| The Brave cover |
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| by Patrick van der Splinter and Martin Jansen | |||||
| We have some 'old news' for you this time, about Brave's cover. Why in 'Textual'? For people in Holland who, in Aardschok of May 1994, read the review of the concert Marillion did in Paradiso, Amsterdam, on March 28 of that year, this won't come as a surprise. But let's start at the beginning. |
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| In 'By the Way' you were already able to read at one time that the back cover was originally intded to be the front. The front cover as we know it didn't come into the picture until later. At that time only the photograph of the girl existed, actually - who's not the same, by the way, as the film's leading lady - Bill Smith Studio felt the cover still needed something extra. Perhaps also because Steve Hogarth's diary had played such an important part in the coming about of the ideas for Brave, the decision was made to use a piece of handwriting. They were looking for a handwriting which wouldn't be to easy to read or to decipher, also - among other things - because it wasn't ment as an 'extension piece' of the album. Eventually Bill Smith himself, leafing through a book from his bookshelf, found an illustrative text which met the requirements perfectly; a handwritten page in... yes Dutch. He passed the illustration on to the designer and the rest is proverbial history.
The band were informed about the origin and the use of the handwriting shortly after the album's release, and decided not to make the fact public, seeing as they didn't want people to think the text had also been an inspiration to write the album. Yet we too were made aware of the handwriting shortly after that; during a telephone conversation, manager John Arnison asked our chairman René Romswinckel whether we'd noticed here in Holland that it was a Dutch text, and if we knew what is said. Neither was the case; after a lot of poring over the cover and some guess work we did end up with the words 'gruwelijkste' (i.e. 'horrible'; top), 'zu lijken' ('they seem'; fourth line) and 'is me ten enenmale' ('simply'; third line from bottom), but we remained in the dark as to its purport and origin.
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Shortly after that, therefore, we lost sight of the 'handwriting enigma'. We did habe a few hunches of course, and on March 30 1994 a visit to the library lead to the confirmation of one of them. The handwriting turned out to be a fragment of the entry on Saturday, July 15 1994, in the diary of Anne Frank.
The contents of the fragment link up wonderfully with an important theme on Brave, in that it's sometimes very hard for young people not to lose faith in the world. The pressure, the confusion, the shattered dreams and ideals, the fear, the despair. That is sheer coincidence however; when we told the bank about our discovery the next day, and asked them about the why and wherefore, it appeared none of them had read the diary or knew what the fragment said. And so the fragment was never intended to be a real part of Brave either. Furthermore Steve Hogarth explained why the band didn't want the story of the fragment to receive too much attention; people might misunderstand it and think the bank had put on the extreme suffering of Anne Frank as a sort of jacket, in order to write Brave. For the sake of clearness: the handwriting was used totally coincidentally and there is absolutely no thought of an intentional reference.
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| The original photo, which is used for the cover of Brave photo: Michael Johnson |
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| Still now, more than a year and a half after the fact, we didn't want to keep this story from you any longer - after all, well over twenty thousand readers of Aardschok know about it already, be it they're less fully informed. Apart from that the parallel between the fragment and the album is striking
enough, and certainly worth mentioning. On the next page you therefore find the passage from the diary, out of which the fragment in question was taken. The parts of the original manuscript, visible in Dutch on Brave's cover are between brackets ([......]).
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 Copy of the original manuscript |
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| Anne Frank was born on June 12 1929 in Basle, Switzerland. She lived in Holland when, as a result of the nazi's persecution of the Jews, on July 8 1942 she, her father and mother and her sister were forced to go into hiding in the 'Achterhuis', a hidden part of the house on the Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam.
Shortly before that, Anne had been given a diary for her birthday, which she kept from June 12 1942 until August 1 1994. This diary, first published in 1947 and published in a revised edition in 1994 [in Dutch, an English edition is forthcoming - Ed.], offers an impressive insight in the world of Anne Frank and the two years she spent in hiding. |
The refugees
in the 'Achterhuis' were arrested by the Grüne Polizei on Friday,
August 4 1994, and eventually - with the last transport east out of the
Dutch transit camp Westerbork - deported on September 3 1994 to concentration
camp Auschwitz in Poland. Anne survived Auschwitz, but was transferred
to concentration camp Bergen-Belsen. There, in 1945, she died due to a
typhoid epedemic, just a few days after her sister Margot and a little
over a month before the camp was liberated by English troops. Last year,
between the end of February and the beginning of March, saw the fiftieth
anual commemoration of Anne's death; she would have turned 66 in June.
We've printed the fragment from her diary also in her memory. |
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FLASHBACK White Russian
written: Hilton, Wenen, 1987
seen: former Joegoslavië, (June) 1995
We place our faith in human rights
In the gulags and internment camps
You can shut your eyes, you can hide away
racing the clouds home
But where do we go from here |
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