| # | Quote |
|---|
| 1 | I can't really talk about it without sounding pompous. I could say the fans are all nutters, but I don't think that's true. I think what we've got going within our words and music is something that really gets into the soul of people. They reciprocate by responding to it. Over the years I've had more than one letter and email from people who say your music has saved their life - literally taken them down from the ledge. I know Australians who have flown over to see gigs in England, Americans who have flown to the UK for a show and back home the next day. You see people who travel to see us nearly every night. One Australian guy sold his house so he could see us in the UK. I might have said it's scary, but I've met a lot of these people and they're not scary. They're nice people. Most of them I'd be happy to go for a drink with. |
| 2 | In some ways I think you get the fans you deserve. If you're just producing quite insincere poppy nonsense, you get the people who are excited by that. |
| 3 | [on "Out of This World" from the album "Afraid of Sunlight"] The BBC did a documentary about Bluebird being raised and I don't think the song was even mentioned. If Sting or Peter Gabriel or Annie Lennox had written it, I'm pretty sure the producers would have made a big thing of it. Maybe Marillion weren't good enough for them. Above all, it's a great honour. And bizarre, to be slowly drawn to Donald Campbell by a set of real long shots. I'm just a kid from a council estate. I just wrote a poem. And I ended up sprinkling dust on his coffin as they lowered him into the ground. |
| 4 | [on record companies] I'm getting paid 10p per copy of every album I'm selling and they're selling it for 15 quid. That's outrageous but it's quite typical. |
| 5 | I think there's something terribly dishonest about manufacturing a product for a market. I don't think that's art, I don't think it's creative, I think it's a factory process. Most people who work in factories dream of being in rock 'n' roll, so you wouldn't want to turn it into a factory having got there. |
| 6 | [on "Afraid of Sunlight" being named as one of the best albums of 1995 by Q Magazine] I was knocked backwards completely because I thought the press hated us, so when that happened we all went onto medication. |
| 7 | We're a band with a big fanbase, but the problem is that, as a result, no-one has an incentive to market us. Record labels know they could spend a fiver on promoting our album and our fans would still go and buy it if they had to find it under a stone. And we knew what would happen if we signed to an indie label. They'd do nothing, sell the album to the fanbase and put the money in the bank. |
| 8 | It's a massive frustration that no-one will play our stuff. If we send our single to Radio 1 they say: 'Sorry, we don't play music by bands who are over so-many years old? and here's the new U2 single.' I suppose it's something everyone has to cope with - every band are remembered for their big hit single, irrespective of how much they change over the years. But you can only transcend that by continuing to have hits. It's Catch 22. |
| 9 | You know, at some stage, someone has to notice that we're doing interesting things. Someday someone will take a retrospective look at us and be surprised. |
| 10 | If we had known when I joined Marillion what we know now, we'd have changed the name and been a new band. It was a mistake to keep the name, because what it represented in the mid-Eighties is a millstone we now carry. If we'd changed it, I think we would have been better off. We would have been judged for our music. It's such a grave injustice that the media constantly calls us a 'dinosaur prog band'. They only say that out of ignorance because they haven't listened to anything we've done for the last 15 bloody years. If you hear anything we've done in the last five or six years, that description is totally irrelevant. |
| 11 | I'd like to sing with Peter Gabriel because I respect him as a singer, writer, and good bloke. I admire his honesty - there's not too much honesty in our profession. I've met him a couple of times. He played me "Red Rain" just after he'd mixed it in his own studio. There was only me, the guy I was working with, and Peter and we all just sat together and listened to it. He didn't really know us but he had nonetheless invited us in to hear it. I admire him for that and I admire him because he seems to care. |
| 12 | The only problem we've created for ourselves is being uncompromising in our music. Doing it for ourselves and hoping that the fan-base will enjoy it and maybe that someone somewhere at radio will play it. What choice have we got; you can't deliberately write for radio, although there are some artists out there that do precisely that. They find a sound that's successful, but they secretly hate it. To me, that's not why you make music. |
| 13 | It (the Internet) gave us a medium through which to collect data, find out who our fans are and advertise to them directly without spending any money. We've got Mark Kelly to thank for that, because he saw its potential in the very early days. Nowadays there's so much talk of Internet trading, but we were doing it before it was on the TV. |
| 14 | Music does cost quite a lot to create, and if you give it away you're gonna go out of business. My own viewpoint is that I don't mind a student who doesn't have two pennies to rub together listening to my work if it cheers them up - it's crap being skint! I only have a problem when people start making large amounts of money out if it. |
| 15 | [speaking in 2001] We're just tired of the opinions of people who haven't heard anything we've done in ten years. A lot of what's spread about this band is laughable. |
| 16 | Our fans are very, very dedicated and sometimes obsessive types. Lesser people sometimes call them anoraks, and this is our way of saying that we're anoraks, too. We haven't got a problem with people believing in something, or being so into it that they know everything about it. On Room 101 (1994) recently, Stephen Fry made the point that there are too many programmes on TV about what's crap. Laughing at things has become a source of entertainment, yet the smart Alecs who point the finger are always the last ones to stand up and say what they believe in. |
| 17 | I don't understand why Q Magazine won't write about us. The most memorable review they gave us was of 'Afraid Of Sunlight' which said, 'If this were by anything other than Marillion it would be hailed as near genius'. And they still wouldn't give us a feature. How can they say, this is an amazing record... no, we don't want to talk to you? It's hard to take when they say, here's a very average record... we'll put you on the front cover. Why don't they just stop pretending that it's all about music and admit it's really about money? Then put the top selling five bands on the cover and tell everyone else to fuck off. |
| 18 | In my view the "punk" revolution was overrated, over-hyped, and only the excellent songwriting of The Clash saved it from being a scourge. |
| 19 | I grew up in the seventies and I really hoped we'd seen the last of the likes of The Bay City Rollers and The Osmonds but since 1997 we've seen little else. |
| 20 | Disco is the scourge of the 20th century. |
| 21 | [speaking in 2004] If you look at what we are doing in the context of the music business, then this is ground-breaking stuff. I'm absolutely certain that in 10 years there won't be a music industry as we know it. A band's future will again depend on whether they are any good. Instead of spending years on the road trying to attract a deal, bands will gather the names and e-mail addresses of fans as they tour venues. If they are any good, bands will be looked after by their fans. The music will be uploaded on the net for anyone to listen to. |
| 22 | We never produce two albums the same. |
| 23 | [on the chart success of "You're Gone"] The fact that this single is in the top 10 will sell more albums and inform more people about Marillion's music. That's what our fans want. They are frustrated that so many people are listening to so much rubbish music without having even heard of bands like Marillion. |
| 24 | [speaking in 2004] The reason record sales are down is not simply due to piracy, it's because the major companies have been peddling rubbish. |
| 25 | The future is going to wipe out all of this Pop Idol (2001) nonsense. There will only be a future for people who do something meaningful. |
| 26 | I do not want to end up like Phil Collins - making records that all sound like each other. |
| 27 | I'd like to work with people in different fields of music, really. I mean everybody says 'Oh Marillion's a progressive band.' Progressive rock doesn't interest me one bit, not one iota. I find it all terribly naive and secondhand for the most part. |
| 28 | I have written around 100 songs now and I still don't have a clue how to do it! |
| 29 | I'd love to sing, just for five minutes, with Joni Mitchell because she's a genius. |
| 30 | Every year goes by I know I'm singing a bit better than the year before. It's a really good feeling and that's happened every year of my life since I started singing. Voice is like any other muscle, it gets fit through use and in my case it gets stronger through use. |
| 31 | We tried having a manager and a major label. They ended up with all the money. The fans were the only people we could trust. And the only people who understand us and truly value us. |
| 32 | You're all wrong about Marillion. Whatever you thought you knew about this record, forget it. Just put it on and listen to it. |
| 33 | There's two kinds of people in this world - those who talk about stuff and people who do stuff, and our fans are the latter. |
$800,000
