March bonus #1: Misplaced Childhood [airplay banded vinyl rip, Side A]

Although this little Patreon endeavor primarily concerns itself with video games, I do occasionally stumble across little bits and pieces of lost media worth sharing. Here's one of them: a record that I've owned for more than 30 years and which does indeed constitute "lost media."

"But Jeremy," you say, "I can buy Marillion's Misplaced Childhood at any convenient shop near me that sells music! Well, OK, no physical shops sell music anymore. But the CD and record are still in print!"

That is true! However, to my knowledge (based on having bought many different versions and reissues of this album), this particular record was never sold to the public and has never been reissued. Misplaced Childhood comes from the same little universe of music as The Wall and The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway: it conveys a narrative over the course of its 41 minutes, and all of the songs link together without interruption into a pair of suites, one per record side. However! Despite this radio-unfriendly format, Marillion had its biggest radio hits ever with this album in "Kayleigh" and "Lavender" from Side A of this album. Their label, EMI, clearly recognized the commercial potential of these tracks and planned ahead by releasing the album to radio stations in a special pressing with fades and breaks edited into the songs. This was in 1985, when CDs (to say nothing of digital satellite feeds) were a few years yet from becoming the primary medium radio stations played from, so this record would have been the mechanism through which disk jockeys, uh, jocked.

The thinking, I suppose, was that all 10 tracks on the album could potentially become radio hits. That's... let's say "optimistic." Misplaced Childhood is a murky, morose album, and even most of the individual tracks have multiple movements and lyrics that make little sense divided out from the rest of the album. God bless EMI for dreaming, though. A few other prog records have been divided up like this, including Yes's Tales from Topographic Oceans and National Health's eponymous record. I can't imagine either of those work at all. But the ’70s were a time of reckless abandon and doing whatever, so I'm not surprised that Atlantic tried to figure out some way to squeeze airplay out of Jon Anderson's religious tone poem.

Anyway, I've been wondering what to do with this record that I picked up in a dollar bin across from Texas Tech University in the early ’90s, clearly a discard from the campus radio station. This is a virgin vinyl pressing for radio-grade audio fidelity, but it does have a moderate amount of surface noise, so I guess the college kids actually dug the tunes? Since lead singer Fish officially retired a few days ago, it seemed a good time to share this. Unfortunately Patreon only lets me share a single audio file per upload, so I'll have to share Side B some other day. Enjoy! Unless you hate prog rock in general or Marillion in specific!