It’s been six years since FEAR was released during a time of political turmoil, and yet nothing could have prepared Marillion for the challenges they’d face in making its follow-up. Prog catches up with the band as they prepare to release An Hour Before It’s Dark, and finds out how they turned some of their darkest subject matter into one of their brightest and most optimistic-sounding records.

Clockwatching: Dave Everley

Marillion: celebrating light at the end of a rather long tunnel.

Images: Anne-Marie Forker

“I’m just saying to people, ‘Go out and make things better.’”

Steve Hogarth

December 16, 2019. Marillion are playing the last concert of their With Friends From The Orchestra tour at The Colosseum Theater in Essen, Germany. Befitting the show’s grand orchestrated conceit, the set leans towards the more epic end of their catalogue: Gaza, Estonia, plus the four-song The New Kings Suite, from 2016’s acclaimed FEAR album.

After the final chords of closing song This Strange Engine drift away, the band take their bows. It’s a triumphant end to one of the most successful periods of Marillion’s career – one in which FEAR gave them their first UK Top 5 album since 1987’s Clutching At Straws. But the band members’ minds are on the impending Christmas break and the prospect of reconvening in the new year to begin work in earnest on their 19th studio album.

The latter will happen eventually, but it will be in circumstances that neither Marillion nor anyone else on the planet can envision. On the same day as the Essen show, 5,000 miles away in the Chinese city of Wuhan, a patient is admitted to hospital with severe acute respiratory symptoms. It is the first documented admission of someone suffering from what will soon be named Covid-19.

What happens next seems simultaneously surreal and all too real: the rising tide of uncertainty and fear, the escalating death toll, the closing of borders and government-mandated lockdowns, the disruption and despair, the chaos and grief. By the middle of 2020, there’s not a person on the planet that the Covid-19 pandemic won’t touch in some way.

For Marillion, as with so many musicians, the last two years have been the strangest of times. Bubbled up in their Racket Club studio-cum-HQ, recording the new album, they tried to block the events happening outside the window from bleeding into the songs they were writing. As singer Steve Hogarth puts it: “I was determined not to reference the pandemic ’cos I thought every writer under the sun was going to do it. But everything I was trying to write, it kept worming its way into the words.”

The album Marillion have emerged with, An Hour Before It’s Dark, is undeniably a lockdown album, albeit one that has been informed by events rather than consciously confronts them head-on. Like FEAR, it is inextricably coloured by everything going on around it, but where that album was a dark, sometimes despairing examination of Britain and ‘Britishness’ in the run-up to the Brexit vote, An Hour Before It’s Dark finds compassion and hope amid the chaos and confusion of the pandemic era. If FEAR was a state of the nation address, An Hour Before It’s Dark is a state of humanity address.

New album An Hour Before I t’ s Dark is out in March.

“It was slightly weird being in [The Racket Club] while all this stuff was going on outside. We were watching the news, but we were in the middle of doing our own thing too.”

Mark Kelly

“You can make two kinds of record in a pandemic,” says guitarist Steve Rothery. “It can be doom and gloom, and the world’s about to end, or it can be a celebration that we’re still alive and we’re still going and hopefully there’s still light at the end of the tunnel. I like to think that’s the one we’ve made.”