The night of this interview, Marion will play to a sold out Forum. They will leap on to flashes of white light and play a polished set of indie rock songs that, whilst conveying a certain angst, will never really rise above average. Jaime, the lead singer, will display all the right poses, but something will be missing. When I first saw them, they had a certain spark that convinced me their singles didn't do them justice, yet tonight they will seem far more content, far more polished and far more average.

However, they seem to be doing okay for themselves. They lack the kind of media following of your Menswears and your Sleepers, but have built up a live following that is both loyal and young. It also seems predominately leather-trousered and female, but hey, that's the reward for having a lead singer like Jaime, all cheekbones and brooding eyes.
However, it seems if you want to interview Jaime you have to bring along some champagne and, just to make sure, I think it's best to be female. So, it seems us less glamorous hacks get to talk to Phil the guitarist.
Phil is the one that will later spend the gig leaping from speaker stacks, throwing his guitar around and generally behaving like a right rock and roll star. Yet talking to him he seems shy and thoughtful and not the sort of person to do that sort of thing at all.

After waiting for them to finish their soundcheck in the company a group of female Belgian fans trying to get backstage passes, the allure of the group seems obvious; "he (Jaime) is just a good looking chap, I suppose. So he attracts that kind of following. But our fans on the whole aren't all screaming little girls. It's surprising how variant the audiences are. You get, like, guys with beards with their wives, or whatever."

However, the image is one of the distinctive things about Marion. They are not one of your white trainer Northern Uproar or Cast types. They wear make up, they wear stupid clothes, it's almost Romo. Well, apart from the music and the ideology and ... okay, it's not almost Romo, but there does seem to be a conscious effort made to look different from most bands.
"It is a conscious effort to keep away from all that (laddish, white trainers and attitude), but not from this time around. It's from the '89 Manchester type scene, because we're all about 21 or 22 and when all that shit was around we couldn't get into it at all. It was just all these absolute pricks wearing baggy T-shirts and trainers and that and these real dicks at school that we just couldn't get into at all. I was in a band with Jaime at the time and we were playing stuff like Buzzcocks covers and punk stuff which we got into from our brothers and sisters, because that appealed to us much more than the whole 'twisting the melon' sort of thing. So, that's why we can't relate to bands like Cast and all that sort of shit."

It is an obvious difference, but whereas a lot of groups at the moment take their influences from the sixties and seventies, Marion just don't seem to be so hung up on the retro thing.
"I think we've been through that in the past really, because we've been together for absolutely years. The thing was that the image was never that important. It has developed now into something where we now all look reasonably cool. We've just developed something between us where there is a bit of a look to the band as a whole. The thing with us though was just the music and just doing loads and loads of gigs."

Which brings us to what I mentioned earlier. Marion, live, can be invigorating and passionate and something special, yet on record they have a tendency to slip into boring indie band mode, where the passion is dissipated through a lack of imagination and a lack of real invention and charisma in the songs. Their album was received with a kind of indifference that reflected the sparsity of genuinely breathtaking songs and the fact that it came out at the same time as the Bluetones debut.
"We had a bit of a hard time recording it because the songs were geared up for playing live and a couple of them were written when we were younger and we're used to hammering them out through shit PAs, so it is hard putting them on record. You've got to consider other things to make it sound good in the studio as opposed to just banging it down live and having it sound bland. A few people have said the record sounds different to how it sounds live but that's obvious, because it is different being in a studio, but I think it's still got that excitement about it, anyway."

In a way it seems it was lost in the rush for new bands and left behind by the success of their contemporaries. However, you get the feeling that with Marion, critical acclaim may come later, as they improve musically and the spotlight twists Jaime's psyche.
"I think we're in a really good position just because the way we've built up our fanbase is by playing live and people actually seeing what we're about, as opposed to being in the NME every week talking bullshit. I mean, I admire bands who do that, in that they can manipulate the press, but at the end of the day it's all about the music you're doing. I don't know, bands come and go and the press can ruin it for a band no matter how good they are."

The future of Marion depends on how they can transform this initial promise into good records. Unlike Radiohead, who they have been wrongly compared with, they do not have the musical genius of Jonny Greenwood or the lyrical intensity of Thom Yorke and so need time to develop their sound and the songwriting but luckily, this is what seems to matter to Marion.
"Those were the two main things we concentrated on when we formed; that and having songs that had some emotional depth and meaning to it. We just wanted songs that were about ... I don't know ... emotions, as opposed to 'Parklife' or whatever. Just music that was rock 'n' roll rather than watery indie music."

Unfortunately, tonight Marion only occasionally touch rock 'n' roll. They have the looks, the intentions and the will to succeed but have yet to prove they have the creativity to avoid 'watery indie music' hell. However, given a chance and given time for Jaime to get bitter and twisted in the cut-throat music industry they could just become brilliant.

(Marion's 'This World And Body' is out now on London Records.)

Marion were talking to Ben, in June 1996.