agree with that. I could see why he wanted to put all these thoughts down. A lot of it came down to his relationship with Kay and the fact that they were living together and it was all going so well. He seemed to deliberately destroy it, and after that he was the tortured artist almost trying to buy happiness in some way.”

Mark: “He definitely has this idea in his head that if he was to fuck up his life he’d have something juicy to write about. We used to laugh about it, but it was true. It was a catalyst for material.”

Steve: “He was always more in love with the idea of being a rock singer or being a singer in a band; we were a lot more grounded in the music. The whole package is what he bought into. And if you live your life by those criteria, then those things are going to happen to you. He was embracing the tragedy, if you like. It was something he was actively seeking. We’ve always been aware of it.”

Marillion wrote most of the music for the album during sessions at Barwell Court, a Victorian mansion near Chessington in Surrey, and demoed it at Bray in a studio owned by Gerry Anderson, the creator of the TV show Thunderbirds. Then EMI asked the band if they would record the album in Berlin (at the time still halved physically and ideologically by the Wall). EMI owned Hanza studios, where David Bowie had made his Heroes album in an atmosphere of Weimar decadence. Chris Kimsey was to be their producer.

Mark Kelly: “The whole reason we went to Berlin for Misplaced… was because it was cheap.”

Fish: “I was a very fucked-up person. I had virtually no personal life and I was lucky that I was in an alien environment. West Berlin was the perfect culture to make an album like that. We were in a hotel just round the corner from the studio, and at the bottom of the street was the Wall. It was winter, it was bleak. You walked around the corner and thought you were going to see Michael Caine or Richard Burton playing spies. I loved it.”

It was impossible for such a setting not to work its way into the late-night feel of the record.

Fish: “The main room in Hanza was the former SS Officers’ club. How much ambience do you want? We worked all night, we were totally vampirical… I mean, some of the guys would come in during the day, but 90 per cent of my sessions were done after the hour of 10 o’clock and before five in the morning. There was a bar downstairs, and we’d drink nappa and then go and work.

“We hardly had any money. I was sent on behalf of the band to ask the EMI accountant to ask for more. There was a decadent, hedonistic atmosphere in Berlin. We were in a restaurant one night and Mark dared me to walk through it naked. I won 400 deutschmarks, and it paid for my hooker bill that week. Ha! But the thing was, no one there objected. They just cheered when I did it.

“You were walking about the Wall, you were walking about these dense, overgrown gothic parks, and it fuelled the album. The drama was there. It was a great time for making music. It was really exciting.”

Steve: “Hit singles were never talked about. Kayleigh was just part of that first side of music we came up with. Our A&R guy, Hugh Stanley Clarke, wasn’t that keen on it.”

Mark: “He came out to Berlin, went for a meal, got pissed, and Kimsey took him to the studio to play him the album, and he fell asleep during the playback… After he’d heard it – and it still wasn’t finished, of course – he said: ‘Have you got anything else?’

“The music just sort of came together. I liked the idea of having themes that repeated throughout. I remember Steve coming up with the chorus for Kayleigh; the chorus sequence was originally a little tag on the end of a song that never made it onto Fugazi. I remember joining Kayleigh and Lavender together. The first side came very quick and it felt very natural. The second side was a lot harder and it took a lot longer to shape it. We’d have a blackboard with things like ‘The Joni Mitchell Bit’ or something, identifying the sections, and we’d go: ‘Maybe this will fit with this…’ The second side, there is an up and then down, up and then down.”

With some skill, Fish created some arresting contrasts of his own. Perspectives switch from the LSD trip in Aylesbury to the doomed love affair with Kay to a night with a prostitute in Lyon. Pivotal sections on growing up in Scotland book-end the death of Fish’s friend John Mylett, the drummer in a band called Rage.

Fish: “It’s key in a way. Before that there are these sort of continual shallow collisions, trying to find some sort of real loving. Milo [John Mylett] happened when we were out on the road. Me and Mark were in Toronto with our tour manager, Paul Lewis. John Mylett was a Jim Morrison-type character, a goodlooking guy. He went away on his honeymoon and got killed in a car crash, and the irony was just horrific. I was just about to start doing interviews and Paul came into the room and said: ‘Milo’s dead.’

“John was a kind of guru for me. I used to talk to him about how to deal with stuff, and I was really, really upset. And the interviews started, and the guy would be, ‘Oh, I’m sorry… But anyway…’ And I got angry because you weren’t allowed that private space. If John had been a major star on a major label it would have been: ‘Sorry… not today.’ I thought I was being dehumanised and depersonalised. And I thought: ‘What have I really given up?’

“I had found a crossroads, and it was scary at the time. That night in Aylesbury, I think I basically did break down. And the whole album was rebuilding from that. “Lyrically the album still makes as much sense to me now. It’s like going into the attic and finding an old jacket that still fits, and it looks great and it’s back in style and it works. But I am a man now, and back then I was boy. It’s a great album, and I am really proud of it.”

Misplaced Childhood was released in spring 1985. On the album sleeve was the ‘boy’ character who Fish had envisioned during the acid trip in Aylesbury. The album became an immediate and overwhelming success. Kayleigh was a No.2 single. With some irony, the video featured Fish’s new girlfriend and future wife Tammi playing the part of Kay.

“I’ve always worn my heart on my sleeve,” Fish said. “I’m someone who came out of a culture that believed that a problem shared is a problem halved. I worked with a band who didn’t believe that. They were predominantly middle-class English, and communication within the band was exceedingly difficult. I’ve read, for example, a book about Marillion, and Steve said a couple of things in that book that made it obvious that around 1982-1983 he was having some severe grudges against me that he never let come out. And if that’s what we built our relationship on, then our relationship must have been pretty shit all the way through.”

Steve Rothery: “I was in this café bar underneath the studio in Berlin with Hugh Stanley Clarke. Basically Fish was already wanting to do a solo album. He had this idea: there were these people in Germany at the time who’d committed suicide by driving the wrong way down the autobahn until they hit something, and he thought about a concept album based on the songs this guy was listening to as he was trying to commit suicide. Hugh wasn’t that keen.

“At the same time, I approached Hugh about this project that I had, more of a rock thing. The next thing I know, Fish had me pinned against the wall, accusing me of keeping all of my best ideas for my solo album. Which was about as far from the truth as you can ever get. Everything I wrote at the time was used. His ego had been hurt and he wanted to take it out on somebody.

“That was kind of like a switch thrown in my mind, that this guy is out of control. And from that moment on I sort of emotionally distanced myself from him. Fish is a very complex personality. Sometimes you feel close to him, and at other times you feel like he couldn’t give a shit. And from that moment on that was kind of it.

“I’d had a conversation with John Arnison just after he started managing the band, and we talked then about when Fish was going to leave. That was back in 1982. You could see it coming like an express train, and it was just a case of how fast it was moving and when it was going to hit you. His ego and his drive and his ambition were such that he was going to do this at some point.”

Mark: “His whole attitude was that people he worked with could stick around for as long as they were useful to him, and then he was quite prepared to discard anybody and everybody when the time was right. Because we were so successful, people were happy and excited and it was glossed over. It was when we started writing the next album that things started falling apart. By the time we did the Clutching At Straws tour we were hardly even speaking to Fish.”

The split came in 1989. Fish went solo, and Marillion found their replacement in Steve Hogarth, then singing in a band called the Europeans.

“I always got the impression that Fish didn’t understand what was special about the band,” Steve Rothery says. “It wasn’t just all about him, it was a mutual chemistry, a uniqueness that we had together.”

The interview almost done, Rothery stands up and expresses some mild surprise at how easily his emotions had come back to him. But it didn’t really seem that strange. The same had happened to Fish when he was remembering Kay and his general alienation. Perhaps that’s where the real strength of Marillion’s Misplaced Childhood album lies – in the raw passions that it harbours.

I ask Mark what he thinks about Fish reprising the record for the anniversary, and he says: “I’d have been quite interested to have a look, actually. Our relationship with Fish has mellowed over the years apart from a few little things… It’s alright, though, it really is.”

This feature originally appeared in Classic Rock 91 (April 2006)

Jon Hotten is an English author and journalist. He is best known for the books Muscle: A Writer’s Trip Through a Sport with No Boundaries and The Years of the Locust. In June 2015 he published a novel, My Life And The Beautiful Music (Cape), based on his time in LA in the late 80s reporting on the heavy metal scene. He was a contributor to Kerrang! magazine from 1987–92 and currently contributes to Classic Rock. Hotten is the author of the popular cricket blog, The Old Batsman, and since February 2013 is a frequent contributor to The Cordon cricket blog at Cricinfo. His most recent book, Bat, Ball & Field, was published in 2022.