Explanation Required

Every weekend when I was about 16 or so, my friends and I would get together, buy a six pack of cooking lager each and end up headbanging in a line to the Jovi or Maiden. No wonder most of us were single! One week at my mate Jim's house, rather than pull out the traditional 'Slippery When Wet', he pulled out this black-sleeved album with all these fabulous images on it.

Slumped against Jim's bed, in an advanced state of inebriation, my head was in that magical space where it is capable of understanding all the multiple layers of a track simultaneously. The bubbling intro swirled and eddied in my head and I was truly gone. Life would never be the same again. Jim and Matt were singing along and I just floated in the currents of these astonishingly beautiful tunes and words.

It was Marillion's Clutching at Straws album. Within a few months, I had virtually everything the band had available. When I heard that Jim and Matt were going to see this band, I was jealous as hell, and have never forgiven them! As it turned out, I would never get the chance to see the band in that form for, as we all know, Fish left the band after the tour.

My fandom continued over the years. About 1996, my company got access to the Internet, and I discovered the Freaks mailing list and the websites that were about at the time. I decided I wanted to put up my own fan site and began thinking about what I could do that wasn't just blind worship or duplicating someone else's effort. I came across Scott McMahon's text-based discography for Genesis and in it were some explanations for some of the lyrical phrases. It was the inspiration I needed and soon my friend Matt and I had come up with the original version of the Explanations of Song Elements site, which at that time was hosted by Bert ter Steege, who many of you will know as the master of the Marillion discography. Soon my design skills had progressed to the point where I could consider taking complete ownership of the site and put it at http://www.marillionlyric.co.uk/

I'm delighted with the way the site has prospered over the years. It's wonderful to receive an email from someone who has received some insight as a result of your labours and is really the best reason for doing it. So many people have contributed to the Explanations that it really is a team effort. I like to think that our policy of identifying contributors has helped make it as popular as it has proved to be over the last 6 years.

I was naturally delighted when Jon asked me if I would consider writing up album overviews for his forthcoming Marillion biography. I'm sure everyone who was asked to contribute a story to the book felt the same. Jon had got in touch initially to ask whether he could use some information from the Explanations website.

I flatter myself that, as a result of the research done on the website (by myself and others), I have a pretty good understanding of what the songs are about, but it's still daunting to be asked to write an overview of 12 albums over a period of nearly 20 years. I've always made a point of saying that the Explanations is not about explaining the songs, that individuals meanings are as valid as anyone else's, even the author. But for the book, I was going to have to stick my neck on the line.

It actually took about three and a half months to write all of the overviews. I'd sit at the PC with the albums in the CD player and write. I decided to give myself the length of each song to try and encapsulate it. You might think that it would be easy to capture the soul of a Marillion song in three or four sentences and do it in the time that it takes to listen to the track itself. It isn't! Many was the time that I'd get carried away enjoying the songs, or get stuck trying to come up with a way to express my emotional reaction to them.

I really enjoyed listening to all twelve albums in order. Amazingly I'd never done it before, but I know now it's something I'll do again. There is a connection between each one that is pleasing. Even between Clutching at Straws and Seasons End, where one might expect there to be a chasm, there is a connection which is undeniable.

I hope that people feel my overviews of the album give a flavour of what the songs are about. It was difficult at times to write them - I naturally have songs which I love and some which I don't, but I had to be aware that I was not writing purely to display my own prejudices. I hope I managed to do it. If it made someone go and put on the album they were reading about, I'll be truly delighted.

After all, it really is the music that matters.

I'd just like to thank Jon for giving me the opportunity of contributing to the book and to do the website. It was hard work at times, but mainly, it was a bloody good laugh and I'm dead proud to have been involved.

Fraser