After almost 45 years on the road, firstly with Marillion and then as a solo artist, singer FISH is finally calling it a day and heading off to the Highlands for a new life as a crofter but before then he embarks on, The Road To The Isles Tour for one last run of shows. Mick Burgess called him up to talk about his farewell tour and his new life on a remote Scottish island.
You’re a few days away from the start of your UK Tour. Are you looking forward to playing across the country again?
I feel really good about it but at the moment it’s getting in the way of all of the work I have to do at the new croft I’ve bought up at Berneray which will be our new home which is being built by this fantastic builder called Angus.
Whereabouts is that?
It’s off the beaten track. It’s connected by a causeway to North Uist and you can get a ferry here from Uig on Skye which you get to from the mainland over the Skye Bridge near the Kyle of Lochalsh. You can also get a ferry from Berneray to Harris.
What are you doing up there?
Just before this call I was driving a JCB and I’m doing my best. My wife and me moved in here on 20th December and we are currently selling our house and studio in Haddington so it’s been very busy at the moment. After the UK tour, this will be our new home. I’ve got two heads on at the moment, one is my crofting head that wants to get on and get my croft all done and the other is my Fish head where I’m looking forward to the tour. I finished a European tour in November and was nervous before that started as I wasn’t sure how it would go but having that under my belt now, I feel a lot more confident. The musicians are fantastic, the setlist works great and everything is fine so we know all we have to do is reactivate it for the start of the UK shows.
It’s strange hearing you talk about nerves as you’d have thought after 40 years you’d be used to it by now. Perhaps those nerves keep you on your toes?
If I didn’t have any nerves, I’d be worried. I don’t take anything for granted and things can go wrong. Murphy’s Law exists and on a tour it’s especially prevalent. There’s still a lot to be done but it’s great. We have 15 shows and I’m looking forward to finishing in Glasgow but at the same time I’m looking forward to playing a lot of places and one of them is definitely the Newcastle City Hall.
This tour called Road To The Isles Tour is your farewell tour. You must have mixed feelings about that as it’s been your whole life for so long?
I don’t enjoy being on the road any more. I’m 66. When I was 30 years old being on the road was wonderful. It was around 2015 when I realised that there was a sell by date and I needed an end game in place so I decided to take Misplaced Childhood and Clutching At Straws out on the road as album tours. I wanted to get them done so I could concentrate on what was going to happen over the next couple of years and aim for the Weltschmerz album but everything was held up by Covid. I was supposed to be touring with the Weltschmerz and Vigil albums in 2020 and 2021 and then do a Farewell Tour but Covid and Brexit threw a spanner in the works so that’s where I am at the moment. It was always my plan to retire. I just didn’t see myself hanging around until I was 70 years old and the reason is that the business has changed so much.
It must be daunting yet also exciting for you?
People ask if I’m retiring. I’m not retiring, I’m just taking on a totally different career. It’s brilliant. It’s an amazing place and is so peaceful. It fires my imagination every day. My wife, Simone, is opening a small cafe and a bakery here too. We have a small market garden as well and can supply fresh vegetables to the cafe and the islanders too. We’ll have a little Prog Rock Cafe Berneray here. I loved living in Haddington but I ran out of space to employ my ideas so I came up here with my wife. We have 30 acres and a lot of outbuildings. I love putting my mind into designing and planning and making things happen. There’s a real sense of community here and that’s something I’ve missed. There’s only 148 people on the island. We first came up here in 2022 to see friends and one of my neighbours is Keith Macintyre who did the cover for Songs From The Mirror. He’d been the head of the arts department at Northumbria University for years.
The first date is in your home town of Haddington. That’s a great way to open a tour.
I moved to Haddington when I left Marillion in 1988 and then I set my studio up there. One of the first solo gigs I did was in Haddington.
You can even get your own bed on the first night to ease yourself in to life on the road?
I was actually hoping that I’d have sold my house by then and had actually booked a hotel room but yes, I will be able to stay in my own house then. A week before the tour I’m going to have to get into the garden to get it into a reasonable state before it’s sold. After the tour though I return to my croft just in time for the lambing season so hopefully we’ll have a few lambs to add to our flock of sheep.
You’re also playing a show in Aylesbury where you were based with Marillion back in the early days. Is this your way of revisiting some of those places that have played a key part in your career for one last time?
It is yes. It was important for me to get to some of these places on my final tour.
You’ve got a lot of material to work with. There’s the four albums with Marillion and 11 solo albums as well as classics that only appeared on 12″ singles. How do you choose a set list from all of those?
There’ll be a couple of songs that I haven’t played in a long time, other than when we did them on the recent European tour. We have 37 songs across two setlists and we’ll do different sets each night where we are playing two shows and for the rest of the shows we’ll do an amalgam of the sets where we’ll pick songs out that we want to play. It’s not the entire set that will change but two or three songs will change each night depending on how we feel.
What about your band? Who will be joining you on the tour?
It’s like the movie Reds where they get together to do one last big job. I’ve gone into the vaults. I’ve got Mickey Simmonds from keyboards who co-wrote Vigil with me, I’ve got Robin Boult who came on board for the first tour and was involved in writing Internal Exile and has written on quite a few of the albums since and also played on Weltschmerz. Steve Vantsis has been a long-term collaborator since 2006 and he co-wrote with me on 13th Star, Feast Of Consequences and Weltschmerz, he’s been my main right hand man for a while. Gavin Griffiths, who’s been my drummer since 13th Star is with me too as is Elisabeth Troy Antwi on backing vocals. She worked with me on Raingods And Zippos, she’s amazing. There’s a great dynamic in the band.
Your last show in England is at the City Hall in Newcastle on 6th March. You first played in Newcastle at the old Mayfair in 1983 and then at the City Hall itself the following year on your Fugazi tour. What are your memories of those tours?
There was a really famous photograph taken from there that was used in Kerrang taken by Ray Palmer. I had full face paint on with all of these candles on the floor and it looked great but we burned a hole in the City Hall carpet. My first memory of the City Hall was driving down in a Mini 50 with my then girlfriend to see Lindisfarne’s legendary Christmas gigs. We always went o those shows. Marillion then supported Lindisfarne in the early 80s at Friars in Aylesbury and in Dunstable too. The City Hall is a brilliant hall to play and I actually requested it specifically for this tour.
You put a lot of care and attention into your career and the planning that’s gone into it. It must have been frustrating to you when you added a second night in Glasgow to meet demand, some people complained?
That’s another reason why I’m retiring to become a crofter. There’s so many keyboard warriors out there and opinions are like arseholes – everybody’s got one. Social media gives them the voice to do it. When that show went on sale, it sold out virtually immediately and so many people didn’t get the chance to get tickets and I was very aware of that so I decided to put on another night. It’s my tour and my setlist so I can do what I want but people complained that they bought a ticket for the last night so that they could say they were at the last ever gig. Get a life, get real. I put the extra night on so those that missed out could see the show as well. It just means that they’ll have been to my second last gig.
Will you be recording any of the shows for an official final release?
We have recorded some but I don’t know what we’ll be doing with them. We haven’t filmed any as it’s a waste of time.
You have your own record label, Chocolate Frog Records. What’s going to happen to that? Will you continue to release stuff from there?
That finishes in April and the whole thing will close down. I won’t carry on putting albums out or anything. That will be it. If you want to buy an album you need to get them before March 6th as that’s when the online sales will stop although we will be selling them on the tour. These are the last ones. Virtually all of the remasters are gone already. I don’t see why venues have to take a cut. We hire the venue, bring people in, they use the bar and we don’t get any of that so why should they get a share of my merchandise? We’re actually doing pop up stalls for merchandise as most of the venues now want a cut of merchandise sales including the City Hall. We’ll have a pop up at the City Tavern in Newcastle. The pop up will be there from two o’clock to seven at night and I’ll coming along around about half past four.
This is truly a DIY label in its purest form as you even pack all of the albums yourself and take them to the post office?
I do most of it with my wife but we do have little elves that come in a help from time to time. This is just the way musicians have to do it these days. If I was signed to a major label my career would have been over a long time ago. If I wasn’t able to sell the music directly to fans then I’d be dead in the water years ago. My fans are loyal and want tangible things not a computer file. They’ve kept us alive and I’m grateful for that.
How did you manage to get the masters back from the likes of EMI, Polydor and Roadrunner?
EMI own Vigil so I licensed it back from them but the rest of my solo catalogue I own the copyrights to them. I licensed my albums to those other record labels. I own all of my solo music except Vigil and the Marillion stuff is owned by an American company.
Your recent re-issues of your first solo album Vigil In A Wilderness of Mirrors and second solo album Internal Exile are the gold standard of how to reissue an album from the outtakes, the demos and live material as well as live footage, documentaries and interviews all wrapped up in a great hard backed book. How long did it take you to pull that together?
You have to find ways of keeping your career moving and I’ve done that so I need to pay attention to what people want and make sure I deliver something that they’ll want to buy and have in their collection. I sold 45,000 tickets on my European tour but have only sold 20,000 copies of Weltschmerz. It’s just the way it is these days as people use Spotify or whatever to stream. I get it. I don’t have a CD collection up here at the moment so I’m using Spotify and it’s amazing what they’ve got on there but they need to find a way to pay musicians properly. I genuinely feel for young musicians who are starting out these days as I don’t know how they are going to make it happen.
What about the 2024 remix? What were you setting out to achieve with that when you first listened back to the master tapes?
Remixing is going right back into the heart of the music and rebalancing it. Calum Malcolm did that and I wish I’d been with him in the 1990s. If we’d had a really good producer for Fellini Days and Raingods and Zippos it’d have made a huge difference to those albums. Calum knew I was doing a reissue of 13th Star and he came to me to say that he wanted to remix it as he said he never felt he’d done it justice and he did an amazing job on that. I’d never really been happy with Vigil as it was done at the Funny Farm Studio and sonically we all made compromises and time caught up with us like it did with us for Fugazi. I wanted to remix it. When I heard what he’d done with the Internal Exile remixes I thought it was amazing. When I heard the original album, the sequence was wrong and it didn’t sit right. The track listing was in the wrong position. With the new running order it sounds like a completely different album. What Chris Kimsey did with the original recordings was brilliant but Calum took it to another level with the remix and the resequencing of the running order. After Calum has done Internal, I was unsure whether to do Vigil as it was such an important album but I asked him and he said yes. He just gave it a whole new dimension.
Did you direct what you wanted or did you leave him to it?
I gave him a free reign to do as he wishes as why have a dog and bark yourself. He’s a brilliant producer so why tell him how to produce an album.
After you play that final show in Glasgow what’s next for you?
I have private plans after Glasgow and then I’ll be going up to my croft as my sheep will be dropping lambs on the hills so I’ll be running about the hills in the middle of the night. I’m also writing a book. I’ve been writing my autobiography for a while. I want to write. I’ve always said I’m a writer who can sing, not a singer who can write and I want to be a writer. I’ve been on the hamster wheel for years and it just eats into your time and I never had the space to sit down and write as there was always that demand to put the writing into the music side. Now I don’t have to put things to music any more so I can write. It gets dark early here in November so me and Simone can take 5 or 6 weeks off and I can write or do a spoken word tour, a bit like Fish on Friday and maybe play a couple of acoustic songs. I can have fun and bring out the entertainer in me. Then I can go back to the island again and it gives me a breather. That’s going to be a perfect way of life.
When you look back on your 45 year career, how do you feel about it and did you achieve everything you’d hoped to when you first stepped on that stage?
I don’t think I’d ever say that I achieved everything I hoped to achieve but I’m very happy with what I have achieved.
Interview and Photos By Mick Burgess
Fish’s Road To The Isles Tour starts in Haddington on 18th February and comes to the City Hall, Newcastle on 6th March and ends in Glasgow on 10th March.
Visit Fish’s Pop Up Merchandise shop at the City Tavern close to the City Hall in Newcastle from 2:00pm on the day of the show where Fish will drop in around 4:00pm.
For full details of all of the UK dates visit https://fishmusic.scot/road-to-the-isles-tour/
Be the first to comment