It is fair to say that 2007 has been something of an eventful year for Fish. Aside from the writing and recording of a new studio album, ‘13^th Star’, already being acclaimed as the best of his career, he also completed a successful stint as a presenter on Planet Rock and found himself arranging and subsequently cancelling wedding plans. And then there was the small matter of his headline gig in Aylesbury’s Market Square that saw him reunited with Marillion for the first time in 19 years as they joined him for the song ‘Market Square Heroes’. The ‘reunion’ was deemed important enough to be reported by the BBC and gained widespread media coverage. When Fish took the stage in Aylesbury he proclaimed that “this is the first day of the rest of my life” and our chat kicked off with some of his recollections of the day. 

Fish - The whole thing was very special for me. I had received some news earlier in the day that closed the door for me on a personal level and it became a sort of ‘this is your life’ vibe about the whole event; I saw so many people that I hadn’t seen for 20 years. It was surreal to find myself in the pubs around the Market Square drinking again with people like Pete Trewavas and Robin Boult. And I just felt like it was a new beginning for me. 

Fish

Did you anticipate the level of media interest that was generated following the show?

Fish - No, not at all. I was amazed how quickly people picked up on it because I had kept it deliberately low key. I think if we had publicized it then it would have been spoilt and made it too cynical. And like I have said in various e-mails and also on the Marillion Forum it was just about five guys getting back together to play a song. There is no ongoing reunion and there was no talk of playing any more gigs together or anything like that.  

Well from my perspective in the crowd it just seemed like you were all having so much fun up there just for those ten minutes and it was the perfect occasion for it to have happened as a ‘one off’. 

Fish - Well that’s right, you know they are touring with ‘Somewhere Else’ at the end of the year, I’m touring with ‘13^th Star’ from now through until next summer and obviously our musical directions are so different and any suggestion that we are getting back together again is just silly really. 

Lets talk about the new album, ‘13^th Star’. You have collaborated with various people in the past and I was interested to see that Steve Vantsis, your long serving bass player, was given the role this time around. 

Fish - It was something we started talking about on the tour bus during the ‘Return To Childhood’ tour and it was obvious I was going to have to start thinking about a new studio album and writing some new material. And I thought I wanted to change direction a little from the last studio album, ‘Field Of Crows’, even though I thought it was a great album. And Steve stated that he really wanted to become involved in the writing and I was a little bit reticent at first because he hadn’t written before. Then he came up in January and played me some of the bits and pieces he had written and I thought they were excellent, really thought provoking and had an energy and enthusiasm about them. Sometimes when you are writing with the same team for a number of years there is a great danger that it can become stale. And I think that was the case with Marillion back in ’88 because we had been out on the road for so long and hadn’t had the opportunity to re-energise ourselves. Since I have gone solo there have been different writing teams such as Steve Wilson on ‘Sunsets On Empire’ and John Wesley on ‘Fellini Days’ and it just gives you a nudge in a different direction.  

With all my experience and the kind of person that I am I really like to become very involved in the music side as well as the lyrics. And so it became obvious that we had the makings of an album together and Steve was also doing all of the engineering and starting to dictate the way the sounds were going and I was really happy to let him run with this as he was doing such a great job. And I was bringing in my influences and stuff I knew about from my experiences in writing and we kind of introduced each other to different areas and by bringing those together we found out where ‘13^th Star’ was supposed to be sitting. 

Well some of the early reviews and comments I have seen are suggesting ‘13^th Star’ is the best album of your career.  

Fish - I agree. Often with a new album I will listen to it a few times and then it will start to drop off but with this one every time I get into the car I’m listening to it. 

You mentioned John Wesley (Wes) earlier and I think I’m right in saying it was the track ‘Zoe 25’ that he provided the inspiration for. 

Fish - (Laughs) Well what happened was when we were writing ‘Fellini Days’ I had just split up from my then wife and there was a lot of ‘laddish’ behaviour in the studio and like in lots of workplaces where it’s all guys together we had some pictures on the wall of various attractive young ladies. Wes was particularly taken with one called Zoe who actually looked a bit like the girl I was seeing at the time which was kind of strange. And when we started ‘13th Star’ back in January I opened up The Sun one day…I don’t get it for the news articles I get it for the Scottish football, we don’t get much choice up here….and there she was Zoe, 25. Back in ‘Fellini Days’ she was Zoe, 19 and I just thought wow, what a co-incidence. And I had this song that had a kind of Ray Davies, Small Faces, and 60’s London kind of feel to it and I wanted to write a descriptive story about two people. It was going to be a song called ‘Micklegate’ about something that had happened in York a while back but I ended up changing it. There was just something about the phrase that worked really well, we were having a problem with the chorus but I threw in the ‘Zoe 25’ line, just plucked it out of the air really, and then between Steve and myself we found out where the chords and the melody all fitted and it worked out really well. It’s actually one of my favourite songs on the album, there are two or three that really stand out for me and that’s one of them. 

It’s interesting that you mentioned the 60’s sound. I know there is a song called ‘Openwater’ which is one I haven’t heard yet, that you describe as sounding like The Who, something that was also true of ‘Incommunicado’ 

Fish - Yes I have always been a huge fan of The Who and of Pete Townsend both as a writer and a lyricist and ‘Openwater’ was one where Frank Usher had come in with the riff and we speeded it up and got that nice, bouncy kind of feel to it. And Calum Malcolm did such a fabulous job producing this album and really got the best from me vocally. Sometimes I would bring too much to the vocal and he would say to me “less Bruce Springsteen” (laughs) and he would have to remind me that I wasn’t on stage, and he pointed me in a direction with this album that I had never really been before vocally. I had never had somebody work the vocals with me to such an extent as this and I was finding a new emotion to my voice and it has worked brilliantly. 

‘Circle Line’ was one of two new songs in the set for Aylesbury, and I thought it sat particularly well alongside the ‘Clutching at Straws’ material. Was this inspired by endless journeys on the London Underground? 

Fish - When I was in London I would take the circle line and you would hear stories about people just going round and round on it for ages and so ‘Circle Line’ was the metaphor for somebody who was living a life that was going nowhere and was starting from the same point and ending in the same point every day. It’s the opening track on the album and the character is stuck in this mundane lifestyle and doesn’t know how to change it. There is a lot of imagery of boats, sailing, navigation, and stars and journeys and really that is what the album is about; it’s about a journey through life. And then it goes into the song ‘Square Go’ where the character just feels like he is being browbeaten all of the time and he just wants to fight back. And then you have ‘Miles De Besos’, which is about the lost love, the one that never really left him and that goes into the fantasy of the ‘Zoe 25’ thing where he is dreaming about meeting somebody else and then he meets someone and falls in love. But the trust in the relationship is missing, like in the Turtle and the Scorpion story where it is like “are you going to kill me?”, “no, are you going to kill me”. And then eventually you end up with ‘Dark Star’ which is the realisation that the love isn’t really there and then ‘13^th Star’ when he realises it is never going to happen but he sets off on his journey and he has found a navigator in a sense. And so he sets off in search of the ‘13^th Star’ which represents Nirvana and the soul mate that he has always been looking for. 

It’s a very positive album and even though there are some dark sections there is no particular anger in it which I think some people expected. It’s more about reflection and is very contemplative in places. 

I know on this tour you are marking the 20^th anniversary of ‘Clutching At Straws’ but do you expect to introduce most of ‘13^th Star’ into the set as the tour progresses? 

Fish - The tour goes through until next year and the album is only available through the Web Site right now. I don’t really like the idea of going to see bands where 70% of the show is the new album because you can’t really relax. At the end of the day we are putting on a rock show and you have to pay homage to the past to a degree and you have to show you have a positive direction with the new stuff. So it’s about striking the right balance and that’s why this show is balanced between the new album and the ‘Clutching At Straws’ stuff which is 20 years old now. As a band we were surprised by how well the material complements each other, and it’s very comfortable. 

I also noticed there are a lot of dates in Poland, is that a market that has really opened up for you? 

Fish - We first played there back in 94 with the Suits album and went back the following year for about 35 shows. Due to routing problems we haven’t been able to get back over there as much recently. This is just the first leg of the tour up until Christmas and we are looking at South America at the end of January and come back to Europe in March, April and May before looking at the festivals again next summer. And with this album, I think that it is so good that the US door could open for us next summer as well. And if that happens then I will follow it.  

When you were writing ‘Clutching..’ you had come off a long tour and were following up a what had been the breakthrough album in ‘Misplaced Childhood’. You created this character called Torch who was battling his own addictions and was trying to write a follow-up to a successful book. How much of the character really mirrored what you were going through at the time? 

Fish - I think the problem was, and Mark Kelly and I were talking about this the other day, we were on the road in ’85 and all the way through ’86 and we came off the road and it was like “OK, now write an album”. And the only experiences I had had for the past two years were on the road so ‘Clutching At Straws’ became very much a ‘road’ album and was based around things I had seen on the tour. There was certain darkness to the album and I really needed to get my life back. The material was plagued by the fact that we had been together too long and needed a break but it was more financially beneficial for our Manager to keep up out on the road. In reality we should have taken a year off and I could have gone off and done my solo album and the others could have gone and done what they wanted to do for a year and then we could have got back together again. But circumstances were such that the ‘machine’ had become big but not quite big enough and the manager wasn’t brave enough to let us take that year off. But all of this is historical now and there will always be a big ‘If’ around what would have happened if we had taken a break.  

The character of Torch was very identifiable with where I was at the time and I tend to write in a very autobiographical fashion and I do use the emotions that are flying about. And when were making ‘13^th Star’ there was a lot of emotion around; my fiancée had walked out on the first week recording and I was like “what’s happened”. The whole plan just got thrown up into the air and I had to just turn around and concentrate on the album and it made me focus on the whole catharsis of that period in my life. 

There seems to be a lot of positive vibes leading up to the release of the album. Do you think there is something of a re-awakening of your solo career from outside the immediate fan base? 

Fish - ‘13^th Star’ could do very well for us and I can sense from the level of pre-orders that there is a lot of expectation around it. I was taken aback by the reaction to the show in the Market Square and the website went up from around 2000 to 6000 hits every day for the following week and we were recognising that 70% of them were first time visitors. After the split there was a period of animosity for about a year or so between Marillion and myself and I think a lot of people thought that it was still there. In actual fact we were talking and seeing each other back in the 90’s. So I think people thought that they had to have a certain allegiance to one of the acts but the bottom line is that its just music. But really I think that since ‘Sunsets on Empire’ through ‘Raingods’, ‘Fellini’ and ‘Field Of Crows’ I have been on an upward curve. I really wanted a quality production this time and that’s why I got Calum Malcolm in to produce it. There are too many people making albums now that don’t put the time and effort into the production. The industry has changed so much with the Internet and downloads and so what I wanted to do was to go back to an old fashioned way of working so that when people have the end result in their hands it feels substantial. So with this you get a three panel digipack, some major pieces of artwork from Mark Wilkinson and a DVD of the ‘Making of’ the album. 

And if people still want to download it and fuck the artist over then fine, how’s your conscious you know. 

You’ve had various record companies over the years but that’s not the case this time around 

Fish - If I was going through a record company to retail it would take me about 40 to 50 thousand units to recoup the investment I have made in this album but with mail order I can use top musicians and a top producer and put out a quality product for a lot less. And so the fans are able to support the artist direct. You only have to look at what happened with somewhere like Fopp. Fopp went down and at the end of the day it’s the artist that will suffer; there is no allegiance from retail to the artist and so why should I have any allegiance to retail. If they want to sell albums then fine, I don’t have a problem with that but they demand such huge discounts. The supermarkets don’t have to make a profit with album sales; they can make it somewhere else and so you can find albums in there a year later for three quid. And that’s why the web has become so important to artists like myself and Marillion; it's the only way you can really continue to exist as a recording artist. 

The website has also seen the launch of Fish TV 

Fish - I have 100's of hours of footage available from over the years, backstage stuff and all of that. And the technology is available now so why not do it. So we'll film the blogs on the road and report back on what is happening with the live set and the funny stories etc and it keeps the fans involved as part of the whole experience. If you think back to the 80's when we used to tour originally then you would get a review in Sounds and Kerrang and an interview and then that would be it. You would disappear for a year on the road, so you could be out playing somewhere in Germany and back home no one would know what was going on with you. Whereas now you can get on the web the next morning and find out what set we played in Poland the previous night. So with the Fish TV thing it’s about bringing all of that together. 

You’ve become renowned for writing long e-mails to the mailing list. Will you sit down and write an autobiography eventually? 

Fish - At some point, yes. I really enjoy writing the email blogs and especially over the last two or three weeks when I should have been somewhere else in the world. I was sitting in the house wondering what to do and so I just start writing. I am condemned in some quarters for being a bit too open but I have always been like that, I'm Scottish you know (laughs). And I feel able to get things off my chest and translate my feelings into words and it’s good to be able to write some of these emails and be able to expand on my thoughts outside of the lyrics in a song. I can even see myself getting involved in some kind of writing next year. Will Smith the comedian and I have been talking about writing a comedy series for TV based around what happens with bands backstage and all of that and so I can introduce some of the stories that I have got and he can bring in the stuff he knows about. I see that being a more productive area for me than with the acting. I love doing the acting but I'm not getting the kind of experience that I need at the moment. So I'm doing auditions and waiting on call backs but the way that the schedules work are awful in that I have to book a tour so far in advance that I can't automatically make myself available when they are due to start filming. The worst one was this summer when everything went to the wall, I had actually been offered a role in Berlin with the Wakowski brothers and I turned it down because I was supposed to be on honeymoon. But so be it, these things happen. 

Listening to ‘13^th Star’ a couple of days after our conversation it is clear that the amount of self belief Fish has in this album is more than justified. If the stars are all in alignment then this could well be the one to make a huge impact on his career. There have been other such opportunities over the years but this time around you really do feel it could be about to happen. Fish is on tour around the UK throughout September. ‘13^th Star’ is available now from www.the-company.com

Related Links

Fish - 13th Star Album Review

Fish - Aylesbury Hobble On The Cobbles Live Review