THE EMI SINGLES COLLECTION

The 80s was not a very good decade for music videos. Most of the time, they were over the top, terribly ridiculous, and they made the bands look completely different than they really did and threw the entire of the song itself off. This can be attributed here to Marillion, a group that was never destined to make a truly great music video. Despite that, there are a few interesting videos here to help bring up the overall quality to the completely ridiculous and cheesy videos. This collection, comprising of all of the Fish era videos and the Hogarth videos until Beautiful, has a certain nostalgic feel to it as you see Marillion try to create something that a station like MTV would play... to no avail?

Of the Fish videos, Garden Party, Heart of Lothian, and Incommunicado provide moments of comedy and catch the band in silly situations. The best of these three is Heart of Lothian, which contains a rapid sequence of seamingly slapstick events (one of which is a car driving through a shop window). Sugar Mice is another good video with some definite melancholic moments throughout (special mention goes to the part where the band comes through the bar counter for Rothery's solo). Assassing, He Knows You Know, Kayleigh, and Lavender are some of the most painful things to watch, in my opinion, but not in a bad sense, more like in a funny way. Lady Nina, Market Square Heroes, and Warm Wet Circles are pretty average videos (with Warm Wet Circles being the video for the song from the Live at Loreley release), nothing terribly special or noteworthy goes along with these ones.

Of the Hogarth videos, the best ones are probably The Great Escape, Easter, and The Uninvited Guest (not for the song itself, but for the creativity of the video). The rest are pretty run of the mill videos (although the Brave songs are all pretty intense videos). Beautiful gets a special mention for it's very... how do you say... suggestive content (not in a bad sense at all, for your information), let's say you could get the wrong idea from this video. Another note goes to Hooks in You, the first Hogarth video and the song that really showed that Marillion were back and with a bang... this video makes it look as if Marillion were some late 80s Hair Metal band because it follows the formula of a hair metal video (mainly in that the video is mostly the band playing in front of a crowd).

In the end, the Marillion video collection isn't for everyone. It certainly is for the die-hard Marillion fans and those who like watching videos so cringeworthy they could make you laugh. One of the fun features in the random video option that plays any of the 22 videos in any sequence (so you don't have to to watch all the Fish videos and then all the Hogarth ones). In any sense, it's a fun video, but I can't really recommend it to anyone but Marillion fans. And because of that, I can't rate it terribly high. Still, it's a very complete and harmless collection of videos from a group that never really could make a truly spectacular music video.