Easter

This is one of the most quietly devastating pieces in British progressive rock, and it announces itself with almost no fanfare — clean, ringing guitar over sparse keyboard, building with the careful patience of someone choosing words they know they can't take back. Fish's performance here is stripped of theatrical flourish; the weight of what the song carries demands a more naked delivery, and he obliges, his voice moving between tenderness and suppressed fury. The subject is political and intimate simultaneously — the hunger strikes of 1981, the deaths that followed, but filtered through the perspective of grief that is too large to process directly, so it arrives sideways, through domestic imagery and quiet devastation. Marillion had not yet become the neo-prog relic their detractors would later dismiss; here they sound genuinely dangerous, capable of making a rock song feel like an act of witness. The production builds slowly but never releases into stadium triumph — the restraint is the point. You listen to this in the specific mood when something unjust has happened and you cannot fix it, when outrage has curdled into something quieter and more permanent.