A-Z LIVE 2011

The Marillion Weekend conventions are a great source of unusual live sets from the band, but the flipside of that is that precisely because the concert structures they try out at them are so experimental sometimes the experiments don't quite work. Such was the case for this selection from the Saturday night of the 2011 weekend, which features the band running through a set of songs in alphabetical order, from A to Z.

The band are clearly in a playful, cheeky mood this evening, because they do cheat a few times, though in perfectly appropriate and interesting ways each time - "I" stands in for the first intermission (it's a 25 song set, of course they needed multiple intermissions), X turns out to be a cover version of XTC's Senses Working Overtime with Dave Gregory (former star guitarist of XTC) guesting, and Z is Zeparated out - a crazy version of Separated Out from Anoraknophobia, with selected segments of Led Zeppelin classic songs slipped in here and there to spice things up.

Though the album has a great ambience, at the same time the epic length of the concert means that it is wearing, and the alphabetical concept means that at points the transitions in mood are rather abrupt and the setlist doesn't flow as well as it otherwise might.