Favorite Marillion Track Lyrically?

ClemofNazareth wrote: Certif1ed wrote: There can be only one... FUGAZI "Pandora’s box of holocausts gracefully cruising satellite infested heavens" "Aural contraceptive aborting pregnant conversation, She turned the harpoon and it pierced my heart" Awesome lyrics in "Fugazi", to be sure, but a bit over-the-top at times. (...)

I agree completely with what you're saying about "Forgotten Sons" - that would be #2 on my list.

But "Fugazi" is supposed to be over the top - consider what the word "Fugazi" means.

The "Pandora's box..." line refers to the nuclear-paranoid 1980s, which people seem to forget or have grown up blissfully ignorant of, especially since the cold war ended - the "Taped up painted windows refers to the very useful advice that the government used to give us as protection from a nuclear blast. "Season of the button" refers to the button that needs to be pressed in order to fire off a nuclear ICBM - but is also an archetype. We're just waiting for someone to press it - when rather than if.

The nuclear threat is just as real, if not more so today from terrorists and so on - we've just learned to live with it. The whole current Iran affair is amusing in a bitterly ironic sort of way, especially when you know how the U.N. and particularly the U.S. know about Iran's capabilities and why they are so worried... how many people are aware of this? High (or low)-fibre ignorance - filtered newspapers only reporting what they can get past the censors or what their political slants allow them to.

Son watches father scan obituary columns in search of absent school friends
While his generation digests high fibre ignorance
Cowering behind curtains and the taped up painted windows
Decriminalised genocide, provided door to door Belsens
Pandora's box of holocausts gracefully cruising satellite infested heavens
Waiting, wai-wai-waiting, the season of the button
The penultimate migration
Radioactive perfumes
For the fashionably
For the terminally insane, insane
D-d-do you realise?
D-d-do you realise?
D-d-do you realise, this world is totally fugazi

That lot is still just as relevant as "Forgotten Sons", IMO

The next lines you quote really require the full context - there's a double-story going on here, with double meanings in all the lyrics, which make it fairly impenetrable - but Tony R (alias Reed Lover) did a superb job on interpreting them a while back (you might find it if you search ).

Vodka intimate, an affair with isolation in a blackheath cell
Extinguishing the fires in a private hell
Provoking the heartache to renew the licence
Of a bleeding heart poet in a fragile capsule
Propping up the crust of the glitter conscience
Wrapped in the christening shawl of a hangover
Baptised in the tears from the real
Tears from the real

Drowning in the liquid seize on the Piccadilly line, rat race
Scuttling through the damp electric labyrinth
Caress Ophelias hand with breathstroke ambition
An albatross in the marrytime tradition
Sheathed within the walkman wear the halo of distortion
Aural contraceptive aborting pregnant conversation
She turned the harpoon and it pierced my heart
She hung herself around my neck

From the Time-Life-Guardians in their conscience bubbles
Safe and dry in my sea of troubles
Nine to five with suitable ties
Cast adrift as their sideshow, peepshow, stereo hero
Becalm bestill, bewitch
Drowning in the real

These verses are all related and make a story of sorts - the immediate internal meanderings of the protaganist as he awakens with a hangover and goes through a process of self-remembrance, then catches a tube train. This is combined with his own views of the reality he has woken up to, and a relating of his deeper, ongoing thoughts about his relationship with archetypes found in literature.

I'm fairly sure that the line should read "Caress Ophelias hand with breaststroke ambition - an albatross in the marrytime tradition" - these lines combine Shakespeare (Hamlet) with Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" - to reflect his view of his current relationship.

The line about "Aural contraception..." simply refers to the fact that he's listening to his personal stereo/mobile music device, but probably also reflect a deeper desire to be able to shut out other, possibly relationship derived conversations that are getting to him. The sexual connotations are therefore deliberate and not contrived - and are supposed to feel uncomfortable.

The rest of the song sees the protaganist taking in his surroudings and considering world matters at large, especially the nuclear threat, related with Fish's typical sardonic irony until the (non-ironic) climax in the questions;

Where are the prophets?
Where are the visionaries?
Where are the poets To breach the dawn of the sentimental mercenary?

...and that's just scratching the surface