Best Gig I Ever Done See #7 - FISH

Fish - Derby University
December 13th 2010

I briefly mentioned my childhood love of Marillion once before on this blog (item 6 in this post) and on Monday night I fulfilled a dream that has been 25 years in the making.

The intervening years were spent in denial that I was ever really that big a fan. In fact I didn't actually hear any of Fish's solo albums until about 3 years ago when I finally started to reach that age where I genuinely didn't give a shit what people thought any more.

So when he announced a low-key acoustic tour and that he was coming to Derby I bought a ticket. As a mark of how far I've come - I didn't even press-gang anyone into coming with me. I went on my own and had a great time.

The support act weren't up to much, the drummer was doing that sitting on a box and thumping it thing and the singer looked like a lion and played some fairly ordinary folk blues stuff. I hit the bar.

I wasn't sure what to expect from Fish's set, never having seen him before, but knowing that it was just him, a guitar player and a keyboard player. If you'd said to me beforehand that they could carry off playing over 2 hours of his back catalog without any amount of backing tape trickery I'd have laughed, but that's exactly what they did. In fact the guitarist played the whole lot on a 3/4 size spanish acoustic. Even the solos.

It was amazing stuff. Fish was funny and engaged with the crowd like it was a room full of friends, and the format really did work. He gave it 100% and was totally into it, despite the lack of a rhythm section he still bopped round the stage like he was hearing one anyway. I think most of the crowd were too.

He talked about football, relationships, war, politics and..erm...filming your own porn..amongst other things - always setting the context for the songs - which he sang in great voice (as a huge Sinatra fan, I'm not speaking lightly when I say that his phrasing is up there with Frankie's)

The greatest thing for me was the way the stripped down format allowed you to absorb the lyrics and hear things you wouldn't normally pick up on. Let's be honest the showboat nature of Prog Rock seems to inadvertently do all it can to divert the listeners attention from the vocals. That's probably why so many Prog bands have such cheesey lyrics about goblins and shit. No one cares (apart from people who like goblins maybe, and to be honest I think there were probably a few in this crowd who would have been happy either way).

It seemed like no time at all before 2 hours of this had passed, and for an encore they did a Kayleigh / Lavender medley. In fact it was lovely to hear him be so humble about those "hits". He's a bloke who knows what those songs mean to people and what they mean to HIM in terms of how his life would have been if they hadn't been such globally successful singles.

I think my highlight was the song he did with just the piano behind him.

Fish - A Gentleman's Excuse Me

This is a live version from a few years ago, but you get the general vibe. It seems lazy to call it spine-tingling but it really was exactly that.

I've not enjoyed a gig so much in ages, and on the way home I had one of the strangest spiritual experiences of my life. Completely unrelated to the gig, as far as I can tell, but one more reason why I'll never forget Monday night.

In fact I must have been in a bit of an altered state by the end of the gig as I filled all my gaps in the CD rack when I saw that they were knocking out most of his solo albums for a fiver on the merchandise stand (and it seems via
his own website shop)

He may never be cool but I'm 40 tomorrow and I don't give a fuck. He's my hero.

Eight Things...frankosonically speaking

OK, because Mr Hibbett didn't think I would respond, I decided I would do the honourable thing and have a go at "Eight Things You Didn't Know About Me". I appreciate it's taken me a couple of weeks but it's SO HARD! And also as this is meant to be the music blog I need to try and keep it music related and finish with a tenuous link to a choice mp3. SO here goes…

1) The first band I ever became obsessed with was Kiss, when at the age of 10 a lad at school gave me a copy of the "What Makes The World Go Round" 7" single signed by Paul Stanley. I still have it and it is blatantly not signed by Paul Stanley - he just did some scribble on the front and lied to me.



2) As a result of this pre-pubescent love for Heavy Metal I got a subscription to Kerrang for my birthday. Following on from that I was thrilled to learn that my sister's friend Colin was related to Rocky "Wrekkless" Shades of Wrathchild. Things took an even weirder turn when, on holiday with my parents in Menorca in 1984, it transpired that Rocky "Wrekkless" Shades was staying in the same hotel as us. My mum told him I was a fan and he was very nice to me. His hair was massive!




3) Round at my mate Benny's house in the mid-1980's we used to play on the ZX Spectrum, drink Soda Stream (which was state of the art drink-making at the time) and listen to records. Most popular choices were New Order's "The Beach" on the b-side of the Blue Monday 12" and Billy Idol's first solo album. I recently bought the remaster on CD and despite the fact they left off Congo Man for some insane reason - it's still a fucking great album - shut up!



4) My mum once played football on the park with Billy Fury and his band when they were playing at Matlock Pavilion. These days she is in a Gilbert & Sullivan Light Opera Society and they have won international competitions. I like the bit about Billy Fury better.



5) I still get occasional performance royalties for the tracks I played guitar on the White Town album that EMI released in 1997. The last one was £8.07 for radio plays in Switzerland. I don't think I've ever got into double figures.

6) With the event of tracking tools like LastFM it's fascinating to look back over my listening habits for the past 18 months or so. Then I got to wondering as to which record I have probably listened to the most over the course of my entire life. My internal LastFM mind memory churned the calculation for a few days and I have come to the conclusion that it is almost certainly "Misplaced Childhood" by Marillion. I don't think I could be any less cool at this precise moment in time, but bear with me.

Prog Rock has never been cool, and especially not the kind of second-hand early-Genesis prog that Marillion dished up in the early 1980's. Yet Misplaced Childhood is still a fantastic concept album and one I have come back to time and again from the first time I heard it in 1985, through every phase of my musical awakening. It's a lyrical tour-de-force and musically astonishing, managing to contain two top 10 singles in amongst the more intricate pieces, transient passages and recurring motifs.

I lost all interest in the band after the follow-up album didn't grab me, but I've recently discovered that Fish has been regularly blogging for years and the archive is available via his website. Boy has he had his fair share of relationship & business problems - the poor bloke has been through the mill but he's still so optimistic about life it's a joy to read sometimes (at the moment he is about to release a new album having been jilted a couple of weeks before his wedding day!).

So yeah, number 6 - I like bad prog.

7) I never had guitar lessons but learned via a square flexidisc called "Play In A Day The Billy Bragg Way". In all honesty it took me a little bit longer than a day.



8) Fittingly at number 8 - I once rented Eminem's film Eight Mile on DVD from Blockbuster, got home, put it in the player and then made some dinner. An hour or so later switched the TV on settled down with a plate of food to watch the film - then got confused when it finished after half an hour. Turns out that it was an autoplay disc rather than one that continuously loops the title menu and I managed to skip the first hour without even noticing. It really didn't make ANY difference to the plot, or my enjoyment of the film. They could have just made it a 30 minute TV show and saved themselves millions.




So that's my eight things - and the tenuous mp3 link is going to be a live version of Marillion's Sugar Mice (In The Rain), which isn't fom Misplaced Childhood but is my favourite song from Clutching At Straws. This live version comes from the Curtain Call boxset and benefits from a less polished sound than the studio take (plus the audience clapping somewhat out of time). Fish really sounds like he means every word of this "stuck in a hotel miles away from your loved ones" ballad. Anyone brave enough to download this, I warn you in advance there is a VERY 80's guitar solo at 2:12 but keep listening as the post-song monologue is one that puts Bono to shame...

Marillion - Sugar Mice (In The Rain) - Live In Milan 1988