Holidays in Eden : December 1997

Immediately following the “Seasons End” tour we descended upon “Stanbridge Farm” residential rehearsal studio and decadent gentleman's retreat, once again just outside Brighton. I arrived on a sunny summer day in 1990 to discover a rambling Tudor house with outdoor swimming pool, a cottage annexe, and a converted barn full of sound equipment. Having turned up first I bagged the master bedroom and lay upon the bed contemplating it's recent occupants - Phil Collins (no less), Siouxie Sioux, Morrissey, and Duran Duran's Warren Cuccurillo. Word has it, Warren likes to decorate his room with silver foil and as I lay on the bed, I could see evidence of his efforts - sellotape and tinfoil remnants in the topmost corners of the room. (I heard a few more stories about the Durannies... they sound like quite a bunch of characters...)

Having come more or less straight here from the tour we hadn't had much time to dream up any new ideas - we were starting from scratch - and in many ways this was the point in our creative relationship where we first started attempting to define what Marillion might represent in the future. There was a degree of nervousness on all sides during the writing process. Everything seemed to take forever and my natural impatience to move things along and turn musical moments into song structures caused mutual frustration amongst the boys, who were used to living with ideas for a period of time before moving on. I thought “Seasons End” was written in a few short weeks but I was forgetting that the band had been jamming for eight months before we met! I was going to have to slow down... I became ill and went home for a couple of weeks while they got on with it.

The songs gradually came together during the late-summer and autumn.. and then the winter. Originally the band were to return to producer Chris Kimsey to record “Holidays In Eden”. Chris was in the middle of recording “Steel Wheels” for The Rolling Stones and came over a couple of times on his days off to listen to us playing. Somehow they got wind of it and he started receiving threatening letters from the Stones' lawyers in New York banning him from any other projects until he'd finished their record. That's what he told us, anyway... We were going to need another producer. Chris Neil - pop producer extraordinaire - called up one day to say we were his son's favourite band and that he would love to work with us and that he promised not to lighten up the sound and turn us into Mike and the Mechanics. We bit the bullet and enlisted him, moving to Nomis Studios in London to routine the songs and then on, once again, to Hook End Manor in Oxfordshire, to record the album. Consequently, “Holidays In Eden” was to become Marillion's “pop”est album ever, and was greeted with delight by many, and dismay by some of the hardcore fans. That was just fine by me - I like anything that stirs up a bit of controversy... and if Splintering Heart and The Party are pop songs, I'll eat my pink telecaster.

Holidays in Eden : December 1997

My memories of writing and recording Holidays In Eden are mixed and rather blurred... the reasons why will become apparent if you read on...

Holidays was the first album that the band wrote and recorded from start to finish with Steve H, so in that sense it was a testing time. When we got together over Seasons End, Steve Rothery, Ian, Pete and myself had been working on material for almost a year and so we had a lot of the component parts which just needed sticking together. H also brought along Easter which was pretty much written. We were probably on our best behaviour and H being the new boy was eager to please. This made for a very positive attitude where nobody questioned what we were writing. With Holidays we had to get used to his creative processes and he ours. H is someone who comes up with an idea for a song and will work on it night and day until he beats it into submission. It is only then that he will step back and look at his handiwork to ask the question, is it any good?

The rest of the band are more into navel gazing until we come up with what we think is a gem of an idea, discarding everything else. We'll work on it to polish it up and then stick it in a box for a while, afraid to play with it in case we ruin it and keen to see if we still like it when we get it out again later. Two completely different approaches which initially clashed to the point where Steve had to go home for 10 days to recuperate! Watching us write was like watching paint dry for him and whilst he'd built gothic castles and blown them up again, we'd sorted out the plumbing and drilled a few holes.

The months in Stanbridge were full of such navel gazing interspersed with jamming and shooting lots of pool. We shot so much, we could have taken on Jimmy White or Stephen Hendry no prob.

My most outstanding memory was the night we decided to dress up as Mexican amigos. We were totally out of our heads on tequila and magic mushrooms. H had never savoured the delights of the fairy fungi before and just had this bizarre face on the whole evening. As well as wearing sombreros, ponchos and not shaving for a week, we'd bought some of those joke Quentin Tarantino action movie style scars. You know, the sort that make you look like Mr Blonde's found you with his cheating girlfriend. We were pretending we'd been in the wars with Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid or Bruce Willis or whoever and so had plastered them all over our faces and bods. I remember H looking over at me with eyes like psychedelic saucers and saying “You know, I think it's really great that we've dressed up as Mexicans, drunk all this tequila and eaten all these magic mushrooms... but I'm not sure we should have done it all at the same time. For God's sake take those rubber scars off... they're really freaking me out!” No wonder it took about 8 months to write it!

By the time we got to Hook End to record Holidays with Chris Neil I was a bit nervous. Any guy who had produced artists as bizarre as Celine Dion, Leo Sayer and Sheena Easton was, in my view, a questionable choice. Working with him turned out to be fun but it was a bit like being in the studio with a Blue Peter presenter who'd always had one he'd prepared earlier. I got pissed off at the speed of the recording - we recorded and mixed it in 10 weeks - which might be a long time for The Spice Girls but is certainly nowhere near long enough for us! I wasn't allowed to experiment with my bits (oo er missus!) and felt dissatisfied with the resulting keyboard parts. When we play This Town and 100 Nights now live we add a lot of extra embellishments to the middle section which have developed since and it goes down a treat with the audience. I felt there was no art in it ... just lean and mean commerciality. In hindsight I reckon that was fine for songs like No One Can which is a classic pop song but it was less appropriate for the more dark and moody stuff.

Anyway, Chris was a good laugh to work with. There was one time when were in the studio together working on something and the door had locked itself again. Someone was banging away to come in so I went to let them in. Behind me, Chris had pulled his trousers down and was pulling them up with a guilty look on his face as the rest of the band piled in. I wondered why they were all looking at me funny until I turned round and saw Chris!

Holidays in Eden : December 1997

For the writing of Holidays, we found ourselves back near Brighton in a residential rehearsal complex called Stanbridge. A big old country house, with a big barn converted into the live room where all the equipment was set-up.

It took us a long time to find a natural way of working together. This was not helped by the pressure we were put under by EMI to come up with a more commercial album. After the success of Seasons End, Nick Garfield head of A&R at the time, wanted an album with 3 singles on it. He got very excited about ‘No One Can' and would come down and sit in on the writing from time-to-time.

After spending months at Stanbridge it was suggested we go to Bath to demo some songs for the album. We were in the Moles Club, a famous place, which the band had played many years before. We recorded in the studio upstairs and on the last night we played in the club downstairs to the fans to see what they thought It was a good idea as we were made aware of what Songs we had for the album and also what was missing. It worked well and was quite a relaxed atmosphere. This was where ‘I Don't Need Anyone' was demoed, a song of Steve's that was going to be used, and that Nick Garfield particularly liked.

After Christmas we were back in Hook End Manor in Oxfordshire, working with Chris Neill and Rob Eaton. Once we'd set up and started recording, we had severe snow and really cold weather. This caused all sorts of problems and it got frustrating not being able to record because of power failures. It did however allow us to get to know Chris a bit better.

Chris Neill is a song man really, he likes a verse and a good chorus and we did learn a lot from him about song construction. Chris really liked ‘No One Can', ‘The Party' which is a favourite of mine and ‘Cover my Eyes' which we salvaged out of some bits we weren't going to use, but his most creative moment was putting together ‘Splintering Heart' the way he did. The original version had a raw approach a-la Killing Joke and Chris changed it about a lot with the electronic beginning. I seem to remember ‘Waiting to Happen' being another song that we were ready to drop and Chris persevered with.

This album was released on CD, Cassette, and LP.

The song 'Dry Land' originally appeared on Steve Hogarth's pre-Marillion band How We Live's album Dry Land