Greetings from the Marillos and a Happy New Year to you all.

Well, what a disastrous Christmas for so many people. We hope yours was good, although our thoughts naturally are with the unfortunate victims of the Asian tsunami. I guess we all have a friend, or a friend of a friend, who was caught up in the devastation. To help with the relief effort, we've decided to play a warm-up show for our Marillion Weekend 2005 at the Aylesbury Civic on the 9th of March and donate all profits to the DEC - www.dec.org.uk - the "umbrella charity agency" in the UK running the Tsunami Earthquake Appeal.

We've set the ticket price a little higher than usual at 20 Pounds in order to make as much money as possible. Marillion will take no money from this show and we'll try our best to persuade everyone involved in the show to donate their time and effort to the cause. We should be able to donate thousands of pounds.

Tickets for this show are extremely limited, so we are making them available ONLY to members of any of our official Web fan clubs world-wide. Tickets will go on sale from 2:00 PM (GMT) on 18th January at www.marillion.com/tickets - full information on ordering, and our Web Fan Clubs are also available on this page.

In addition to the gig proceeds going to the Tsunami Earthquake Appeal, we are also joining forces with Britain's biggest daily newspaper, The Sun, and donating two prizes to their fundraising auction via Ebay. We don't have an exact date, but the auction will go live within the next week at www.thesun.co.uk/section/0,,2005000000,00.html

The first auction item is a private chalet for two at the Marillion Weekend 2005 - www.marillionweekend.com - being held in Minehead in March 2005. As well as all your accommodation being paid, we will give the lucky winner 2 VIP passes which will allow you into sound checks and come backstage to be part of this wonderful weekend. You will also receive a personalised and signed Marillion Gold Presentation Disc.

The second auction item is a private drum lesson from Ian Mosley at Marillion's Racket Club studios, a pair of signed drumsticks, AND signed copies of the entire Marillion back catalogue on CD.

We hope you can bid on these fantastic items to help a great cause.

H, Pete, Ian, Steve and Mark