RADIATION 2013.

At this year's Marillion Weekends, as well as performing Brave in its entirety,
we had also decided to play the whole of the Radiation album. Although very
proud of this album as a collection of songs we have often debated whether it
might not benefit from an updated mixdown.. so, following his sterling and
much-lauded work on Sounds That Can't Be Made we asked our
(increasingly resident) sonic wizard, Mike Hunter to apply his ears, hardware,
software and talent to it. This turned out to be anything but staightforward as
the original source recordings had to be oven-baked and transferred from
their original somewhat dodgy digital format before the re mix could begin.

The remix is now complete and sounds wonderful. We will release this in
conjunction with Madfish who have done such a wonderful job on
repackaging this as a 2CD digibook. The digibook contains new artwork and
the original album as well as the new remix.
We have played the album to a few people and their responses have ranged
from 'immense', 'awesome' to " It's fantastic ... it's a completely different
album. It's got space, clarity, power and you can pick up all the nuances".

So we can't wait for you all to hear it.
It's available to pre-order now and soundclips are also available to listen to at:
http://www.marillion.com/shop/albums/radiation.htm

I wonder if it's another of those silly rereleases with a book of artwork attached? I didn't bother with them either.

This release utilizes similar packaging but is the first of the Madfish reissues to include any additional audio material.

Radiation is kind of like the Vapor Trails of the Marillion back catalog... there were different (and some allegedly inferior) masterings used for the previous UK/US/Japan releases, so a completely new mix-and-master is intriguing.

Seeing as I despised the original Radiation I can't justify getting this, although since I ditched it years ago it is the only Marillion album from 2004 back I don't have. I have avoided everything since Marbles.

I always bitch about them but I was obsessed with these guys in high school and college and saw 'em live 7 times and I gave up after being let down so many times starting around This Strange Engine. I did see the Marbles tour in 2004 though and was not pleased. I find Hogarth very pretentious and dismissive of Marillion's past. Ice Cream Genius he is not.

If Fish ever came back I'd be there in a heartbeat. That I do not see happening-ever.

As you probably know, I'm a huge Fish fan, but his last few haven't done much for me.

I gave up on Fish solo after Fellini Days or whatever that one was. Marillion from 1983-95 (the EMI years actually) was simply the best.

Gazette: I guess I should ask you about the albums you’re playing at the convention. I remember you said once that Radiation was an experiment that didn’t really work. Do you still feel that way, or has it gone up in your estimation?

Kelly: Yeah, it was fun coming back to it when Mike (Hunter) was remixing it. I think it was flawed in a number of ways, but there’s a few songs on there that I really like, and I think Mike’s done a great job of injecting new life into it with his remix. He’s put back in some things that were taken out – I’m not sure why they would have been taken out, but that sort of thing happens all the time when you’re mixing. “That’s a bit too busy there – let’s get rid of this,” you know? But I’ve got a theory about Marillion albums, in that you need one or two whoppers, as Mike Hunter calls them, for people to really love the album. So an album like Marbles, it’s got "Neverland" and "The Invisible Man" – in a way, it didn’t really matter what the rest of the album was like (laughs), as long as it’s good and not terrible. The problem with Radiation is it doesn’t really have any whoppers. I think that’s why it’s not really considered to be one of our best. But it’s got a few really nice songs on there that you wouldn’t really call whoppers. I really like "Now She’ll Never Know". I think it’s a really nice song. And "A Few Words for the Dead", I think it’s got a great payoff, but I think it takes too long to get there. So I’m not so keen on that. I hated the original album intro – the sort of noise thing. I mean, "Costa del Slough" is just a bit of a throwaway thing. And there’s "The Answering Machine" – we had two versions of that. We had what we call the “hey nonny nonny” version (laughs), which was the more folky version, and then we went to the opposite extreme and did this very ’90s-influenced grungy fast version, which was suggested by Erik Nielsen, actually, who was working for us at the time. You know, a young 23-year-old American kid comes over and goes, “Hey guys, why don’t you do it like this?” “Yeah! That sounds really young! We’ll do that!” (Laughs) I think we were suffering from some sort of identity crisis at the time.

Gazette: "The Answering Machine" is kind of what I think about when Radiation comes to mind. Even if it’s not necessarily one of your best, it seems like one of your most important albums, where you started to explore more sounds and textures that might not have been seen as Marillion-ish before.

Kelly: Yeah, true. Actually, I hadn’t thought about it like that. It was I suppose a stepping-stone album, if you like – the fact that we were leaving behind some of the things that we used to do and trying to bring ourselves up to date, in a way – taking on board some of the influences that were around at the time. Of course, the danger in that is that 10 years on, it all sounds dated. But I’m just trying to think of what else is on there … what else have we got … oh, "These Chains" I really like.

Gazette: "Three Minute Boy" has held up really well.

Kelly: It has, and it’s a good live number as well. It works really well live. We were torn, actually, whether or not to do it at the convention as we have been – it’s sort of morphed into this audience-participation rock-out thing where the last part of it is a bit like “the last one to the end buys the beers,” you know? (Laughs) And we thought, “Well, should we go back and be more faithful to the original? Keep it a bit more under control? Or should we do it like we always do it?” Because we play it quite frequently. We decided on a bit of a halfway between the two, really. It’s more structured at the front end, like the album, and then it gets a bit more freed. And there’s still room for the audience to join in if they want to. That’s one of the things that we constantly talk about: Are we trying to reproduce the album faithfully or are we trying to do something else?