Steve Hogarth is a man for whom I have a deep personal respect.  As the front man for the UK Prog band Marillion since 1989, Hogarth's brilliance has shined on an even dozen studio albums.  His songwriting is stellar and his voice is one that bears great distinction in an industry where many sound just like somebody else.  In 1997 Hogarth gathered some musicians, booked time in a studio and produced his first solo album, "Ice Cream Genius".  Though a critical success, the album never made an impact much beyond the hard and fast Marillion faithful.  Not to be dissuaded by album sales however, and purely by the love of music and performance, Hogarth assembled a travelling troupe and hit the road for a limited number of show.  His band mates, though perhaps not first names in the classic rock lexicon, are very well established, highly respected talents from around the world.  Shows were recorded on their tour and the result became "Live Spirit/Live Body".  

I recently had an opportunity to interrupt H in the studio where he is holed up with his band mates from Marillion working on the band's 13th album.  Here's the conversation as it occurred:

H:  Well, in the short term, bearing in mind it’s only been out about a month now, I was only just planning to sell it on the website, but if any interest emerges from further afield, then I’ll look at that if and when it does.  I would rather it came out through a kind of music lovers label in America rather than necessarily one of those labels that’s just out to make money… I mean, we’re all out to make a little bit of money, but if there’s anybody there who is into music for music’s sake and expresses an interest in putting it out, then I would look closely at that because I think it would be good to have the album available there in the right kind of outlet.  But I’m not particularly interested in having this record in Tower Records or something like that, because I don’t think that’s the right outlet for it. 

H: Oh no, no… it was completely and terribly poorly done, so I have more or less washed my hand of the whole retail thing really.  I think the audience, for what I’m doing with the H band is such a kind of fringe audience that to go do some kind of deal with a big distributor who will then take most of the money, I really don’t see a point in doing that.. they’re not going to do anything for me, they’re not going to spend any money marketing it, they’re not particularly going to give the thing a  profile… so really for me the H band thing, especially the live thing ahs been a labor of love and I wanted to produce an outstanding record of what this band was capable of doing live and to celebrate that.  It’s sort of frustrating for me that I can’t just think of this as a mainstream record and push all the usual buttons… do a deal and get some marketing and get some airplay… but I just know that the business has just turned into another creature in the last four or five years.  And it’s a creature that I’m at odds with really now. 

H: Well, I don’t know if it would go so far as to say it’s Marillion’s future, although it’s something we’re looking very closely at, but certainly from the point of view of any of our side projects, bearing in mind that the audience for those is so much smaller… it’s fantastic for us to have Racket Records because it’s a very efficient record selling machine… we know all the people that work there.. it’s really just a case of anybody who wants to buy this record coming to marillion.com and looking it up.. and within a very short time of ordering it you can have it in your hand. 

H:  Yeah we have control and I don’t have to sign anything away… the amount of money we can make from each sale is many, many times the amount we could receive by doing some kind of distribution. 

H: Yeah I was more than happy.. I think a great many of the songs… would I say all of them?  I’m going to have to say all of them… I think all of them grew quite a little bit from where they were at with the studio album.. they actually grew and the more dynamic aspects of the things in many ways became magnified to the point where the quiet things are incredibly quiet and the louder dynamics just about then rip the wall down and that’s very exciting to do live.  Something like “Better Dreams” we were able to pull off… I actually took all the original violins from the master tapes of the original record and chopped them up into little pieces which were then mapped right away across Richard Barbieri’s keyboard.  So what he’s playing are the very violin phrases that are on the master album along with me.. I’m playing a little keyboard string instrument while I’m singing it and then Stephanie is playing the cello along with it.  And you’d be really hard put to tell them apart.  It’s an incredible feeling to sit there with what sounds like a totally real string quartet all around me as I sing this little song.  So there’s a great many magical moments in the live show from things that are very un-rock and roll like that to things that are very balls-out rock and roll like “You Dinosaur Thing” and perhaps the end of “Nothing to Declare” one of these big solos.  And then there are also very dark things that are made darker still by the band.. I’m thinking particularly about “The Last Thing” where some nights when the band has played that song I’ve almost been expecting the ground to open up and creatures come crawling out from beneath the earth (laughs) It’s so very very dark and magical.  So yeah, I’ve done my very best with this album to try to capture those moments.  There are no overdubs on this album apart from one guitar on “Life is a Long Song” which Dave wanted to replace because he used an electric guitar live and he wanted it to sound like an acoustic guitar, so we replaced that one thing.  But everything else is completely the original performances on those nights. 

H: Yes.  There are some notable exceptions that I really wanted to do, like “God Only Knows” by the Beach Boys.  That was vetoed purely on the grounds of rehearsal time.  I think for the “Spirit and Body” shows we only did three days of rehearsal for that lot, so we had a mass of material to get through.  And although all the players are all very fine players and very quick to learn, Dave Gregory vetoed “God Only Knows” on the grounds that I must be completely insane if I was going to try to put that in the show.  He figured that would need 3 days of rehearsal on its own to get together.  So that was a disappointment, but yeah for the most part these really were my favorite songs of all times, most of them. 

H: Well, a lot of it was luck.  I had run into Dave Gregory years ago, I mean way back when I was in the Europeans and we were making our first album in the Townhouse and I think XTC were in the Townhouse in London at that point and I just happened to meet him in a café one day and then I borrowed a Mellotron off him some years later… and so we just stayed in contact and remained chums and when I first got the opportunity to make a solo album he was the first person I called.  I really respect him as a musician and his playing excites me, but also because what I was trying to do with the album was work with the last people on earth that anybody expected me to work with.  So of course I tried to leave alone all the kind of musicians that you might consider to be in the same genre as Marillion and tried to look outside those genres in every way.  And it was Dave who put me on to the producer Craig Leon who had worked with Blondie and Bob Marley and The Fall and he then put me on to Clem Burke from Blondie and Chucho Merchan from the Eurythmics and they became the studio album band.   Porcupine Tree had opened up for a Marillion show and I had always been a huge fan of Richard’s approach to synthesizer playing because he’s like no other synth programmer I’ve ever heard.  He’s completely unique and has a different approach to sound architecture really.  A much more spiritual and ghostly approach…   I mean the worst insult you can give him is to call him a keyboard player, I mean he won’t speak to you for a week if you call him that because he doesn’t consider himself to be that… he considers himself to be some sort of weaver of spells or something I suppose <laugh>.  I’m very spiritual in my approach to music anyway and I love the idea of summoning up spirits rather than making music. For me it’s to do with pulling those gossamers out of the air that are invisible, but can still stir people.  So for me music is all about spirituality and the supernatural in a way because I think music almost is a supernatural in itself, or can be at it’s best.  So Richard got involved and then again by pure chance I ran into Aziz Ibriham and heard his playing for the first time and it completely knocked me over because he studied Indian classical music since he was very young, but he’s also a rock and roll guitar player. 

H:  Yes he kind of straddles that bridge between Eastern music, not just Indian, but also Chinese, Oriental music and Rock and Roll and that’s completely where he is at as a player.  So he can pick up a Gibson Les Paul and make it sound like a Sitar or a Koto and then just sound like a full-on rock and roll, you know Les Paul through a Marshal… that sound that everybody knows.  He can go from one to the other from moment to moment.  He also has an amazing mastery of foot pedals.  I mean his foot pedals take up the area of a kitchen table.  And he really knows how to use them.  So some of the time when we’re playing live I can’t tell from moment to moment which sounds Richard is making on the Prophet 5 and which sounds Aziz is creating using his guitar and pedals.  You can’t tell them apart some of the time.  So for me standing up there on that stage in amongst that lot is like having the most enormous sound palette to paint with and a lot of the time that painting paints itself.  I do have control over it, but I do give the musicians a lot of freedom to do their thing because to have such a wealth of talent at your disposal and then to sit on it and try and impose your will on it is not only a waste, it’s downright stupid. 

H:  Yes it started with this massive Tabla .. this groove on the Tablas which is kind of the “Cage” groove, but it’s an Indian take on it and it kind of has more of a swing to it.  And then when Andy swings in it turns into more of a Dub thing when the drums and bass come in.  Of course my rhythm section is Guyanan.  Andy Gungadeen is English, but he is of Guyanan stock and so is Jingles the bass player so I’ve got that kind of South American rhythm section working in conjunction with two other guys in the band who are Asian:  Singh on Tablas and Aziz on Guitar.  And then of course you have that English thing going with Dave and myself… and then it’s hard to define what you call Richard.  He’s half Italian, but how you would define how those come out in his music God alone knows <laugh> .  But then there is the very, very kind of straight-laced English thing going on with the cello.  So it’s a real car crash of cultures and then when “Cage” resumes I deliberately structured it so it resumes with the Tablas so you’ve got this Indian Swing groove thing happening.  It’s very ethnic Indian… and then straight off the back of that  you’ve got the choppy dub guitar Aziz is playing with the very straight-laced English cello solo right on top of it which couldn’t be more English.  So straight away you’ve got those three completely opposing, yet completely harmonious cultural elements. 

H:  The reason it works is because the musicians themselves are really there playing the music for the absolute joy of playing with one another.  Part of the reason I was able to put this band together was because I would cast around for musicians and I would say “Well, Dave Gregory is doing it” and they’d say “Well, then I’m doing it!”  And I had to cold call Andy Gungadeen to get him in.  He’s just one of the best drummers in England.  So I was selling myself for all I was worth down the phone at him and he didn’t know me from Adam.  I told him who was in the band and when I got to Richard Barbieri he just said “Okay, where do you want me and when?”  So all these guys are in the band for the joy of playing with each other. 

H:  <laughing> Yeah. 

H: It was quite an intense three days.

m-r.c:  Did you sleep during those three days? 

H: Yes, I slept very well, just not very long. 

H:  They were all listening to each other.  Sometimes musicians get into a room and listen to themselves, but great musicians go into a room and listen to themselves least of all.  They feed off each other and then what they play is in sympathy with it or inspired by it.  So, instead of having, as so often can happen, four or five players in a room who are all in their own little universe you have exactly the opposite, you have one universe and four or five people in it and adding color to it.  This is kind of what the H band is about. 

H: Oh yes I’m a big fan of Liz Fraser but particularly the vocal performance on “Song to the Siren” that she did on This Mortal Coil.  The first time I ever heard it it just wiped me out.  You know, I’m a singer and I never heard anything like it. 

H: Yes. “It’ll End in Tears,” wasn’t it?  

H: Really… Well, I’ve got a wild side <laugh> 

H: Yeah <laugh> like letters from there lawyers and the like.  No, so far nobody.  We’re as yet undiscovered I think.  I do have a very good friend currently on the road as a production manager for Bowie and I was awfully tempted to send a copy of “Life on Mars.”  But then I’m almost too frightened to do it because it might come back that he didn’t like it and then it would destroy it for me forever.   So no, I mean so far I haven’t heard back from anyone.  We even did an Elvis Costello track. 

H:  I have had a few emails.. there was one guy said he never heard of Jeff Buckley and as a consequence of hearing “Dream Brother” he went and got ahold of “Grace” and checked that album out.  So there have been instances of fans getting into good music because of the things we covered. 

H:  Well I’m happy to be one.  Good music is good music and if people get to hear amazing things and I can play some small part in that then I’m very proud to have been part of the process of getting  there because there is some amazing music out there that goes unheard. There’s so much rubbish out there that people hear daily and sometimes all you really need is someone you can trust to point you in the right direction. 

H: Yes they went down incredibly well.  We played Cardiff, Sheffield and then we went over to Holland and played the Paradiso in Amsterdam.  Then we went and played a little gig in a Dutch town called Hallendorn on the German border and I think that was the best H gig we’ve ever had.   Richard walked off stage at the end of the night and quietly declared that that was for him the best one we’d ever done and he is not a man given to massive displays of drama or emotion.  And I felt exactly the same – I don’t think we’d ever been better.  Then we came back to London and played Dingwalls and that was terrific so we were in very good spirits. 

H: Hmm…  Let me think back.  No it did come together quite a bit quicker than in the past.  We were more or less straight on it so it was a little easier and we added Middle Road which is an Aziz Ibriham song, another one which is quite a complicated arrangement which came together quickly.  And we also added a Marillion song called “A Few Words for the Dead” from the “Radiation” album and we actually opened with that song which was something I wanted to do because these dates were occurring .. well actually the Sheffield show occurred on the anniversary of 9/11.  So I wanted to open with a song which is all about how you might choose to live and what kind of values you might choose to take on and how you can define yourself and others from your fellow man if you choose and if you choose not to you can join together with everybody which is what that song’s all about.  I thought that needed saying, especially at the beginning of our show on such an auspicious night. 

H:  Well I agonize over those kind of issues anyway.  A lot of people have said there are things in previous songs I’ve written which were strangely portentious of what actually happened.  “This is the 21st Century” is one.  It was almost chilling when those things happened because in some ways I felt I had already written the soundtrack for what was going on and what continues to go on.  No one in the West is ever likely to be the same after that day.  It was a particularly strange day for me because I was about to sing at the funeral of Donald Campbell the day after.  The funeral had been set for the 12th of September so I was actually in a church sound checking for a funeral and went across the road to have lunch only to see these planes crashing into the Trade Center.  And then I found myself lying in bed in the Windemeer Power Boat Club in the middle of the night of September 11 hundreds of miles from home having to sing at a funeral for a man I had never met, but who by a strange process of music I had come to resurrect the next day and I was lying in bed with my head just going round as all of us were wondering if this was World War III and what the hell was going to happen next.  So I’ll never be the same.. that’s bound to creep into the words and the music. 

H: Richard and Aziz are pestering me whenever they get a chance to book some studio time and do some writing so we’re hoping to do that by the end of the year.   So yeah there will be another studio album everybody’s very keen to do it.  At the same time I’m actually speaking to you right now from a residential studio where Marillion are writing so I got my work cut out for me in writing album number 13 here with the boys.  So it’s all a question of kind of keeping one finger in the air and the first chance  I get of running away, maybe once the backing tracks are down for the next Marillion album and I’m not needed quite so much I might book some time and run off and do some writing with the H band.  It’s a little bit like trying to find time for the mistress  really. 

H: Well, much as I’d like to tease you, it’s still very early days.  The writing so far has gone very slowly we’ve been writing off and on since the beginning of the year.  We don’t really have anything yet.  We have lots of half-formed ideas, little bits of sketches, but it’s still very early days.  So if I was to really give you the kind of answers that the fans are looking for I’d be lying <laugh> there’s nothing to tell you at the moment and we still don’t know where it’s going yet. 

H:  Absolutely not!  There may be a new song by Christmas, but that’s about the best we can really hope for. 

H: And also very, very supportive. 

H:  I don’t know.  It’s definitely not an if, it’s definitely a when, but it’s a when that I don’t have an answer to at the moment.  Maybe we can do something next year, but I’m not given to false promises, especially not with the fans. 

H:  Oh no <laughing>  oh no they’ve been worse!  We can’t even get them on the phone, man.  This is the problem we have in America.  We’ve never been able to plug into anything in the music business in America that we feel has understood us or can get their head around what the potential is.  Let’s leave it at this :  we’ll work at it, but we really do have a problem State side with the business. 

H: No.. I mean EMI didn’t even want to sign us for America because they said to be honest you wouldn’t want to do it because the label is hopeless.  That was there words in London <laughing>. 

H: Even they said it.  They didn’t even have the energy to lie <laugh>.  And that’s rare!