The Jester’s Tour

“Suddenly we went from being some home-county area band to having an audience all over the country.”
Mark Kelly

We know the script by now. It’s the late 70s. Progressive rock has had its day in the sun, and now its bloated carcass lies dying in the street, kicked into the gutter by the nascent fury of thousands of punk rockers. In a few short years it has risen majestically, daring to challenge perceived convention, ripped up the rule book and owned arenas around the world. But it has become the victim of its own success; a cumbersome beast in thrall to its own peccadilloes. And then along came punk rock…

Except no one thought to tell Marillion!

In truth, punk rock was already almost an afterthought when a young Buckinghamshire drummer by the name of Mick Pointer, with a head full of rock-star dreams, was looking for a band to join. If you believed the media, the music that inspired him – such as Camel, Deep Purple, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Genesis – was also an afterthought.

“I thought there’s got to be other people that are into this style of stuff,” Pointer recalls today. “Honestly, it was simplistic, but that’s actually what I thought. And I thought: ‘Not everybody has got a fucking spiky haircut now.’”

But soon Pointer found some likeminded musicians without spiky haircuts, and joined Electric Gypsy, who also included future Solstice guitarist Andy Glass and a bassist by the name of Doug Irvine.

“It was a 60s/70s mid-rock sort of thing,” Pointer remembers. “There wasn’t any particular route anybody was going down. I don’t think we had any particularly big ambitions to make too much of it. We were pretty young – just get in a room and start playing. It was pretty ad-hoc, to be honest with you.” Lurking beneath the surface, however, was a determination that would become a staple for where things would move next. Frustrated by a lack of ambition in the band, Pointer and Irvine decided to move on.

“I got along particularly well with Doug,” Pointer says. “As usual with most of these things, everything was done down at the pub. We spent all the time together just mapping out where we’d like to go, like everybody does when they’re young. So me and him said let’s form our own band, and put our own guys together that would suit what we’re attempting and trying to do.”

And in one fell swoop, Marillion were born. Except they weren’t called Marillion back then. Inspired by a Tolkien book that Irvine had, the new outfit called themselves Silmarillion. The early line-up was Irvine (bass) and Pointer (drums), keyboard player Neil Cockle and guitarist Martin Jenner. Camel, with whom Irvine and Pointer shared a mutual love, became their main reference point.

“We used to rehearse in the Princes Risborough area,” Pointer recalls. “We had this rehearsal room, and in the other room happened to be…”

“There were parts of that original Silmarillion set that actually found its way onto Script For A Jester’s Tear.”
Mick Pointer

You guessed it…

“…Camel! They would come in and watch us. Very fleetingly, but it was a bit of a moment for us. We wrote all our own material. Me and Doug had a lot of our own material