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AUGUST 1979
The two-piece Silmarillion placed an advertisement for a guitarist in Melody Maker, and started to audition guitarists in the living room of the house where they now lived together. Having seen the advertisement, the guitarist, Steven "Steve" Thomas Rothery arrived from Whitby, at the northern side of the beautiful North Yorkshire Moors national park, one early Sunday morning in August 1979 to join the band. The story goes that Steve arrived out of the blue with his car trunk full of gear, because he was so determined to get the guitarist job and so he had brought along his equipment right away. Mick: "We advertised for a guitarist and I remember auditioning these guitarists, and then completely out of the blue Steve turned up at the house in his knackered car all the way from Whitby. It's a hell of a drive from Whitby down to where we are, about 250 miles or something. He just sort of turned up. We never knew he was coming, and his friend Edwyn came with him, I think that was the name of his friend. He came down to the house, and he was setting up his guitar stack, an orange guitar stack that he had, and me and Doug sat there and watched, and he just played to us, and we just gave him the job there and then. "Okay, you will do!". He'd only been playing a couple of years. Steve was a late starter in playing, actually, in fact all of us seemed to be quite late starters in playing. Perhaps that's a good thing, and none of us studied music. For some reason he seemed to think that we knew he was coming. But I remember me and Doug not knowing he was coming. And we could have been anywhere. He'd driven all this way, turns up in this little village of Long Marsdon, and just gets his gear out of the back and plays. I cannot remember, I'm sure he stayed, I'm sure he stayed for the night and then drove back the next day, and then came back a couple of days later and stayed. He just moved in [laughs]. Yeah, he just moved into the house, and we had a guitarist. So the three of us, it was Doug's house, and all three of us were living in this house together." (Claus Nygaard, Private interview with Mick Pointer).

Steve briefly described the line-up when he arrived: "1979 was when I joined the band. There was just a bass player and a drummer. It was then called Silmarillion, from a book by Tolkien. After I joined, we changed the name to Marillion and did a few local gigs... I auditioned through an ad in a music magazine, I think it was Melody Maker." (Ric Levine interview with Pete Trewavas and Steve Rothery. Cymbiosis Magazine, March 1986.)

Steve had previously been playing guitar in a Yorkshire based band named Purple Haze, hinting Jimi Hendrix was one of his biggest influences. To mark the change in line-up, the band, as Steve remarked, changed name to Marillion. As Mick tells it, they decided to change the name of the band to mark the new era: "When we did the split, I suggested to Doug that every time somebody leaves we should get rid of the bit of the front of the name, so that's why "Sil" went. That's why the first Arena album is called "Songs from the Lion's Cage". Because all the people that left, by the time I left the name would had been Lion, if we'd split everything off from Marillion we'd been left with Lion. My little joke. But originally we said every time somebody leaves we will cut something off the front of the name of the band." (Claus Nygaard, Private interview with Mick Pointer).

This idea, to cut a part of the name of the band with every major change in the line-up, never happened, but it cleverly inspired the title of the debut album from Arena, Mick Pointer's current band. The music as well as the lyrics for "Songs from the Lion's Cage" were written by Mick Pointer together with Clive Nolan, and there are what seems to be obvious references to Mick's "departure" from Marillion, especially in a track like "Solomon", where it goes: "When you fed me to the lions in your personal arena / And you watched till the cries and the prayers grew weaker / Head in my hands - Dripping tears in the sand / The roar of the lions as the victim lies damned and alone... / Does it matter to you? / In the lion's cage we're all the same / Does it matter to you? / It's a child's game with a child's name / Does it matter to you? / If I place the blame upon your shoulders / Don't try to fool the world / Don't try to rule the world again..."But Arena is today, and Silmarillion were then, so back we go to the autumn of 1979, where the band recruited a keyboard player.