Marillion have played a couple of UK dates recently and we went to see them play in Aylesbury. This was, apparently, the first time in 29 years that the band have played at that venue, and as Aylesbury is where they’re based it was a sort of homecoming gig. The Waterside Theatre is relatively newly rebuilt, and Aylesbury seem very pleased with it – we drove into Aylesbury twice* from different directions & you’re sign-posted to the theatre right from the outskirts of town both times. It’s quite nice, and the staff were all astonishingly friendly and cheerful.
The support “band” was Jacob Moon – who does guitar+singing. His most recent album is a collection of covers, and so as well as original stuff we were treated to his version of Kayleigh and also of a Rush song (I don’t know Rush well enough to remember what it was). He was good, and built up some quite complex songs by layering guitar loops. Obviously he got the best response to Kayleigh, as you’d expect.
Then it was Marillion. Overall they played two hours – a main set plus 3 encores. Apart from the very last encore it was a very recent setlist, heavily biased towards things off Sounds That Can’t Be Made (as you might expect). But the setlist had been shaken up a bit from when we’ve previously seen them while they were touring this album – in particular they started with Invisible Man (from Marbles) rather than with Gaza. There were also no A Few Words for the Dead this time. I put the camera away for the last encore once they started playing – this one was two Fish-era songs, Garden Party and Market Square Heroes (appropriately as we were right near the Market Square in question). And it was very bouncy 😀
A good evening! I’ve got some more pictures up on flickr, here.