For a while I wanted to see Marillion live, that’s why I keept a close eye on their tour dates. Well, they’re not touring now but the singer goes on a solo Christmas tour and this year he decided to include Stockholm in it as well. I thought about it a bit and decided to give it a try. And what I made out of it is written below.

For me it all started with Tracy LaBarbera’s cover of “Beautiful”. Until then, the other songs and videos that I was occasionally listening to and watching on a VCR were just there as good music my brother & sis liked (thanks for that!). And I didn’t make any sense of “Brave”, the movie, at all. But this cover changed everything, though I had it written down as Marillion.

Then “barefoot on the lawn with shooting stars” (“Kayleigh”) started to make sense when I actually got to be barefoot in the grass as seldom as going to the countryside, and that happened once a year. Then they made it onto my playlist.

Somewhere on my late evenings at work I started to listen to “The Hollow Man” and “The Great Escape” but that was already more than 10 years after listening to these songs for the first time. Then Politics and Popular Culture happened and “Brave” got a totally new meaning. Or, it got a meaning. 

I went to this concert with no idea what to expect. The venue: The Baroque Hall, The Swedish History Museum. A few people waiting in queue, the doors open with a small delay but 10 minutes after everybody sits down Steve Hogarth, Marillion’s singer, comes and sits in front of us all. He starts to joke with the audience and invites us all to ask questions and request songs. After a small chit-chat and after he let us know that he’s usually used to having a band with him, he starts playing “The Hollow Man” from the album “Brave” (which in the meantime became one of my favorite albums ever). And I was spellbound. That voice, and that piano and that music!

To my surprise the second song was “You’re Gone”, a song I have a history with and I connect to it far more than just liking it for the beautiful song that it is. “You have the day/I have the night/But we have the early hours together”, and Steve says that he actually wrote this song in Stockholm.

The concert goes on with “Season’s End”, somebody asks for “Easter” so he sings it, “This Train is My Life”, “Sympathy” and this is where I stopped writing down each song and just stared into nothing and listened to the music. I recognized so many songs I heard before, I sang along and clapped as hard as I could and at a certain moment a song came, even though not “The Great Escape” which is my favorite Marillion song, but “Beautiful”. This “Beautiful”:

“You wild enough to remain beautiful?”

At the middle break people decorated the Christmas tree that was on stage with ornaments that they brought from home, they talked to Steve and took photos. And after each song they clapped like crazy. And they cheered. And at the encore they hit the floor with their feet. And we were maybe 300 people. I’ve never seen such a wonderful and passionate community of fans.

And I haven’t been to a concert this beautiful in such a long time.  Just a man and his piano and lots of passion.