AFRAID OF SUNLIGHT (LIMITED DELUXE EDITION)

The deluxe release of Afraid of Sunlight offers the sort of package we've come to expect of these reissues: a new mix of the album, plus the original mix, plus a Blu-Ray of various bonus materials (including a documentary on the album's production), plus a full live show from this era.

In this case, that live show is especially welcome, because official releases of shows from the Afraid of Sunlight tour are thin on the ground - the Official Bootleg Boxed Set Vol. 2, which brought together a clutch of Steve Hogarth-fronted shows from the band's tenure on EMI, stops at the Brave tour. The Made Again live album did have some tracks from 1995, but was a rather lacklustre presentation, showing every sign of a product knocked together to close out the band's time with EMI. Moreover, it wasn't a single show - it was a Frankenstein creation, with disc 2 providing a performance of Brave from that tour (from the show later released in full on the deluxe release of Brave) and disc 1 having a mix of tracks from 1995 and 1991.

The live show here comes from the Ahoy in Rotterdam, and was the source of those 1995 tracks on Made Again - but they've been treated with a bit more love this time around, and hearing them in the original context of the original setlist is obviously a big plus. Marillion were still including a healthy pinch of Fish-era material in their set lists at this point in time (they'd go through a phase a bit later where they grumpily tried to pretend the Fish era hadn't happened, though to be fair when the music press keep failing to twig to the fact that you've changed singers...), but the selections here are well-chosen and, as on the Brave tour, it really feels like the centre of gravity has well and truly changed towards the H-era stuff.

Out of all of the band's eight albums under their EMI contract, only Fugazi isn't featured in the set - which is sensible, because I don't think the material from that album has ever really lent itself to Hogarth's approach as vocalist or fits with Marillion's later music to the extent that, say, the Clutching At Straws picks here do. (Garden Party from Script For a Jester's Tear shows up, but it's very much a muck-about-at-the-encore song in Hogarth's hands and that's how they deploy it here.) In this context, the additional maturity carried by the material from Afraid of Sunlight and Brave is particularly notable, giving the sense of the band really getting to grips with its new configuration.

The original Afraid of Sunlight studio album was already a very fine bookend to Marillion's time as a major label act, before they ploughed their own furrow as an independent act and became pioneers of crowdfunding over a decade before Kickstarter became the new hotness. This deluxe presentation of it only amplifies its status. If the live show presented here is the only full show we'll ever get from the archives from this tour, then it is a magnificent swansong for this stage of the band's career.

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