Marillion’s final album on EMI was their first not to reach the UK Top 10. Afraid Of Sunlight has since been hailed as one of the band’s greatest recordings. Prog sat down with the band on the album’s 30th anniversary in 2025 to get the inside story…
“Do you know what was really amazing?” asks Steve Hogarth. “It was like it had sunk the day before, but in fact, it had been down there for nearly 40 years. It still had the Union Jack on the tail fin, and it was still so blue, so much of it was still intact.”
“I was at the end of the pier taking photos, as the craft broke the surface of the water and they hauled it out of the lake, while all of the world’s press were a hundred yards behind me behind a barrier,” continues Steve Rothery. “It was quite spooky when I think about it. Like someone raising the Titanic.”
“I remember watching [the accident] happen on the news, I was just a kid,” says Hogarth. “This weird, lobster-shaped machine suddenly doing a back-flip and noticing that my mum was crying and wondering what the significance of that was. I was too young to really get it.”
On January 4, 1967 Donald Campbell would make history for all the wrong reasons when his Bluebird K7 craft flipped over during a water speed record attempt on Coniston Water in the Lake District, shattering into pieces and killing Campbell instantly. The infamous footage of Campbell’s craft flying helplessly into the air to its doom sparked something in the young Steve Hogarth and inspired him to begin writing a pivotal part of the Afraid Of Sunlight album: Out Of This World.
“I’d started writing some of the lyrics before I’d even joined the band, I think, I had a handful of lines,” he says. “And then later when I was writing the lyrics, developing what I wanted to say, I thought of it being a little bit of a love song about his wife’s take on it, how maybe he doesn’t love her enough to take his life in his hands like this, made it into something more than a bloke just driving fast over water.”
Either way, the song would catch the ear of one Bill Smith, an underwater surveyor and diver who, inspired by Out Of The World, created The Bluebird Project and set about bringing both the K7 and Campbell back to the surface. And that’s why in the spring of 2001, both Steve Rothery and Steve Hogarth found themselves on the pier at Coniston Water watching the centre hull of Campbell’s ill-fated Bluebird breaking the waters that had once carried it and him away.
“Some songs have influence in places we couldn’t have imagined,” says Hogarth.
“That Bill heard that song and thought, ‘Right, I’m going to see if I can go find it’, and that I ended up singing the song at Donald Campbell’s funeral at [St Andrew’s] Church in Coniston in 2001 was a very weird experience, not least because it came out of this record.”
(Image credit: PLG / EMI)
That song may have helped change the course of history, but in 1995 the band who created it were struggling to tell their story. Although the previous year’s Brave album had been something of a creative landmark for the post-Fish Marillion, the band were at odds with their record label, EMI, after the record had run over time and budget and fallen foul of their A&R man who felt the band had deliberately attempted to undermine him. They hadn’t, but there’s still a feeling that both parties won’t be swapping Christmas cards anytime soon. Still, somehow after the Brave project, Marillion were allowed one more record: Afraid Of Sunlight.
“I was in a café in Stockholm,” says Hogarth, “with our manager at the time, and he was saying that EMI didn’t want another record, but he’d persuaded them to do one more if we could do it quickly and cheaply. I still think it’s a great record, but after that we were gone.”
“I think they’d [EMI] given up on the band before they’d even heard the album,” says Rothery. “The message had come down from on high: ‘Let’s get what we can out of this band because we’re dropping them.’ It was one of those times when EMI was trying to streamline the company to sell it, so they dropped quite a few acts. But I think we were probably the most successful act that they dropped. The album still did something like 400,000 or 450,000 copies. To get dropped by a label after selling that amount, it’s just insane, ridiculous, really.”
“Record companies play games with you,” says Pete Trewavas. “Even on the first album they were muttering to our then-manager about who they thought should stay in the band and who should go. He said, ‘Listen, you’ve signed the whole band, so the whole band are doing this album.’ And when they first heard Misplaced Childhood, they said they couldn’t hear a single and I remember [our producer] Chris Kimsey saying, ‘I’ll make a hit out of Lavender or Kayleigh’, and by God, he did.”
“Sunlight escaped more than it was released,” recalls Hogarth, who claims the band were deceived by their A&R. “I think arms had to be twisted to even get them to release the Beautiful single. Our A&R man, who we’d fallen out with over Brave, and who pretty much hated us at this point, said he didn’t like Dave Meegan’s mix, and he’d sent it to an American remix guy called Michael Brauer [award-winning mix engineer for John Mayer and Coldplay]. But it turns out he hadn’t sent it at all – I phoned Michael’s office in New York myself. So, I ended up sending it and he thought it was great, said he would have loved to do it. But that’s just another example of how being signed to a label can make you suicidal, because it can make you think nobody likes what you’re doing only because your A&R man has lied to you. It drives you nuts.”
Intriguingly, Beautiful would go on to become the mainstay love theme of a very popular South American soap opera called Cara & Coroa.
Mark Kelly explains: “My wife Karina, who’s Brazilian, tells me that whenever the love interest appeared onscreen that Beautiful would start playing in the background, that’s how it became so popular in Brazil and probably explains why it’s our second most listened to song on Spotify.”
Though not even a nation of ardent daytime TV fans could convince EMI to change their minds when it came to Marillion. But as the adage goes, art out of adversity. Talk to each bandmember now and though there are moments not unlike Rashomon – where each party describes the same event in a different or contradictory manner – they can all agree on one thing: how the threat of being dropped galvanised them to create what’s arguably the album of their careers.
“It was a weird situation, though the five of us understood what we had and what we had to do,” says Trewavas. “I remember Steve [Rothery] coming up with Afraid Of Sunlight at Racket [the band’s rehearsal space], the riff, and thinking, ‘Oh, that’s really good.’ You know you’re on to something then.”
“We still had confidence in the band,” says Rothery. “This blind optimism, if you like, because we’d just made such a great album. We thought, ‘We don’t need EMI, we’ll survive.’ And of course, we did, but it meant signing to a small independent label for three albums, and seeing our record sales fall a third or a quarter of what they had been. But the thing I remember about those sessions for Sunlight was that they were fun. It was this very productive writing period, and after Brave I think we wanted to prove that we could come up with an album of great, diverse songs. And that’s what Dave [Meegan – see box out] was so great at: he would kind of encourage you, so you kind of go down a certain path with it. So, you know, something like Gazpacho is so different to something like King, but it was all encouraged, and it just kind of made the process easier.”
“One of Dave’s real strengths is that he gets people,” says Trewavas. “He’s very knowledgeable, very switched on, he picks up on moods and ideas. Also, he’s not afraid of telling people when he thinks they need to stretch themselves: he pushed Steve Rothery with his guitars, did the same with Mark, he just got the best out of all our abilities.”
“He was the sixth member of the band, to me,” says Ian Mosley. “The way he would go through our jams, distil it down and find the right part for the song or the song itself. I remember going into the studio one day, and he’d built this whole section of a song from a jam we’d done, it was almost unrecognisable, pulling one part from here and one from there and then moulding them into this new thing. It’s an incredible skill set and sort of set the way for how we’d write going on from there.”
Afraid Of Sunlight opens and closes with meditations on the vagaries of fame, bookends of avarice and excess. Dizzying highs and the crushing lows, Gazpacho ends with the sounds of OJ Simpson’s televised run from the police, a helicopter buzzing overhead (Ian Mosley: “Dave recorded that when he lived in LA, and Universal Studios
was burning down. And there were helicopters circling over his building.”). King opens with a babble of famous voices before ceding into Hogarth’s plea to escape the rigours of celebrity. They’re extraordinary entry and exit points on an album filled with surprises, and though far from a concept record, the toll stardom can take is never far away. Hogarth, unapologetically frank as a confessional lyricist – he sometimes refers to the process of going into himself to find the right words to fit the band’s songs as soul mining – is at his most explicit here.
“I was struggling a bit,” he says. “My marriage was in a bad place, and so was I. I was just generally burnt out by having a bit of the rock star excess, I suppose. Everything that goes with it, the price to be paid for all of that was getting to me. I was raw and suggestible and there was the whole OJ Simpson thing, the Mike Tyson rape case, and I was thinking a lot about what success and fame had done to these people and thinking like I could relate to some extent and that all lead to King.
“Then [Marillion lyricist] John Helmer sent me Gazpacho, and that’s what those words were saying to me as well: they’re all about the whole trip, when I sing: ‘the boys who run the house’ll make it all OK’ when you feel screwed, the list of causalties is endless,
the machine eats its own. And what everyone keeps forgetting is the sheer amount of work people have to do, the constant pressure and that gets to you eventually as well. We’ve never had that kind of success, never been the biggest band in the world. I think if we had been then we’d have split up years ago.”
Brave had seen the band set up home at a château in the French countryside. By the time of Afraid Of Sunlight, they were calling the upscaled version of the Racket Club studio in Buckinghamshire not just a rehearsal and writing space, but a recording hub, too.
“I could see the logic of having our own place,” says Kelly. “Though I do recall us having a problem with rats in the loft. But it was the right idea, we got dropped after we’d made our first record there and if that had happened and we hadn’t had Racket, then we would’ve had nowhere to work. It would have made it much harder for us to continue, especially through the late 90s, the lean years when we were doing the Castle albums. The records wouldn’t have sounded half as good, either.”
“The album just flowed. Top to bottom it took something like three months to make,” remembers Mosley, “which is unheard of with us. We’d just finished the Brave tour, too, and we were on something of a high, firing on all cylinders as players. Even though
we had the whole EMI thing hanging over us, it was just a case of crack on and get it done.
“It’s a very ambitious-sounding record, too. Even though it’s our album, you’ve got lot of styles on there, that Beach Boys vibe with Cannibal Surf Babe – that was a one-take thing, we could never really reproduce it as well as we did the first time we played it – the Yes-like punch to Gazpacho and then the Joni Mitchell feel of Afraid Of Sunrise. It’s a very much standalone kind of record, there’s a lot of experimentation on that album. I mean, we all love Brave, but this was a much more freeing experience. Brave was a mammoth task. I remember being back in the US, and after about three months calling the boys to ask how it was going and them telling me that they’d just finished the bass parts. I went, ‘What?!’”
And while Hogarth was struggling with his own demons, Mosley was having problems at home, too. His marriage was also falling apart. Though while Hogarth poured his
pain onto the page and into his songs, Mosley went a more conventional route to kill the pain: Prozac.
“I was all over the place,” says Mosley. “I was taking quite a lot of the stuff, which was just brilliant. I had a lot of energy. I was coming over from the States and doing blocks of work at a time, so Sunlight is a bit hazy for me. In the middle of working, because of the Prozac, I’d be thinking, ‘I might go for a bicycle ride and get a packet of fags.’ Suddenly I’d be riding 70 miles!
“I went to New Zealand for the weekend. There was a girl that I knew, so I popped over to see her. I went on the Friday and I’d finished taking the Prozac – this is quite funny really – I got to New Zealand and I was standing on top of this building, looking out over the harbour and I thought, ‘What the fuck am I doing here?’ I came home –
I was back in London by Monday night!”
One of the sublime highlights of the record is the folksy-sounding Afraid Of Sunrise, which echoes elements of the title track, but comes at the lyric from
a completely different musical world.
“I remember us working on that song,” says Hogarth. “I used to go in about seven in the evening to do lead vocals with Dave, and I went to the Racket Club. It was early in the year, and I did about seven or eight takes of the vocal for Afraid Of Sunrise conjuring up this desert heat, the golden light coming in through the window, sun
on skin, mirages and heat coming off roads, all of that stuff. Then I went outside to drive home, and several inches of snow had fallen while I’d been there. I spun the car three times on the drive home on these A roads, which were totally impassable, but I had to get home. And that was a weird thing to sing a song like that with all this snow piling up outside, in this sort of sanctuary we’d made for ourselves.”
Ask all five members what they make of Sunlight now and they’re unified in their effusiveness, even if they can’t quite pin down just how they managed to capture lightning in a bottle so ably. Steve Rothery thinks it might be their best record, and he might be right, even more remarkable really considering that EMI were distancing themselves from the group and Hogarth was in something of an emotional freefall.
“If the mood’s right, then creativity can be effortless,” says Rothery. “For me, Sunlight is a perfect example of that. The title track and The Great Escape [from Brave] are probably my all-time favourite Marillion songs. We were still optimistic about the future and how can you be despondent when you’ve made an album that’s
this good? If the ideas had dried up and the creativity had gone then we would have wondered what the point was, but we were very far from that.
“I don’t think there’s a weak track on there. Part of that might have been because the writing was on the wall with EMI, I don’t know. But I do know that Dave Meegan did such a great job bringing that out in all of us, especially in H, I think. Making us
do things in a way that you wouldn’t naturally gravitate towards as well, playing different parts of the songs in different keys, different tempos. It was quite something.
“You also have to remember that it was our first time recording in Racket, too, changing the way we were doing things. So, it was quite groundbreaking for us and set the pattern for the next 30-odd years. I also think it’s probably the first album where the five of us were fully interacting. We’d tried pop with H and failed. Brave was a band reaction to that, us restating our prog credentials if you like, but with Sunlight there was no agenda, it was just us, our essence, this crafted music. For me it was the perfect storm, everything came together, even though the circumstances were less than ideal in that we were being dropped.”
It was telling of the situation the band found themselves in that Hogarth and Trewavas were sent to Paris to do a day of press and ended up in their hotel rooms doing phone interviews to other territories instead, the culmination of their trip being an extended face-to-face interview with a French fanzine. Back at home, Q magazine raved about Sunlight and found a place for it in their albums of the year, but by then EMI had just about cast the band adrift.
“That was a mad, little press trip,” says Trewavas with a smile.
“You got the feeling that they looked up and went, ‘Marillion are coming in today? Oh God, who can we get to talk to them? Who’s in town?’ It was really stupid, we just sat in our room on the phone to all these different territories, and then they got some bloke from a fanzine to come in a chat to us, bless them, but it was a bit underwhelming, shall we say?”
(Image credit: Niels Van Iperen)
Dave Meegan didn’t realise the potency of the album until he went back to visit the remaster and was blown away by its creativity and depth of songwriting. It took Mark Kelly a few years to realise the album’s worth, too, though for different reasons.
“We were really rushed, or it felt that way, and I wasn’t very happy with it at the time,” he says. “Not that I wasn’t happy with the results, but my opinion of the album was spoiled by the process. There was a song called An Accidental Man, which we did
a version of that I liked, and for some reason we threw it out. It resurfaced with different music on This Strange Engine, but I liked the Sunrise version. Dave Meegan and Steve H didn’t, I’m still not sure why, and my opinion of the album was tainted by that, you know? ‘You threw out one of my favourite songs!’
“It was just that particular thing, really. I got a bee in my bonnet about it. I liked the original, there’s a demo of it kicking around somewhere and I think we did actually put it out as part of the This Strange Engine [2024 deluxe] reissue. I should go and listen to it and decide whether or not it really was as good as I thought it was at the time, but I was a lone voice. I don’t know how it happened, but I think it got bumped off the album in favour of maybe Afraid Of Sunrise, which I particularly didn’t like. So, I was probably doubly hurt about the fact that one of my songs got bumped for something that just sits on the same musical motif for five minutes, but then, Nowhere Man goes around like that for five minutes and it’s a classic.
“So, my whole opinion of the album was kind of coloured by that experience. Of course, you go back to it years later you realise that it’s a really good album, one of our best. We just did it in full alongside the Marbles album, another one of our best records and another Dave Meegan record, at the Port Zélande Weekend, and it’s
so good to play live. All the tracks work really well, it sort of plays itself: well-constructed songs, good lyrics.”
Before gentrification gave it a slick makeover, Battersea Power Station was made famous on the cover of Pink Floyd’s Animals. In reality, as a listed building, the façade remained intact, but the interior was left empty and unwanted, which makes it odder still that a photographer and members of Marillion were in there shooting promo pics for Afraid Of Sunlight record. Pete Trewavas plays Napoleon, OJ Simpson and Mike Tyson stand in the frame, an astronaut sits at the edge of the photograph. Fame, downfall and celebrity crashing together in the burst of the photographer’s flashgun.
“I’m still not sure why I was Napoleon,” Trewavas chuckles. “And was H the angel? Of course, he probably was. I think it was the photographer’s call to take us there. It was this weird wasteland and there was what I think was a Pedigree Chum [dog food] factory next door. All very odd.”
“It was like this big vacant lot,” says Hogarth. “We’re doing these promo shots, and half the band aren’t in them. But it had something to it and it clearly caught someone’s imagination.”
Two years later, on the band’s 21-city crowdfunded US tour (financed to the tune of $60,000, around £45k today, by eager American Marillion fans), Steve Hogarth was reminded of that shoot as he was stood outside the band’s show in Columbus, Ohio, signing autographs and posing for pictures with fans.
“I remember it like it was yesterday,” says Hogarth. “This guy was having his photo taken with me and he asked me why there was an astronaut in that publicity shot. So, I was explaining to him that it’s an album, in part at least, about people who become unhinged as a consequence of their success, and Buzz Aldrin says he came back from the Moon a slightly different man. And this guy says to me, ‘That’s strange, because this album is like the story of my dad’s life’, and I said, ‘Who’s your dad?’ And he said, ‘Neil Armstrong’ and my jaw hit the floor, as you might imagine.”
“Rick, that’s the son, and Neil had been playing golf up in Scotland so I got to meet him at Heathrow for lunch as they were on their way home. I had my son with me, and he’d just got a new bike and Neil was asking him all about it, the most normal things from one of the most abnormal individuals on Earth. They had to get to Gatwick to make their connecting flight home to the US, so I’ve got them in the back of my car haring around the M25, really gunning it to make sure they don’t miss their plane and thinking, ‘God, don’t be the man who kills Neil Armstrong.’
“And he was great, excuse the pun, but so down to earth. And it’s really hard to comprehend, isn’t it? When you really think about it, he’s been to another planet. He’s travelled through space. It’s such a great privilege just to be around someone like that, to have anything to do with it.”
Strange to think, how the disparate yet pioneering spirits of both Donald Campbell and Neil Armstrong could echo through the ages, and both find their place on a record that was, in its own way, pushing the envelope of a band who were trying to find their own path forward and do things their own, new way. Marillion might not have touched the sky or tested the limits of machine and man on the frigid waters of a northern lake, but in their new way of doing, they shared stories, changed some ways
of seeing, and helped bring at least one modern hero home from the black waters of Coniston. All with unflinching endeavour, staring at the sun.
