The Invisible Man

Introduction: From an interview with the Web France, in September 2004, h said, "Invisible Man takes a bit of explaining, and I don't really want to explain it... Well, just very generally, it's about witnessing without being there, about being conscious of other people's lives, sometimes intimately conscious, without being there and without being able to do anything about it, and about how difficult that is. So the invisible man is a ghost, really, he is somebody who is watching and knowing, and must bear the weight and the pain of that, and the pain of being unable to help. 'When you stumble/ You will stumble through me' is the most important line of the song, and this one line really sums the song up. The attempt to catch someone as they fall and them falling through you because you're actually not there. And to some extent we've all become invisible men.

"There was a time when we all just lived in caves, where the only things we were conscious of where the things that happened to us in the cave or just outside the cave. And if something dreadful happened to us, we were conscious of it, we felt that pain. Or if something dreadful happened while we were out, running around, hunting, we were conscious of that and had to deal with it... We now live in a world where we are conscious of all kinds of horrors that are happening on the other side of the world, because of mass telecommunication, television and television news. So every day we wake up with this knowledge of some terrible injustice that has happened. And that's totally unnatural. We're not really equipped as human beings to have to be aware or feel responsible for something that is happening in Rwanda or Sydney, Australia or Mexico City, and now we do. And I think that introduces a massive burden on every person, because try as we might, we cannot help but feel a little bit responsible for it.

"And in many ways we are, because internationalism and global corporate trading are now such that each of our economies and our own national, and to some extent therefore our personal wealth, is a product of the fact that perhaps some corporation has gone to another country and exploited the people, either culturally or financially. And we're all a little bit conscious of the fact that perhaps our own wealth is coming at the expense of somebody else somewhere in the world. So there is this feeling of shared responsibility and collective guilt for things that really, in an ordinary world, in a primal world, we never would have known about in the first place. So in that sense we're all invisible men and we all carry that burden of the knowledge of what we have to witness and can do nothing about."

'The Invisible Man'
The title comes from HG Wells' classic sci-fi tale of the same name.

'Venice, Vienna, Budapest, Krakow, and Amsterdam'
Venice is the capital of the northern Italian region Veneto.

Vienna is the capital of Austria (other than that, it means nothing to me...)

Budapest is the capital city of Hungary.

Krakow is the former capital of Poland, and Amsterdam is the capital city of the Netherlands.

None of these places have anything much in common! Marillion have often toured in Amsterdam and Vienna. Venice was played, as far as I can work out from Bill Frech's The Story So Far website, only once, in 1991 on the Holidays tour. Krakow has been played in 2001 and 2004 - Anorak and Marbles tours respectively. Budapest has never been played as far as I know.

Ana 'Arqanacarb pointed out that in the DVD Colours and Sound, h says that 'Budapest, Krakow and Amsterdam' are three places in the world he most considers 'obscure', sad , 'ghostly' places.

'St Stephen's'
Martin Cito added; "Stephen Cathedral's is in Vienna and the mother church of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Vienna and the seat of the Archbishop of Vienna."

Songs with a link have explanations.

• Introduction
• The Invisible Man
• Marbles I-IV
• Genie
• Fantastic Place
• The Only Unforgivable Thing
• Ocean Cloud
• The Damage
• Don't Hurt Yourself
• You're Gone
• Angelina
• Drilling Holes
• Neverland
  
  

  ---

  Click to access album