Marillion, Gig Review. O2 Arena, London. Stone Free Festival.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

When all that remains is love, the human heart will feel peace. It is a love that has been kept firmly in the hearts of the tens of thousands of Marillion fans since the first moment they came across the band. When all that remains is love, then the complexity of human emotion can come shining through like the Lighthouse of Alexandria, it is talked of for all time and the beacon searches out both wrecks and salvation alike.

The set may have been truncated for one of the Progressive Rocks Kings, however empires have been built on less and the music from the stage floated with the ease of a butterfly, unhindered, unobstructed and full of a force that wept with passion and glory. The set may have been shortened but it was dynamic, it was pathos and unity rolled together and the memory of times past held tightly to the o2 audience’s collective hearts.

The Stone Free Festival crowd had had the spirits and the temperatures raised by the rock/metal contingent the day before, now was the time for the cerebral, the mix of notes that cannot be contained and fresh of the back of a successful South American tour and with a new album only weeks away, Marillion once more delighted their followers, their fans and those who never stop adoring them with a set steeped in magic; the older and the determinedly courageous feeling into the darkness and hitting home with passion.

It was a passion that the band kicked off the set with, the anger that fills the void as the stirring Invisible Man from the album Marbles played out. The world has gone mad, Steve Hogarth is right about that, to the lay person we stand on the cusp of truth but are in danger of falling in to the trap of lies, the squalid nature of human existence in recent weeks somehow bringing out the worst of us and the voyeur that watches the insanity unfold can only scream silently. It is silence that allows the madness to continue and Invisible Man has perhaps never been played live with more resonance in its heart as it was at the Stone Free Festival.

With You’re Gone, the fantastic Easter, Kayleigh, Lavender and a rousing rendition of Heart Of Lothian and Neverland all combining well on the night, it didn’t matter that the night was shortened, for in the end only love remained, and for that the music that transported many in the audience to better times, times when all they had to worry about was getting someone to like them, this was a night when Marillion ruled.

Ian D. Hall