I’ve been a Prog Rock fan since I first discovered Rush in 1981. I was 10 years old and most of what Prog bands did went way over my head, but there was something about Rush that clicked with me. Not long after it was Yes. Then Pink Floyd. Then Genesis. Then King Crimson. And so on and so on.

The 1980’s though, were a pretty dark time for Prog. First we had Asia, which included members of Yes, King Crimson, and Emerson Lake and Palmer, releasing their very commercial, radio friendly, MTV orientated first record which blew away the album and singles charts in 1982. Then a year later we had Yes releasing 90125 in similar financially friendly fashion. Genesis had descended into a hellish pop music abyss by then as well (though there was still good in them if you were able to look past the chart topping crap), and while it would take a few years for them to catch up, even Pink Floyd released a pretty radio friendly record. Rush and King Crimson both morphed into an 80’s sound without really caving into the pop music world, at least not to my ears. I get the impression that Robert Fripp was trying to bend pop music to his own personal will (if anyone could have done it, it was him) while Rush just kept making Rush sounding records that happened to embrace 80’s technology (arguably to their detriment, but also maybe arguably to their benefit).

In other words, prog rock in the 70’s was awesome. Prog rock in the 80’s was… less awesome (though still better than almost anything else… except for some specific Genesis songs [looking at you, Illegal Alien and Invisible Touch]).

But there was one question that I never asked myself, or anyone else for that matter… did I miss anyone? Were there any other bands that I should have been listening to that I wasn’t?

Apparently the answer is yes, yes there was.

Marillion.

Well, there were probably 20-30 bands that I should have listened to but never did (Gentle Giant and Camel come to mind, but not Jethro Tull. Fuck Jethro Tull. I can’t stand that friggin’ band), but I don’t know why Marillion never came up. I think it might be as simple as they were not very big in the United States. They apparently were huge in the UK for a little while at least, and I was actually paying attention to the industry as a whole at that time (their biggest record came out in 1985, the same year as Power Windows by Rush, which I bought the minute it hit the record store shelves). Was that the only reason I never listened to them?

I have been aware of them for ages, of course. Was I aware of them before the internet? If it really was a regional (US vs UK) thing that kept me from them, then the internet would have been what put them on my radar. Recently they have been showing up in a bunch of places online where I happened to have been looking. A few months ago I made a note to check them out on a streaming service somewhere. I don’t recall what made me want to do that, but it was something. I didn’t do it until this past weekend though. Their guitar player was a guest on That Pedal Show and I figured I should at least listen to their biggest record, Misplaced Childhood, before I watched it. I did. I liked it. I thought the record had a sort of 70’s Genesis vibe to it. It was very 80’s, but not in a bad way (and me calling something “very 80’s” is usually meant as a negative).

I thought they dated back to the early 70’s like all of the more important prog bands but no, their first album was in 1982 or 83 (according to the two minutes I spent digging around wikipedia). I think if I had known about them at that time I probably would have gone completely off the deep end for them. They would have been a legit prog band that wasn’t devolving into a commercial/pop shadow of their former selves the way most of the prog acts from the 70s did. I knew they had two singers and that the changing of singers sort of mark different eras of the band, but I didn’t realize the first singer left as quickly as he did (after the forth album).

Yesterday I googled “list of best albums by Marillion” and found one random site that ranked them from worst to best. I listened to the 4-5 “best” albums on the list during the work day and liked most of what I heard, though I have to admit I wasn’t listening all that closely because, ya know, work.

I guess the point of this post is to get myself to accept that while I am a total prog rock snob, there are still a lot of things I don’t know about. Maybe it’s time to start taking advantage of streaming music services (ick) and start digging into the catalogs of some of those bands. Just not Jethro Tull or Dream Theater. I fucking hate both of those bands.