Holidays in Eden

 

With the latest Marillion deluxe release, it is back to where it started - for me. June 24th 1991, Holidays in Eden is released. One month after my initial [brief] encounter with Marillion.  The band’s second effort with frontman Steve Hogarth very much repeated the pattern of the original incarnation of the band.  This was their difficult sophomore attempt, their next Fugazi.  Whereas their first release as a new group easily found music inspired from without (in this case the music written with Fish), this one required a what now? period of motivation.  Additionally, the record company (as always) was pressuring them to release material that was commercially viable and recreate their brief highpoint of chart recognition.  The result, emerging from a much larger contribution from H, including tracks from his previous alternative career, was indeed their most commercial attempt. This legacy has haunted the album, considered by many to be too pop, and an album of commercial singles.  However, as my entry point into new-release Marillion, this record has always presented core, classic Marillion - built around the ethereal and intense guitar work that Rothery had been exemplifying for at least three albums. Cover My Eyes (adapted from How We Live’s Simon’s Car), Dry Land (a How We Live cover), and No One Can are the radio-friendly cuts. Call them whatever you want, but the first two are about as close to perfect pop/whatever songs (and then squared) as you can get, and I would dare call the original Dry Land a New Wave album.  For the third, every time I start to get that feeling that it’s an overly-sweet, sappy love song, I am overcome by the transcendental quality of the guitar line, and it might be the most innocent, positive song the band has done, without something dark lying right beneath the surface.  While many consider this a complete diversion in style, and for those following through the 80s, and from earlier prog entries, this may make sense.  For myself, being an entry point, this album makes perfect sense as a quintessential sound, and as I was already encountering what I knew would be decisive change from the Fish material, it didn't seem that much more of a reach than Season's End, and by the end of the summer 1991 all six albums seemed like a contiguous whole. Emerging as music of the time, as Marillion moved away from their pre-1980s influences, resulted in something more like U2 (incorporated into a higher level) than the aging idols of progressive rock.  Although, as the accompanying documentary reveals, there still remained a lot of classic influences which were directly re-articulated in these songs, namely Yes and The Who, which once brought up, makes perfect sense. 

Holidays in Eden, the next in line with a commercial structure, is in my opinion, despite the far-from-unanimous appreciation from the community, the most Marillion title and theme they have created. Let me take a moment to digress. Everything they have written somehow returns back to the idea of the self (and the ultimate self-facing you must do) in opposition to the world.  Stepping out of the social construct of the symbolic world, one encounters the Real.  A complete change of context results in an internal change as the self is constructed out of the meaning around it, it is, we are, being-in-the-world.  Thus, in a Heideggerian sense, a change of context results in a new self.  Furthermore, a collapse in worlds changes the center of our existential being and our relation to authenticity.  Experiencing such a world as Eden, in opposition to our own highly problematic society (as Marillion often engages), and then exiting that world would result in such a collapse, and require us to disclose new meanings in the process of finding authenticity. This theme is mirrored in the opposite way in the This Town- 100 Nights trilogy, where the surrounding environment, the city, forces the self “to become” what it is, rather than being directed internally. The result is a decent of the self into a morally unclear position and the initial relations of the song meet a seemingly disastrous end.  There is always a consistent theme in H's work regarding the loss of innocence and the dangers just below the surface in any ostensibly benign situation - the unavoidable, ever-present, forces of change, the inevitable crack emerging in what one thought would remain unchanged, and the Real surrounding the Symbolic stability of one's immediate life -the need to wear your gun to Neverland,

As a product on the dividing line of a much larger world and time at the end of the 80s, this record was a little ahead of its time, foreshadowing the 1990s.  Season’s End had shown us many of the larger external predicaments of the final chapter of the Cold War.  Here we are presented with a more optimistic, open future.  Gone are so many of the past problems, leaving the self as the challenge to be taken on.  The most important view was now inward, as a reflective exploration.  Of course, even more forward looking, this would be short lived, and the dark storms of larger forces would again return on Brave, with a following return to the self on Afraid of Sunlight.  As Pete claims in the documentary, this was the first attempt at their Sunlight. And, again, that now makes sense.


Splintering Heart is the mini-epic of the record, a slow-build-up rock song. In addition to the straight-forward rock and pop songs, the This Town-The Rake’s Progress-100 Nights trilogy is the full epic of the album, and has always been classic Marillion.  Waiting to Happen is the acoustic-type ballad of the record, and while the band considers it a “classic” presence, The Party has always been the odd-one-out track to me. The updated release attempts to correct the sound away from the late 80s / early 90s zeitgeist in order to allow some of those dismissive fans to re-hear the record out of that context, as well as satisfy the band’s persistent desire to finally finish a not-quite-complete product, as in the case of Fugazi. The impression I get on the initial listening is that it really does emphasize the overall album, and brings out each part in a very positive way.

The package includes a live show from Hammersmith on the 1991 tour.  Alongside the usual HD and 5.1 mixes, like the Script and Fugazi releases, the blu-ray also includes a live concert video from the tour, a surprisingly well done upgrade for a shot-on-video release from thirty years ago.  It is worth it for video documentation of Freaks alone.  As an excellent representation of the band in their prime, this upgrade from my incomplete record-show purchase of a VHS bootleg might become my favorite video release of theirs. Unfortunately the live discs are not duplicated on the blu-ray which does includes all of the B-Side material from the 1998 remaster, which provides an interesting alternative album: including the original versions of Splintering Heart and This Town, the original Epic (Fairground) which became 100 Nights and included material from the post-Clutching at Straws session, as well as the other How We Live track You Don’t Need Anyone, considered as an alternative to Dry Land (and whose existence was denied for seven years). If you ask me, all of this material, and maybe a recording of yet another How We Live track, Games in Germany, could be remixed, finished and made into a fine album on its own. On the more acoustic side, the creepy-yet-intriguing track A Collection and the cover of Sympathy are here as well. Not included is the acoustic session released over the Dry Land singles, which included the Who’s Substitute.  In my own playlists, I’ve found that adding the other included B-sides of How Can It Hurt (amazingly played at the 2022 weekend) and I Will Walk on Water, adds more Holidays in Eden -like songs and fills out an amazing rock album. Additionally, You Don’t Need Anyone fits in exceedingly well with the trio of concise singles (unsurprisingly of similar origin) - of course this is the direction that so many people were apprehensive of embracing.  But, this collection of songs doesn’t get weighed down in overly long attempts (*ahem, last four releases, ahem*).  This is the side of the band that get straight into the rock (I’ll leave the magnitude up to you) and directly and without hesitation dives into the point of the song.  These are the songs, when included in contemporary setlists, that break up the long journeys found in newer material, and continue to provide a momentum that always deserves to be included in anything involving Rothery.