In fact the one who plays guitar. Steve Rothery enlarges upon the new Marillion album "Clutching At Straws", and how he made the nice noises. Paul Colbert holds up a tape, Grahame Tucker holds up a camera.

WE SHOULD meet in The Ship, said Steve Rothery, thankfully in a non nautical frame of mind. Why not, since the infamous Wardour Street hostelry is only a stage length from the Marquee. And it is that very niterie which takes a starring role on the cover of "Clutching At Straws". "I've got some shopping to do," Steve had explained, "so I'll be around that way."

And indeed he was, grasping a newly purchased video camera to immortalise the lesser publicised moments of Marillion's world tour.

The band had taken longer than usual to complete this album, 15 months in all, principally down to a heart searching false start. "Clutching At Straws" was begun, torn apart, plundered and rewritten before it saw the light of the record rack. Marillion's intention had been to follow the trail of "Misplaced Childhood" with a continuous concept album, flowing from one track into the next. It didn't work.

"We played the demos to our producer and kept saying 'well this bit will be really good when the solo goes on, and that bit just needs a little sorting out'... but after a while we had to admit it wasn't working." So with the album half finished, they took a scalpel to the project's soft, sensitive flesh and began to remove the best numbers, links and passages to begin all over again, this time with songs. And gaps between them.

"We were a bit nervous of the number of soft gentle songs that were being included," Steve revealed. "We got to the point of being in danger of swamping it with guitar picking parts, and were very conscious of trying to get some more rocky tracks on there, like 'Incommunicado' and 'White Russian'."

When it came to sorting through the finished tracks and describing them, Steve apologised for his puzzled frown. "We always change the titles," he said, poring over the cassette sleeve attempting to recall what was what. "We have working names, then we get to the very last minute and change everything. "'The Last Straw' was originally called 'Hotel Lobbies', and now that's the first track."

Guitars

There were two principal guitar set-ups for the album — a Strat through a Rockman module juiced up with chorus and reverb, and a Charvel Model 6 for the solos: "I saw it at last year's British Music Fair... a brilliant guitar. The way the Kahler is set up is incredible, really stable, instant hooligan."

It was the first active guitar he'd bought, "and I wasn't really sure about that at first, but it turned out to be brilliant for lead stuff. Couldn't come to terms with the picking sounds, though." Since the pickups are actually stacked humbuckers (two coils one below the other rather than side by side), tapping one off for a single coil sound is a compromise.

"My main guitar is really a Roland guitar synthesiser controller, the Strat-shaped 303 — it's the only one that does every job. I don't know if it's the density of the wood, or the fact that so much of it is carved out to make way for the electronics, but it gives a special sort of resonance, almost like a semi-acoustic. I had a Kahler fixed to that as well. Roger Giffin put a new neck on for me — a Strat type, though quite flat and wide like a Les Paul — but that's getting a bit old now. Halfway through doing the backing tracks for this album it threw a wobbler on me — incredible fret buzz all the way down the neck."

Steve's excuse that "it has suffered some abuse" could be a dictionary definition of understatement if ever the Oxford boys were stuck for an idea. It was once transferred from a gear truck at minus 27 to a sweaty Winnipeg hall with all of 30 seconds to make the adjustment. "All the varnish cracked as the wood expanded. That's why I never take my Les Paul on the road... too frightened. I'm trying to track down another one, so if anyone out there knows of a 303 going?..."

Did he ever use it for its intended purpose, ie wobbly guitar synthesis? "Yes, though I think I prefer it for single line melodies, it's a bit more controllable. I've found the hold facility is quite good for doing chords — you hit one, then press the hold straight away and that seems to clean things up quite a lot. It prevents the synthesiser from hearing the harmonics which develop within a sustaining chord, making it glitch. Even so we had to do some things a couple of times to get it perfectly right."

For the single 'Incommunicado' Steve used his sunburst Les Paul (an instrument we reckoned was steadily recovering from its reputation as the world's most unfashionable guitar), and a Marshall stack. The guitar is about seven years old, rescued from a New York shop for about £260: "I do love Les Pauls, but I couldn't play one all the time — that picking sound on a Strat is what I love more than anything."

Mr Rothery then leant across his beer and reckoned that I should try his new double-neck: "I got Roger Giffin to do two Strats — two six-strings — with locking Kahler trems. That's 'cos I do a lot of things with capos, especially on the last album, "Misplaced Childhood"... capos at the second, third, fifth, seventh... and some of the changes were so quick there was no time to whack on a capo and make sure everything was OK. On the Giffin I can leave one neck capoed and ready.

"Lovely guitar," he muses, "weighs a ton, though." You can hear the bottom neck on the 'Sugar Mice' solo, plugged in because the 303 had gone down.

"We always change the titles. We have working names then we get to the very last minute and change everything."

Stage set up

"Two Roland JC120s on top of each other, and a double Marshall stack. I'm trying the new Anniversary series which seems really good. Up to now the effects have been the Boss computer pedalboard with the Roland SD3000 digital delay and rackmount Roland chorus. But now I'm changing over to the Rockman modules in a rack, and I've just got my hands on one of those new Roland multi-effects, the GP-8. That's amazing. Once we get to Poland I'll have some time sitting around in a hotel trying to figure out how to program it up.

"There are a lot of treated reverb type guitar things on the album which I'll have to try to reproduce; and lots of live changes which I prefer to do myself rather than have an engineer carry out."

So why have you got so many keyboards, then?

"I'm really not a keyboard player," confesses Steve, "it's just that I do seem to have a lot of them: a Roland MKB1000 keyboard, Super Jupiter, Akai S900 sampler — bit over the top, isn't it — the Oberheim Matrix and a Yamaha TX7. I do some writing on them now, but they're all there because eventually I want to do some film music. I've been building up the home studio and producing a couple of local bands. At home I've got the Akai 1212 for recording — very well designed and the sound quality is excellent, I just wish the EQ was more flexible. When you're trying to fine-tune a sound, it's a little clumsy.

"I do a lot of work with Ian (Mosley), it's good to have a drummer who really inspires you to write. If I play a guitar at home it could be any of them — the music room is pretty crowded with stuff — but I do have this classical guitar I pick up when I'm watching TV and it's a bit boring..."

Clutching At Straws

"I think it's better recorded than any of our others. When we did 'Fugazi' we used 48-track analogue — two 24-track machines synced together. We had so many problems trying to get the machines locked together. We lost days and days not being able to do it. With the two 24-track digital Sonys you just press a button and it's instantly rock stable. On the whole it turned out really well."

Marillion always record the backing tracks as a live band, and on "Clutching At Straws" a good proportion of the guitar tracks were retained with "maybe just a few repairs".

"'Sugar Mice' was practically the first track we wrote and that solo is almost exactly what I played the very first time we did it... almost before anyone knew what was happening. The solo on 'Last Straw' was the last thing I recorded, it's OK, could have been better.

"It is an album that takes a bit of listening to get into. The last album was a very conceptual thing, continuous, whereas this is more broken down into songs."

MIDI Guitar

Steve and keyboard playing pal Mark Kelly were among the first musicians in Britain to use Steinberg's Pro 24 software for the Atari, a superb bit of computer scheming, but one that takes a long time to get to know. Had he ever tried strumming straight into it with the MIDI-ed guitar?

"Yes."

And does it actually work?

"Oh yes, it works. The only problem is the delay." Pitch-to-MIDI guitar controllers need time to capture, analyse and establish a note's pitch, having to listen to at least one complete cycle of the waveform to make up their minds. The lower the note, the longer the cycle takes to finish, and the more time the computer requires to make the analysis. Result, a delay between plucking a string and hearing the synth sound. And if you play across the strings, the delay will vary from bottom string to top.

"It's infuriating, especially the things I do with picking or playing against an echo, trying to get that bouncy triplet sort of thing in time. You have to anticipate the note, and that gets so frustrating. One good thing I did was a Jan Hammer keyboard line on the MIDI guitar, then a normal guitar on top. I used the top three strings and programmed it to drop down an octave, but after a while you just think that a good keyboard player could do it so much better... and quicker."

Listen carefully and you can also hear the Roland controlling an Akai S900 sampler on 'Warm Wet Circles', delivering the wispy Fairvoice sound.

But back to the Steinberg. As a sophisticated sequencer it can collect its note data just as easily from a MIDI guitar as a MIDI keyboard, "and later you can quantise it to help remove the delays, or move each individual note to its correct position. But on a long piece of music that's a laborious process... I can't play keyboards well, but I can still play them better than I can put the information in from a MIDI guitar."

He'd read the Making Music story about The Infinite Sustain Guitar used by The Edge on "Joshua Tree" which contains an electronic system for keeping the strings vibrating. "It sounded interesting. I used some E-Bow on this album (the handheld father of infinite string sustain) which you can hear just before the lead verse on 'Last Straw'. They're easy to use, but work better on some pickups than others, like a Les Paul."

"But really," reflects Steve, drainings his lager and preparing to return to the shopping, "I'm more interested in what you can do with a normal guitar than a MIDI one. You tend to lose sight of what a real guitar can do. How good it is. You know?" We do.