The Wound

Introduction: The Wound was partly written about an incident on a ship where h nearly died. h's pre-Europeans band, Harlow, got a job performing sets on a cruise ship. Their bassist seems to have been more than a bit unstable.

One night the bassist attacked the drummer, trying to bottle him. h intervened and got slashed across his hand, severing tendons and blood vessels. He nearly bled to death over the side of the boat (the 'blood diamond' bit of This Strange Engine is also based on this episode). There was no doctor on board but one of the crew managed to sew h up and saved his life. His hand took many months to heal but h felt the bandages were a sign of his good luck at having survived. He wore them throughout his time in the Europeans and for a long time after he joined Marillion.

Clare Butler said, "I asked H at the pub when I saw the scar as I winced when I saw it and said that it was really nasty. His first words to us were, "Do you know the record The Wound?' We laughed! 'Of course we do!' He replied, 'This is what I wrote the record about.' It still gives him an ache after all these years."

'Wound'
Rich Harding said "One of the less pleasant euphemisms for the female genitalia, though whether it is intended here is unclear."

'Didn't stop it weeping' 'Weeping' obviously refers to tears. In English, it is quite normal to refer to a wound that seeps fluid as 'weeping'.

'Tree Fern'
Adapted from Wikipedia's article: "Tree Ferns (Cyatheales) are technically a type of fern that grows with a trunk elevating the leaves above ground level. However, the ferns most commonly named 'Tree Ferns' comprise a group of large ferns belonging to the families Dicksoniaceae and Cyatheaceae in the order Cyatheales, found growing in tropical and subtropical areas, including cool to temperate rainforests in places like Australia, New Zealand and Malaysia. "Many tree ferns grow in shaded woodland nooks, though this is not the only place that ferns can grown."

Their reproduction method is far too complex to attempt to describe in any detail here, but essentially, adapted from Wikipedia’s general article on Ferns, works by "dropping a spore which is capable of growing by cell division until it creates a sex organ with both sperm and eggs. One an egg becomes fertilised, it will remained attached to the spore and grow to become an adult plant."

'There ain't too much sadder than Clones'

A pun on the notion that clowns are inherently sad (see the Fugazi cover description). Sylvain Clauser also noted that the lines bear a strong resemblance to the chorus from Smokey Robinson's Tears of a Clown, which goes as follows:

Now there's some sad things known to man,
But ain't too much sadder than
The tears of a clown
When there's no one around.

'Now there's some sad... ...the planet Marzipan'
A line in the lyrics, but not audible on the album! Possibly, like the 'chasing the moon' lines in This Strange Engine, this is a line that was excised for reasons of space. A play on the name of the planet Mars, presumably intended to imply tragicomedy to the aforementioned man through the use of the word 'marzipan', a confection of ground sugar and almonds, often used to cover cakes.

As of April 08, we also knew Planet Marzipan was to be a song on the Happiness is the Road album. The song was eventually titled The Man from Planet Marzipan.

There are no explanations for See It Like A Baby or Faith.