Fish

Two large coffees, please,” says Fish, politely. We’re at Absolute Radio, where he’ll do an on-air interview after we’ve finished. There’s a moment’s hesitation on the part of the station staffer that he’s asked. “Oh, and one for my friend here as well,” he adds, noticing the uncertainty. “I don’t function until I’ve got at least a gallon of coffee inside me.” With just a fraction of that amount imbibed, Fish is his usual garrulous, anecdotal self, blessed with a memory which displays almost total recall. His blogs, and his sleevenotes for the reissues of his solo work, are as detailed as they are extraordinarily frank, shining a light into nooks and crannies of character flaws or bad financial decisions which most musicians go all-out to hide. He likes to demystify the star-maker machinery behind the popular song. Derek Dick’s loyal fans love him for it. Which might surprise those who remember him best for his days as the singer and frontman for the wilfully florid Marillion, who he left on bad terms in 1988. They crossed over into the pop charts in ’85 with Kayleigh and its romantic remembrances of loving on the floor in Belsize Park, but their four albums with him at the helm revived full-blown progressive rock at the most unlikely time. The band endured after the split, as did Fish, though not without his fair share of snakes and ladders. The (very) tall 61-year-old Scotsman is nominally here to promote a recent deluxe reissue of Clutching At Straws, his dark, melodramatic Marillion kiss-off, and his forthcoming new and final double-album, Weltschmerz, after which he’s declared he’ll retire and write. He plays a mixture of these two career poles the next night, at a London gig where his banter and interaction with the audience recall nothing so much as a jovially observational and sweary Billy Connolly stand-up set. The man who breathed life into the most escapist of genres is a staunch, stoic realist. And a keen gardener.

How did you first get into music, growing up in Midlothian? My family weren’t musical but my grandmother had a piano which I used to plonk around on, playing giants and fairies when I was a kid – you know, bashing the low keys then the high ones. My dad took me into a guitar shop and I squatted down by one of these beautiful guitars, thinking that you just strummed it and it played a Beatles song without having to move your fingers. I ended up with an orange plastic one for Christmas that I broke within a day. I wasn’t that interested in playing; I was into writing. At school I was good at English. I read a lot of Burroughs, the Tarzan writer – Edgar Rice. William S [Burroughs] came later! I started to get really into music aged 12/13: the first single I bought was Lola by The Kinks. By then, The Beatles and Stones were for older brothers and sisters. Glam was coming through at high school. But I couldn’t identify with the Bowies and Slades, because I was a very tall guy who was never going to be into fashion. In any shop they’d say: “ Sorry, we don’t have that in your size, only something in black or brown.” Even the jeans advertised in the back of Melody Maker would never work with my legs!

So your legs led you towards prog?
Well, suddenly I saw progressive rock as being a great vehicle to put lyrics on. The first bands I ever went to see – in ’75 – were Yes, then Genesis on The Lamb Lies Down tour three days later. But my own first gig wasn’t till 1980, when I was 22.

Was that a mini-universe of unicorns and wizards?
Oh, no… I’d never sung before, and I was doing All Right Now and Walk On By. Steely Dan covers, Ry Cooder. We supported Alexis Korner, who said he liked my voice and I should come to London. I never saw him again. By January ’81, I joined Marillion – it was that fast. I’d auditioned for a NWOBHM band who said my voice was too quiet. Then I’d joined a psychedelic band who rehearsed in a piggery full of rats. That lasted two weeks. I was moving around – Cambridge, the Scottish borders – then saw Marillion’s advert in Musicians Only.

And the rest is history?
Well, they wanted a vocalist-bassist. My bassist friend and I called them from the village phone box with our last coins and asked if they’d take two separate guys? We sent them demos, me singing in one channel over Yes and Genesis songs. They sent us theirs. They seemed to like Camel. I sent them lyrics: I’d written [future Marillion tracks] Garden Party and The Web at that point. When we went down to Aylesbury to meet them, we’d decided we were staying there no matter what. I’d been a gardener, garage attendant, forestry worker; spent time in the woods. I thought: I can’t do this.
I had to be a singer.

The rise of Marillion came in an era when unfashionable prog was not the horse any betting man would have backed…
The media had dictated that it was dead. And after the excesses of Yes and others, it’d become flatulent. A lot of that flak was deserved. Even I hated [Yes’ 1978 LP] Tormato. And, oh God – ELP’s Love Beach: ha ha, always wanted to do a cover shot like that. Anyway, the progressive rock scene was kicked into the long grass. But when we came out, NWOBHM was petering out, and Sounds magazine were crying out for something else to champion. The people we were playing to, who’d loved Genesis and Yes, were hankering for long songs and lots of words. And they saw this six-foot-five jock with a painted face: that worked. We built it, gathered a following. Eventually, we needed somewhere in London to be our cave, and I identified the Marquee. Buses full of our fans came. By ’82, it had just accelerated.
We played and played. In that year we did, I think, 13 sold-out Marquees, and supported Jethro Tull, John Martyn, Spirit, Lindisfarne. Tommy Vance got behind us on the radio. For people outside the band it must have seemed meteoric, like a Halley’s Comet – where the fuck did they come from? Playing that kind of music? We were now a hot ticket. You couldn’t ignore us.

When you signed to EMI did you feel you were sticking it to the sceptics?
Well, they wanted a single but we knew we were an album band, so we did Market Square Heroes, with Grendel – a 20-minute piece, a big fan favourite – on the B-side. Look, we knew it sounded like [Genesis classic] Supper’s Ready. We knew! Genesis’ manager said if he’d heard it sooner, he’d have sued us. But it was tongue-in-cheek.
It satisfied the fans and meant we could get rid of Grendel.

Get rid of it? The song that most diehard Marillion fans have tattooed on their chests?
It was going to have to come out somewhere, and we didn’t want it on the album because it was just too Genesis. The fans now had it on a piece of vinyl, as they wanted. The [1983] debut album, Script For A Jester’s Tear, was pretty much written and things like Forgotten Sons were set regulars. It was an exciting album to make but I look back on it now and it’s a bit naïve. It’s a good ident for where the band was back then. But we had a crap drummer. I’d already had to fire the bass player, who was a friend, so I had no choice but to respond to our demographic. I didn’t enjoy being cold about it. It all got a bit …Spinal Tap when our next drummer had a nervous breakdown and the US tour fell apart.

The second album, Fugazi (1984), felt as much rock as prog…
I wanted it heavier. I was into The Who, Faces, Led Zep, whereas Steve [Rothery, guitarist] was into Camel. But we had our definitive rhythm section at that point, and that made us, having that core. I feed off the rhythm. So then the band was fantastic.

Which gave you the solid platform over which to drape your stories in that Daltrey-meets-Gabriel voice?
That was the start of finding my feet as a lyricist. With Script, I was very flowery. With Fugazi, the dynamic and the stories worked: Incubus, She Chameleon, Assassing. But I remember being in Liverpool hearing mixes and asking to change some things and being told: “No, that’s it, it’s gone.” So that was a let-down. It was somehow both overworked and under-polished. Oh, there was too much cocaine around. It’s not a good substance for use in the studio.

Now came commercial success with [1985’s] Misplaced Childhood and its unexpected hit singles, Kayleigh and Lavender. Did you enjoy the ascent or did it make you blue (dilly dilly)?
Firstly, we were on a sticky wicket then with EMI; they were questioning how much we’d spent on Fugazi. So they sent us to Berlin with (producer) Chris Kimsey. A cheap studio. To get us out of the way somewhere.
Wait – Hansa was cheap? The hallowed Bowie-blessed studio of rock lore?
Yeah, yeah, Hansa was very run-down at that time. It was kind of wild the bands who got sent there – Killing Joke, us. It was cheaper than The Manor. We just thought: “Right, let’s make an album that we want to make, and damn the torpedoes.” Because we were in Berlin, it was difficult for the record company to check up on us. When they heard we were doing a concept album, there were panicky raised eyebrows. But when they heard Kayleigh – that changed everything. They knew they had a single. And that album catapulted us into another realm. It went into hyper-drive. Yet that was when we lost our gang mentality, and our manager lost his focus. It destroyed us.

There must have been some elements of sudden pop success which were enjoyable?
Oh, putting that album together was a marvellous experience. Joining all the pieces together, realising they worked, that it had a great flow and curve – recognising that was an incredible feeling. As a lyricist I’d become more confident to express myself, to make it more first-person. I opened up. It was about me recovering from my relationship with Kay, my girlfriend then, which predetermined where the album went. The band were mostly fine with that, though they didn’t want a song called Kayleigh – they said it was too close to her name. I said: “That’s the way it is.”

Is it true you wrote all the lyrics on a massive acid trip?
Not all of them! An old girlfriend had sent me a tab of acid in an envelope. It was the summer of ’84, and I was bored. I hadn’t done acid for about two years, and I thought: “Oh, I’ll just do half.” Got on my bike, went to Steve Rothery’s house. That’s where it all started to go “wrong”. I’d now taken the other half, thinking, as you do: oh, still bored, nothing’s happening. And then, well, Steve had to drag me back to my house. There, that night in Aylesbury, I sat up writing a stream-of-consciousness, parts of which were used in the lyrics. The opening – “huddled in the safety of a pseudo-silk kimono wearing bracelets of smoke, naked of understanding…” – was written in one flourish. I remember thinking: I’ve found the concept now; I know what I’m doing here.

Clearly, those lyrics are too good to have been written on drugs…
Yes, they were not written on acid, that’s a myth. But the dream – idea – concept was. It was about my childhood, too. And about whether I was Derek or Fish. The conflict between the two. Which was strange. It was Derek dealing with being Fish. There are elements where Derek is the central character and others where Fish is.

Was Derek having problems inhabiting the Fish persona?
At the time. I was trying to remember who I was, where I’d come from. Because we were moving up the ranks, big in Germany and all, but you’re trying to keep your feet on the ground, too. Kayleigh took us completely by surprise. We were used to our singles going in at 16 then dropping down. We thought if we could get in the Top 10, brilliant. But Kayleigh went 10, 5, 3, 2, 2, 2…

The teenage dream realised?
But it separated us. We’d been a gang, but suddenly all this focus was on me. Everybody wanted to interview Fish. The others were able to keep domestic things going, to stay out of the spotlight offstage. I was the guy doing all the interviews, the radio stations, talking it up. I was subjected to a lot of external influences. Some of which were dark. I was led into areas – quite happily, because that’s the kind of person I was, and to some extent still am – which were… experimental. And I was single, whereas all the other guys had, by that point, got married. Which meant different attitudes towards life. Then all this gets caught up with money, and a Machiavellian manager. Tore us apart. On tour there were a lot of hi-jinks, which was fun, but it went on and on because the manager was making so much money for himself. How we managed to get [1987’s] Clutching At Straws together at all is a miracle. That fourth Marillion album (the last with Fish) – a study of despair, drink and divorce – vies with Misplaced Childhood as the fans’ choice of masterpiece. Laced with geopolitical barbs (“Uzis on a street corner!” goes the refrain of White Russian), it’s the dark side of its predecessor’s pop sheen.
All my observations and experiences were now from a tour bus or a hotel room. It became a very intense world, with tunnel vision. The band weren’t too happy with my ideas – they didn’t like the drug references as they were all “clean-living” guys. They didn’t want a camera put on that part of the band. Whereas I was very Scottish and open about it. Then, after the album, we went on tour and, oh, I just hated it. I mean, in That Time Of The Night, I’d written my resignation letter. I’d think: how can they not have seen it coming? Can they not tell how I feel?

How much of Clutching’s lead character Torch is you?
That’s a big question. He was another alter ego. He wasn’t fully-formed, in all honesty. I threw in some of my more negative attributes, and blamed it on Torch.

Hadn’t you got married around then?
But I’d married the wrong person. The wrong fucking person. If I’m forced to put my hand up, I think I’d married a trophy wife. I was 29, I felt like I had to get married, had to settle down. But – wrong, wrong, wrong. So, we were going through relationship strife on that ’87 tour, which didn’t help. And then the drugs, the alcohol… I was unhappy and lonely. I wasn’t quite a cocaine-addled alcoholic, but I did have issues. So… I left the band.

How hard was that?
It was something I could easily walk away from. That environment was what was making me unhappy. It wasn’t good for my soul, my spirit, or for a marriage that then I still wanted to save. So, I left. The primary reason was the management. We were playing all these gigs to 12-15,000 people and were struggling to pay our mortgages, while the manager was buying a massive house in Kent. One night, I’d drunk a huge bottle of Jim Beam at my cousin’s, and I was so stressed and my mind was in such turmoil that I wasn’t even pissed. So, an alarm bell went off. It said: “You have to stop this. Now.” I wrote
a letter to them all basically saying it’s the manager or me. They never phoned me. The manager did. He said, “The band accept your resignation.” I thought: “Fuck ’em.”

You and the rest of the band didn’t speak for years, did you?
There was a lot of bitterness to work through. And then legal things – I said, “You can keep the name but give me 50 percent of the publishing for my writing, that’s fair.” Suddenly the dogs of war were unleashed. Dave Gilmour was going through a similar thing with Roger [Waters] at the time and warned me: “It’s fucking awful.” It was a nasty divorce. We’re OK now, but it took years. When we did meet up, we went for a Thai meal in Oxford. And the first thing they said was that they were sorry but I was right about that manager. But we made up, got on fine. I’ll write a book about it all one day. And I’ve got a very, very good memory!

So were you now yourself again, or still Fish?
I was still Fish. I had to move forward, to get away from some of the dark characters that’d been coming around. I didn’t want to end up as Torch, propping up the Marquee bar, talking about the good old times. I’d met [keyboardist-arranger] Mickey Simmonds through playing squash with him and Mike Oldfield, and we got together to write. I had lyrics ready, and we put together [1990’s solo debut album], Vigil In A Wilderness Of Mirrors. I pondered moving to Bristol, then Birmingham, then thought: “Fuck it, I’m moving back to Scotland.” My mum and dad found a farmhouse with out-buildings, which is where I live now. I knew I needed a rehearsal space and studio, because if Marillion had bought one in the 80s it would’ve saved us hundreds of thousands.
So I had my studio, and enough rooms so writers and players could stay if they came up.

When Vigil… came out were Marillion put behind you?
Oh, there was still an intense rivalry, then. In the interviews I did I was a complete fucking super-bitch! And so were they! We were still both signed to the same bloody label, too. I wish EMI had just dropped me. But they wanted, y’know, Phil Collins and Genesis, which caused all sorts of added problems. They asked me to sit on Vigil for a few months while they put out [Marillion’s first post-Fish album] Season’s End [1989], on the promise they’d give me the full all-singing, all-dancing bells-and-whistles treatment. I went, “OK, but I can’t just do nothing.” So I went on tour wasting
a shitload of money just to be seen doing something. Because there’d been these rumours – “cocaine addict, alcoholic” – and I wanted people to see: “I’m still working here! Still got the songs and the chops!” Of course, by the time Vigil… came out, yes, they’d set up a big campaign, but EMI had fired a lot of people who’d been important to it. Costs grew. Long story short, I left the label. I moved to Polydor, and kept the copyrights, which is why I own all the albums from that point on. But it was a really hard time through the 90s, a hard run. By the way, we hope to get the new remasters of Vigil… and the second solo album Internal Exile out around October [2019].

Your reissue campaign for your solo catalogue has been both cleverly managed and candidly presented, as your epic sleevenotes – often almost novellas – detail every personal and financial obstacle. You’ve had tough times.
Yes, but Feast Of Consequences [2013] was a rejuvenation. Oh, I loved making that. And there was a parallel between it and Misplaced Childhood. So I made up my mind that Weltschmerz will be the final album. Because I’m a writer now. The music business has changed so much. You can’t make money off product like you used to: you’ve got to go out live. I’m 60 years old and a realist. I don’t want to be on a Nightliner bus every night when I’m 63. So with this, let’s do what I did with Clutching… and make the best album I’ve ever made, only as a solo artist. “Weltschmerz” is German for “a world of pain” or “world-weariness”. I’m writing about characters… it’s like writing screenplays. I wanted to be an actor, I enjoyed the little I did, but I’m too old now: my knees aren’t fit for action. And my dad died in May 2016: I woke up in the gutter seven months later – I didn’t know what the fuck had happened in that time. It affected me deeply. Then, in 2017, I had various surgical operations on my back and my shoulder and I wasn’t in a frame of mind to write. But from January 2018 it came together. These are naturally long, epic songs. It’s too much material for a single album, so let’s make a real statement and go out with a double.
There are further delays – my mother is ill and we’re moving her in here, which necessitates building on the farm, for which you have to jump through bureaucratic hoops – so I’m glad we decided to put out the EP, A Parlay With Angels, as an advert for what’s coming. It’s like a jigsaw of the sky – you get one, two, three pieces and the shape clarifies. Our confidence was buoyed by the response to it; our tails were up. Then this Spring I was hospitalised for four days with a bacterial infection which led to sepsis, but rumours of my demise were greatly exaggerated – I’m fine. The Clutching tour felt good, my voice held out and we closed that chapter well. Now we’ll finish Weltschmertz this year and release it in January [2020], and tour the UK and Europe in March-April. There’s no pressure. I’m enjoying my gardening. Fifteen different types of tomato!

Is there any chance you’ll enjoy your swansong so much that you’ll postpone retirement?
I don’t think so. It’s time now. I don’t belong to this new version of the music business. I’ll leave it to younger people. It’s a very different beast now.

Clutching At Straws Deluxe Edition (4CD/Blu-ray and 5LP) is out now on Parlophone. Fish’s first two remastered solo albums are due out in the autumn. His final studio album Weltschmerz will be released next year and Fish will be on tour from March 2020.