Mick Pointer & Friends - Script For A Jester's Tour
De Boerderij, Zoetermeer, Netherlands, 17 April 2008

Those who have followed Arena from the beginning will recall that during the early Arena tours Grendel and He Knows You Know were played. On the occassion of the 25th anniversary of Marillion's debut album Script For A Jester's Tear, founding member Mick really goes back to his roots and takes Script back on the road. After a succesful try out at the Riffs Bar in Swindon (U.K.) in 2007, the rest of Europe gets the opportunity to see this unique event.

Mick has really assembled a great line up  of prog veterans for it: Nick Barrett (Pendragon) on guitars, Ian Salmon on bass, Mike Varty (Credo/Shadowland/Janison Edge) on keyboards and Brian Cummings (Carpet Crawlers, Genesis tribute band) on vocals.

I was very curious whether it would prove to be a tribute and not a pastiche, with especially the vocalist having a daunting task of filling Fish' shoes. I need not have worried, Brian Cummings really was Fish (and has a better voice than Fish himself these days). Not just the voice, but also the theatrics and Scottish accent in the chats between the songs created a vintage Marillion ambiance. Brian obviously studied the classic Recital Of The Script video/DVD well. All the props and acts were there: the mask in Grendel, the destruction of a rubber plant in The Web, the military outfit and "mike stand gunfire" in Forgotten Sons...



The band played the entire Script album in the album running order and continued with the non-album tracks of that period: Market Square Heroes, Charting The Single, Three Boats Down From The Candy, Grendel and Margaret (which includes excerpts the Scottish folk song The Bonnie Banks o' Loch Lomond).

It was simply a marvellous nostalgia trip hearing all this stuff live and to see in the real what the old Marillion gigs at The Marquee and Hammersmith Odeon in the early '80s must have been like. Thanks Mick for this uniqe gig!

Check out the MySpace page for impressions.

By: Erik Beers