Brave is the seventh studio album by Marillion, released in 1994. It charted at number 10 on the UK Albums Chart, being the last of the band's albums to reach the Top 10 in the United Kingdom until F E A R reached number 4 in 2016.
Background
After trying and failing to reach a wider audience with the more pop-oriented Holidays in Eden, Marillion decided to go back to their roots and make a more progressive-oriented album again.
Back in the mid-eighties, Steve Hogarth heard an appeal on behalf of the police on a local radio broadcast about a teen-aged girl found wandering alone on Severn Bridge in England. When she was found, she was either incapable of or decided not to communicate with anyone who questioned her. After a while, the police took the decision to make an appeal on radio to see if anyone could identify her. Eventually, the girl was reclaimed by her family and taken back home. Hogarth made a note of this and kept it aside for many years until Marillion began working on what would later become their Brave album.
The band had written two songs "Living with the Big Lie" and "Runaway" when he was reminded of the girl on the bridge and the shape of the album began to happen in his mind. "Living with the Big Lie" is a song about how people seem to get used to things to the point of being totally desensitized and "Runaway" catalogues the plight of a young girl attempting to escape a dysfunctional home. Hogarth told the story to the band and suggested how the songs could tie together in a fictitious tale of a life that has undergone problems and horrors such as sexual abuse (an increasingly reported theme in the media at the time), isolation, drug addiction and breakdown, to the point of considering/attempting suicide.
Recording
The band recruited Dave Meegan as producer, who had previously worked with them as an assistant engineer on Fugazi (1984). EMI 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 Meegan 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 album. The album was written at the Racket Club, Buckinghamshire between April 1992 and January 1993 and recorded between February and September 1993.
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 atmospherics. 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 Marillion's EMI labelmates Radiohead for their OK Computer album. They spent three months in Marouatte in total, but in the summer, they decamped to Liverpool’s Parr Street Studio to continue recording. Marillion spent another four months in Parr Street on top of the three months they’d spent in Marouatte. The mixing of the album was finished at the Sarm West Studio in London.
Release
Three singles from the album were released: "The Great Escape" was only released in the Netherlands in January 1994. "The Hollow Man", released in March 1994, reached No.30 in the UK, and "Alone Again in the Lap of Luxury", released in April 1994, didn’t even make the Top 50.
The double-LP vinyl release of Brave features a double groove on the final side of the album, providing two endings to the story of this concept album. The first groove plays "The Great Escape" as heard on the CD, followed by "Made Again", providing the happy ending; the second groove plays "The Great Escape (Spiral Remake)" and 7 minutes of water noise, providing the downer ending. "The Great Escape (Spiral Remake)" was later included as a bonus track on the remastered re-issue, along with one minute of the water noise.
Richard Stanley directed a 50-minute film version of Brave which was released 6 February 1995. This film takes the downer ending presented by the second double groove.