Brave

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.