Brave

About

Brave is an album by the group Marillion released in 1994. It was selected by Classic Rock in 2003 as one of 30 greatest concept albums ever made. After trying and failing to reach a wider audience with Holidays in Eden, Marillion figured it was time to go back to their roots and make a more progressive rock-oriented album again. Brave is a concept album, based on a news story Steve Hogarth heard on the radio about a girl who was taken into police custody after being found wandering the Severn Bridge. She did not know who she wa, where she came from and refused to even speak. This inspired Hogarth to write a fictional story about this girl and what might have led to her being on Severn Bridge in this state. The band relocated to Marouatte castle in France for the duration of the recording of Brave. The influence of these surroundings can be heard throughout the album in a lot of haunting atmospheric. They even went into a cave which lay in the nearby area and taped some cave sounds which were used as background ambiance on the album. This recording concept was later used by Radiohead for their OK Computer album. As engineer, they recruited Dave Meegan, who had previously worked with Marillion on Fugazi. As for EMI, they really wanted the band to do a 'quick record' to gain some revenue, but this project progressively escalated, taking the band nine months to write and produce, partly because of Dave who would go through 'every single new tape made every day' each night listening for any riff or melody which sounded good enough to be included in the song. This hard and tedious work paid off in the end. Brave was not a hit, possibly due to EMI's lack of promotion and the fact that it had no real single potential. However, three singles were released: The Great Escape. (February 1994), The Hollow Man (March 1994) and Alone Again In The Lap Of Luxury (April 1994). The 2-LP vinyl release of Brave features a double groove on the second side of disc 2. The first groove plays 'The Great Escape' as heard on the CD, followed by 'Made Again'; the second groove plays 'The Great Escape (Spiral Remake)' and 20 minutes of water noise. This provides 2 different endings to the album story, depending on where you drop the needle. Richard Stanley directed a 50 minute film version of Brave that was released in conjunction with the album. .

via Last.fm

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