Marillion ( B13 )

 Kelly's biggest inspiration was Yes keyboardist Rick Wakeman, and Trewavas' favourite bass player was Paul McCartney. Original drummer Mick Pointer was a huge fan of Neil Peart's drumming in his favourite band, Rush.

During the Steve Hogarth era, their sound has been compared, on various albums, to more contemporary acts such as U2, Radiohead, Coldplay, Muse, Talk Talk, Elbow, and Massive Attack. In 2016, Hogarth himself was quoted as describing the band: "If Pink Floyd and Radiohead had a love child that was in touch with their feminine side, they would be us." According to an interview with Rothery in 2016, many of their later albums with Hogarth had been written by jamming.

In the media

"We have got a bit of a reputation. I had a conversation with Noel Gallagher at a party once and said to him, 'I'm in a band but it's the most uncool band in the world - Marillion'. He went, 'Yeah, you're right.' Deadpan! Not even smiling."

—Keyboardist Mark Kelly

The chief music critic of The Guardian, Alexis Petridis, has described Marillion as "perennially unfashionable prog-rockers". On the subject of joining the band in 1989, Steve Hogarth said in a 2001 interview: "At about the same time, Matt Johnson of The The asked me to play piano on his tour. I always say I had to make a choice between the most hip band in the world, and the least." In the same conversation, he said: "We're just tired of the opinions of people who haven't heard anything we've done in ten years. A lot of what's spread about this band is laughable."

Much of the band's enduring and unfashionable reputation stems from their emergence in the early 1980s as the most commercially successful band of the neo-progressive rock movement, an unexpected revival of the progressive rock musical style that had fallen out of critical favour in the mid-1970s.

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