Seasons End (album)

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Seasons End

Studio album by Marillion
Released	September 1989 September 1997 (two-disc edition)
Recorded	Outside Studios, Oxfordshire, 1989
Genre	Progressive Rock
Length	50:55 (single-disc edition) 1:39:25 (two-disc edition)
Label	EMI
Producer(s)	Nick Davis
Progressiveworld.net link
Marillion chronology
Clutching at Straws (1987)	Seasons End (1989)	Holidays In Eden (1991)

Seasons End was the first album recorded by Marillion after the split with Fish in late 1988. The band started to audition singers while writing the new album, and they eventually chose Steve Hogarth, former keyboard player and singer in The Europeans. Hogarth was born in Kendal, UK on 14 May, 1956, and at the age of 17 he bought his first piano and learned to play by himself. From there on, he focused on how to get into the music business. After a couple of guest appearances with several bands, he joined The Europeans and released two albums, Vocabulary and Recurring Dreams, before forming How We Live with guitarist Colin Woore and releasing one record, Dry Land, with this band in 1987. This record went relatively quiet by the public. Seasons End was mostly finished by the time Hogarth joined Marillion, and only a couple of songs on it actually have some pieces written by him, most notably Easter and The Space. The first single to be released was Hooks in You in August of 1989, followed by The Uninvited Guest in November and Easter in March of 1990.

At this point in Marillion's career, the band was still huge and had a much larger worldwide following than it has today. The first ever concert with Steve as the new lead singer was in a small pub somewhere in Aylesbury. The band wanted it to be some kind of rehearsal before going out on the world wide tour later that year. The band put out the word that they were going to do a small gig for only a couple of people in the pub, and when they arrived on the day of the gig, they quickly found out that a lot more people had found the venue than they had anticipated. The crowd was so big that the band actually had to climb out of the back window when the gig was over because the crowd had no intention of letting them slip out. This was the first positive experience Steve had with the band, and from there on, things only improved. The band opened their tour in a sold out venue in Paris later that year, and through the concert, the public were so loud with excitement and cheering that the band actually had to wait in between songs for them to settle down a bit.

Steve Hogarth later said (loosely quoted from the From Stoke Row To Ipanema video):

"It was an incredible experience. The crowd went absolutely ballistic on us, and there was this one time in the middle of the show when they cheered so loud that it was impossible for us to start with the next song. For fully two minutes we just stood there and accepted it. It almost brought a tear to my eye."

The new frontman was fully accepted by the fans, and the Seasons End Tour is the biggest tour Marillion has done with Steve as the band's singer.