'Metal Hammer' Magazine

18th September 1989

(extract)

Marillion : Summer Season

Mark Day is the 'Invited Guest' as Marillion Commence rehearsals

	...The man charged with replacing the irreplaceable is Steve Hogarth. A beaming, grinning, multi-talented musician and singer who radiates his enthusiasm for his new role. With the completion of the new Marillion album 'Season's End', the band are knocking a live set in to shape which you'll get to see later this year. Then Hogarth must make his mark, face to face with the fans
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...Steve Hogarth's not only a singer, but a musician as well. When the band play live he's going to be adding his own keyboard contributions to Mark Kelly's work, as he did on the album. Formerly a member of the Europeans, his next band How We Live were rather unsuccessful and just when he'd started considering looking for a job in a studio, he found himself with a choice of two different jobs, as he explains:

"The money had stopped coming in and I was having to sell things to live. I'd almost stopped thinking about music, when I went to my publishers Rondor. It was just before Christmas, so they were all in a state of severe hangover, laid face down on the carpet. So one of them lifted his head out of the carpet and said 'Marillion are looking for a new singer. For me it was very hard to imagine Marillion without Fish."

"...So they sent me a tape. Christmas happened, I'd kind of forgotten about it, then in January their management phoned me up... so I went down to Pete's place, his garage which is full of equipment. They gave me some words, some lyrics and said 'sing that.' I said 'what's the tune' - there wasn't one, just open your mouth and sing! By the end of the afternoon there was an offer. I'd also sang two old songs. I sand 'Sugar Mice' and 'Incommunicado.' I knew most of the words to 'Incommunicado', but I didn't know the words to 'Sugar Mice', so I'd spent the day before with the tape recorder learning the words. So at the end of the day it was 'are you going to do it?'. I said, give me a week to think about it, it's a huge thing to commit to..."

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"We were totally unimpressed with that, by the way" interrupts Mark Kelly, "Having to wait a week!"

Steve continues : "I was in a really odd position. I'd done a lot of keyboard playing in the past, and piano playing. I'd played piano with Matt Johnson and his band 'The The' on his last album 'Infected' and he was going out on the road. So he phoned me up, and wanted me to go and play piano. I really wanted to do that, I respected the players in his band, like Johnny Marr. I was offered that the same week as Marillion came together. I couldn't get arrested at Christmas, by January I had two incredibly exciting offers sitting on the table. I didn't know which way to jump."

What swung it for Marillion ?

"A whole load of things, first of all meeting the boys... shouldn't say that while they're here but they're really nice people. Matt from 'The The' is very intense, he's not much fun. What really swung it, the hard headed part was that it was really the difference between going and playing for somebody for seven months then saying goodbye or becoming part of something that would be as much about me as anything else. I'm a creative person, and this was a chance to weld myself on to Marillion, instead of just working for somebody."

Having an album as strong as 'Season's End' in the can must surely give the band a real boost, and soothe frazzled nerves.

"There are a little less nerves for me now, being the new one" starts Steve, who talks in smiling paragraphs, not sentences, "I wasn't really worried, but I was always a little nervous, first about how the existing fans would take to me, and second, how the rest of the world would take to me as well, the media and everything. The more we worked together, once the songs came together, I started to feel better and better about it, more confident..."

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