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DECEMBER 1977
"The way I got the job in Electric Gypsy was, my next door neighbour had a daughter, and she was getting engaged to the drummer of Electric Gypsy, and she knew I played the drums," tells Mick Pointer. "Her boyfriend was getting engaged to her and decided to leave the band, and would I like to audition for it? And that's how I met Doug Irvine, I went along, auditioned it, and got the gig. Literally, it wasn't advertised or anything. He getting engaged to her got me the job, and started my career." (Claus Nygaard, Private interview with Mick Pointer).

Actually this was not Mick's first job as a drummer, he had been playing with the local band Stockade for a short period the previous year. "I actually started playing with a couple of friends of mine. What started this was a couple of guys, brothers, Martin and Clive Butler. And they were playing guitar, both of them were playing guitar, in their living room, you know, that's what most people tend to, and I think they had been playing a couple of years, until they then decided to get a drummer involved in what they were doing. And they just knew a guy that had a drum kit, in just the village that I come from, and I went along and I thought - this looks like fun, I would like to have a go at that. And I borrowed the hi-hat stand and a cymbal from him, and got home and started playing with that, and about three weeks later I bought a better drum kit than he had, so I got the gig. So that's how my musical career started. Before I was a huge fan, I was a great consumer of music, I'd listen to so much music, generally rock and progressive rock, and all that sort of stuff, but generally more on the rock side. Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, I was far more interested in that sort of stuff rather than Genesis and that style. It took me many years before I actually got into that sound, I was more of a rock fan that anything else." (Claus Nygaard, Private interview with Mick Pointer).

To make a long story short, Stockade didn't last long. Clive Butler met a Dutch girl and left the band, and although it reformed with a guitarist who was a friend of Martin Butler and a bass player who was a friend of Mick's, they never got so far as to do a gig. So when Mick got the offer to audition for Electric Gypsy he agreed, and Stockade split up. However, they didn't part their ways as enemies. Fifteen years later, when Mick had left Marillion too and got a career going in the interior design business, Martin Butler would phone up Mick and ask him to join his current band. Although immediately refusing to leave his own business and start playing drums in a band again, Mick was talked into meeting Clive Nolan the keyboard player of Pendragon and Shadowland. Their meeting got him back into the music business, as he formed the band Arena together with Clive Nolan. But that was 1992, now is 1977 and Mick has just passed his audition for Electric Gypsy. At the time when Electric Gypsy took Mick on as their drummer, the band consisted of bassist Doug Irvine, guitarist Andy Glass and vocalist Alan King. After several months of rehearsals Mick and Doug decided that the musical direction, in which Electric Gypsy was heading, did not suit them well. They were both interested in more experimental pieces of music. Furthermore Andy and Alan were not determined to get a full time career in music, so Doug and Mick quit the band to form another unit from scratch. Mick himself was a huge admirer of the Canadian trio Rush and as a drummer he saw Neil Peart as his major influence: "I was incredible upset when I first heard Rush, because as soon as I heard them I thought, "my God, that's the band I want to be in, they're doing the music I always imagined" and I thought to myself, cause I had always had an idea what a band should be like, the style of music, this cross of rock music but integrate in places also, you know, they would be playing, they would just write great songs too, it doesn't have to be heavy all the time or complex, but they also do, as you know, complex stuff. And I'd never heard a band, who was able to combine all those elements before, and then I think it was probably about 1979 I heard Rush for the first time, and then to discover they'd been going five years before that upset me, but of course I went out and bought all the material, and I thought - My God, this is incredible. And I've been a huge fan, In fact I've never heard anybody touch them, in reality. 1979 was when I first heard them." (Claus Nygaard, Private interview with Mick Pointer).

Together Mick and Doug formed their new band in early 1978 and they named it Silmarillion, just to put behind the unsuccessful past and mark the beginning of a new era. "Silmarillion" is the name of a novel by J.R.R. Tolkien, who is probably more known for his trilogy "Lord of the Rings" and the novel "The Hobbit". The story goes that Mick, when looking for a new name for the band, just happened to have a copy of "Silmarillion" on his bookshelf, which he hadn't read, and thought it was a proper name for the "new" band. So when critics, writers and music journalists emphasise the name Silmarillion and refer to its deliberate connection with the band's style of music and their lyrics, it does not quite justify the band's choice of name. No, they did not seem to be into Tolkien or Dungeon and Dragons, and they certainly did not sit down and compose soundtracks to J.R.R. Tolkien's novels. After breaking up Electric Gypsy, Mick and Doug took on a keyboardist named Neil Cuttle and a guitarist named Martin whose surname no one seems to remember today.