Marillion, Cry No More – Town & Country Club, Kentish Town

This gig was the end of an era for me. I was still listening to a lot of Marillion at the end of 1990, but my next gig was to be my first Carter USM gig and my music and gig tastes would be irrevocably altered. I’ve still got a soft spot for Marillion though, particularly the Fish era stuff (not the Kayleigh album Misplaced Childhood, but all the other ones were great) and the first Steve Hogarth album, Seasons End, whose lack of apostrophe always irritates me much more than it should.

This gig was a Seasons End-era gig as well as a Christmas show. Writing this 34 years after the event, my main memory was how ear-splittingly loud it was. There was definitely no health and safety decibel limits back then – and if there were, they were regularly ignored.

Marillion fans are generally massive nerds, so a full setlist from this show still exists:

Mission Impossible Theme (intro, on tape)
Splintering Heart
The Uninvited Guest
Slàinte Mhath
The Party
Easter
Warm Wet Circles
That Time of the Night (The Short Straw)
No One Can
Berlin
Kayleigh
Holidays in Eden
The King of Sunset Town
Hooks in You
Encore 1:
Freaks
Incommunicado
Encore 2:
After Me
Garden Party

Support was from Cry No More, a duo featuring Roy Hill and Chas Cronk, who was in the Strawbs and once part of the Steve Hackett band. There’s a feature on the band here on a Strawbs website here.

I have photos of this gig! They are not very good ones but I managed to get a small 35mm camera inside, and apart from Steve Hogarth standing on the speaker stack right above me, they are particularly rubbish as you would expect.