SMOKE

The second album from the 2005 Marillion Weekend captures the Saturday night set, where the band selected a bunch of up-tempo and energetic songs to get a party vibe going. (Yes, that is The Memory of Water you see in the track list - bizarrely, the band do a pretty good rendition of the Positive Light remix of the song from Tales From the Engine Room!) As a result, with all the slower and more atmospheric songs stripped from the setlist, it's one of the most energetic and lively Marillion live albums you can get outside of the Fish era, which should make it of interest even to fans who already have a few H live discs.

Note that despite coming from 2005, there's no songs from Marbles on it because there was a full performance of the album on the Friday night, and repeating songs between setlists at any particular Marillion Weekend is something the band try to avoid. In this case it doesn't hurt the set-list too much because Marbles was one of their slower and more introspective albums anyway. At the same time, though, I think the decision to present a gig this long with this little variation in the mood hurts the set list; in particular, many of Marillion's best songs take the listener through a variety of moods in a single piece (think The Great Escape from Brave, or the This Town triptych), and the combination of a constrained setlist and the lack of variation in the mood makes it a slight chore to listen all the way through.