RADIATION

I've warmed to Radiation over the years and now regard it, like Holidays In Eden, as a rather underrated album, but at the same time I can definitely see where the critics are coming from: it's not so much that in its original 1998 version it's a good album that gets passed over as merely average so much as it's a lukewarm album with some quite good bits that gets passed over as being outright rubbish.

Evidently, Marillion agree, because they got in Michael Hunter to do a comprehensive tidying-up of the album. This included trimming back the running time a little - primarily by taking out cut-and-pasted reprises here and there that didn't really add anything but clutter - as well as giving the entire mix a do-over. This got rereleased as Radiation 2013, and it's a bit of a revelation. Even the band admit the original version of the album didn't pan out right - Steve Rothery was never happy with the mix, and Ian Mosley's gone on the record as thinking the attempt to step outside of Marillion's comfort zone backfired and left them sounding like "a second rate version of who we were trying to copy".

The 2013 do-over the album improves things greatly in this respect, simply by giving a more "Marillion-like" mix to the material, teasing out Mark Kelly's keyboards a bit more and generally letting the band's own personality be more in evidence.

Part of the problem with Radiation is that its weakest songs - the one where they're trying the most to sound like other, more popular groups at the time - are all crowded to the front of the running order, so if you want to give the album a listen from start to finish you have to sit through a clutch of poppy indie-rock numbers with, in the original configuration, some pretty rough and raw production which the band seem to have knocked off in the vague hope of getting some sales from the indie rock crowd who were going gaga for Radiohead at the time. These songs sound better in the remix, but it's still the case that things don't really pick up until Three Minute Boy, which in the remix still feels like a Radiohead nod (especially with some of Rothery's guitar work) but at least also has one foot in the sort of material Marillion were doing back on Holidays In Eden.

The bad first impression the opening songs gave in their original configuration certainly wasn't helped at the time by the band's efforts at the time to distance themselves from the "prog" moniker - an attitude perhaps exacerbated by the music press's abject failure to realise how the band had evolved since the Fish years, but still came across as the band slamming their own past and being kind of ashamed of their own best work; they would, thankfully, get over it after Marbles found themselves re-embracing prog as a concept. Whilst there really isn't much on this album which is capital-P Proggy in the sense of recapturing the great prog bands of the past or Marillion's own neo-prog sound of the 1980s, they hadn't really been about that for years at this point.

There is, however, some really intriguing and genuinely small-p progressive music to be found on the album if you can get over the opening numbers - or, indeed, just skip 'em. The middle tracks of the album - from Three Minute Boy to These Chains in particular - present an intriguing sort of melodic rock tinged with classic psychedelia, mashing together the harmonies and song structures of the Beatles with the modern Radiohead indie rock sound to produce some genuinely interesting experiments. All of this was evident if you listened carefully to the 1998 mix, but it's even clearer on the 2013 mix.

On top of that, the album closes off with two of Marillion's most progressive tracks, which between them deliver 17 minutes of top-notch crossover prog. Cathedral Wall is a hard rocking number with some really aggressive keyboard playing from Mark Kelly, whilst the album's masterpiece is A Few Words For the Dead, which travels from spacey ambient melancholia via a mildly Indo-prog tinged psychedelic midsection to arrive at a deliriously happy crescendo in which the classic sound of albums like Brave or Afraid of Sunlight is found alive and well. This was true of the 1998 album - where those two tracks were pretty much it's saving grave - and the 2013 rerelease really helps bring out their overlooked charms.

I certainly wouldn't put Radiation in the top rank of Marillion albums on a whole, because Under the Sun and The Answering Machine, whilst improved in the 2013 mix, are still fairly poppy, disposable numbers, and the occasional trend-chasing indulged in by the band at this time hasn't aged well. At the same time I wouldn't say you should necessarily dismiss it because there is some really fine material on here - it's just a shame that the original mix obscured that so much.

I've revised my score for this up and down over the years, but I'm going to make a stand for Radiation and set the rating at 4 stars - with the proviso that it's really the 2013 version of the album which truly earns that accolade. If you are dealing with the pre-2013 mix, I'd dock it down by a star or two - the original mix really does the material no credit, and Rothery's instincts that a remix was called for is completely exonerated by Michael Hunter's sensitive reclamation of what had been damaged goods.