The album, Script to a Jester’s Tear was the debut album for my local prog-rock band Marillion. It was released on the 14th of March 1983 by EMI Records. The album spent 31 weeks in the UK album chart and was awarded a platinum certificate. When “Garden Party” became a top twenty hit it only fueled our faith and respect for their craft even more.
So, let’s get into this article, shall we…what are my thoughts?
As a child, you could not write your own story, because, at the least, you did not know how to, but as an adult, you might be wondering why you are still playing on a roundabout...
“So here I am once more..
In the playground of the broken hearts
One more experience, one more entry
In a diary, self penned
Yet another emotional suicide
Overdosed on sentiments and pride”
What's not to like about those lyrics if you are searching, grabbing for something solid in the vast ocean of grown-up-hood that should be enjoyable? If the bubbles called trauma resurface within this new over twenty-one garden party, we have a child trying to cope with all that can go wrong.
Most of us do not think about the playground of our inner kindergarten affecting us as adults. As children, we are delivered into whatever we find. We all then take a trip to adulthood through a story called Childhood.
That semester, kinder years, is indeed a bucket full of dinosaurs. Future lessons are tucked away in the hidden web of childhood and repeated in adulthood until changes are made. So, this song is not a miserable song, for the downhearted but a remedy for a heart full of arrows. A precursor to new beginnings. We can come to see the lessons of the still naïve child experiencing this bizarre fully fledged world. For some children, the playground will internalize many bruises. And what has this got to do with Marillion: Script to a Jester’s Tear you might ask?
Well, quite a lot to be honest. When we delve into what upset the child's path and traumatized them, we can often find the key that leads them out of an inner chamber, a tomb under the sea of reality. Like a shark resurfacing until it is caught and dealt with accordingly, the shole of trauma-related memories, and films, lives on and bubbles up into your adult life.
A seesaw called “sentiment and pride.”
The fossils of childhood can be objects of virtu if you use them to “right the wrongs” within your inner psyche. Formative years always consist of swings and roundabouts and if life is not great at home, you want to play differently, or escape, but you are stuck with “them” for now. Glued to a situation you cannot escape from until you reach sixteen. You are stuck inside a game of Campaign, Chess, being played around you. And as the game unfolds there are winners, and losers, bruised, battered, and torn. You enter the world of adulthood with only the playground skills of a stifled child.
And there we stood, at those Marillion gigs, mesmerized by an opening line. How we rocked and swayed and sang every word as if we had joined a cult. And to be honest, it was a sincere gathering of hearts. We paraded in green army jackets with painted or embroidered jesters. Where we say, yes, come in, and join the club of those who wish to enter the inner workings of the shadows. And explore through the writing of Fish and Co, what on earth has happened in this play called Adult Life so far? You may have been a forgotten son or daughter, but you shall have glitter in the end, my child.
The opening lines caught us and hooked us in. “So, here I am once more”. The enlightened older ones amongst the crowd had already learned about the cycles in life. You will play out the drama over and over again throughout life until you deal with it differently. I certainly wish, looking back, to the younger naive me, someone had been kind enough to explain that to me away. But you learn when you learn. It will come to you hopefully sooner or better late than never. Your lessons make you the individual you are. Amen!
I remember the joy of seeing Marillion in a café in the underground market in Aylesbury. Popping my thirteen-year-old self through the door and shyly saying hello and hearing a hello back. They just looked at me, not knowing what to say. Then I left. I was happy.
At fourteen years old, I had a cleaning job, and, on a Saturday, I would go to Aylesbury, my local town, on the train. Confidently chugging along the Marylebone line in one of those old carriages, where you had to pull the window down to open the door. Remember those?
In Aylesbury, we had a record shop called Oven Ready Records in the concrete shopping centre that no longer exists. If Slough needed bombs, then this ugly thing certainly needed demolishing. You were now at the age where you could be free to flick through vinyl albums, twelve inches, meet others into music and somehow feel whole outside that growing up experience back at home. And strangers can be much kinder, and welcoming, compared to the web you leave behind at home.
If we look at the first track of the album, we also look back in my opinion to an analysis of childhood. We can see there is already much to dive into now we are in this new land of grown-ups. Another thought-provoking analysis arrived in the next album.
Looking back for a while can propel you forward. Just as the child who escapes the not-for-some paradise playground of childhood. You will look back and wonder why. Although your daffodil might be a cigarette or something worse. In many cases chocolate, as you sit there feeling the smoothness of the melt covering the inside of your mouth as you study the fossils of your childhood before you.
Am I saying that sometimes lyrics are the fountain of childhood cries that reverberate until we delve into the archaeology of the soul? Yes!
Within your adult life, those old bones become entwined with the present, attracting the wrong people. Bone collectors...
Running blindly towards that spinning roundabout, still in your dungarees of youth.
You could find yourself on that childhood roundabout again if you make the wrong decisions as an adult. As a child, you could not act differently for many reasons, but now you are here, with maybe grey hair, wrinkles, and a mortgage. You are still wounded and yet to learn to connect with your primordial inner father within, who will show, and tell you what to do.
You swing back and forth from buzzing emotional energy, and false love to wounded pride. Again, out of kilter with new actions that change the future, perhaps the middle ground, pathway. Wondering why you did not enjoy the garden party.
To be continued…
Article © Sonya Vukomanovic/Lawrence 31/01/2024
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