Date posted: 05 Jun 2003

Reporter: Craig Finlay

Fish — all set for World tour

Time Out gets a raw serving of Fish

SCOTTISH singer Fish has been largely swimming against a current of manufactured pop since his split from chart-topping soft rock outfit Marillion in 1988. In this exclusive interview, “Peeblesshire News” reporter Craig Finlay gains an insight into the charismatic frontman’s opinion on the music industry, as he waxes lyrical about his new band, forthcoming album “Field Of Crows” and ensuing world tour

TO many, ex-forester Fish, born Derek Dick, is most fondly remembered for top-10 hits such as Kayleigh, Lavender Blue, Incommunicado and Warm Wet Circles, during a spell which saw him rise to the dizzy heights of global stardom as singer with Marillion.

But despite jumping ship over an objection to “too many people meddling in the (group’s) creative process”, he has continued to record and perform as a solo artist, with his “live” work garnering much praise from critics within the industry.

With a new all-Scottish line-up behind him, an older, wiser, more tactically astute Fish has been making battle plans for an assault on the current formula-based music industry.

Due to be released this autumn, “Field of Crows” will coincide with the start of a world tour beginning in South America, but according to Fish, the industry net is being continually tightened around him.

He explained: “Not being signed to a major label, a lot of our income comes from touring and selling albums and merchandise at the gigs, but unfortunately touring is becoming a lot more difficult for bands like us.

“More often than not, my profit margins are not even 33 per cent, so to have one third of my fee taken away is a bit annoying — it is basically becoming a pay-to-play situation.

“The last time I checked out visas for America they were going to cost £600 a man, which added up to £3000 before anyone had even played a note.

“The German government is also taking 33 per cent tax before you even set foot on the stage, and the result of this kind of thing is that a lot of bands are facing a dilemma of having to choose whether to put ticket prices up by a huge amount or not tour.

“We have now adapted a kind off guerrilla warfare art of touring in that we are a small, light unit that can move quickly from venue to venue, but it is still hard to predict how a tour will unfold because things perpetually move.

“For example, we planned to do South America in September but that has been changed to the end of October, which pushes the European Tour back to November and December — our world tour will definitely go ahead, but not in the same rigid manner that it used to.

“We hope to do the Scottish Highlands and Islands in August if we get sponsorship sorted out, and then bounce along and do some more UK shows before a lot of Scandinavian and Dutch festivals.”

Always a question mark, America is considered a heavy risk according to Fish.

He revealed: “The cost of visas has risen quite sharply and the way that American venues work, taking 25 per cent of your merchandise, is kind of despicable.

“You have to weigh up whether it is worth playing some little club in Cleveland when you are depending on that merchandise to back up your tour.

“We will probably wait and see what kind of reaction there is to “Field of Crows”, so America could be sometime next year,” he said.

With a keenness on reshaping the structure of his bands on a fairly regular basis, Fish feels that the current line-up of Bruce Watson and Frank Usher on guitars, Steve Vantsis on bass, Jim Drummond on drums and Irvin Duguid on keyboard is already proving to be as tight a unit as he has worked with.

“I have a pool of very talented musicians, but the beauty of having a band like this is that if someone gets tired and wants to take a break they can.

“Bands that have the same members for ever and ever can run into problems creatively because the chemistry stays the same and they get tired, but this keeps things exciting and revitalises the music by giving it a different edge.

“We have only played a handful of shows so far, but the band is taking leaps and bounds further forward and is getting tighter and tighter all the time — that is exactly what I wanted for the studio, a band that has feeling as opposed to session musicians who just play together.”

Having worked with the British army in Bosnia and Kosovo, Fish has many friends in the military.

A general disgust at our society’s treatment of its servicemen led to him penning a recent song titled “Pilgrim’s Address”, which is now freely available on the internet.

Explaining the origins of the work, he said: “That was a song that I felt had a lot of valid lyric, and putting it on the internet was a good way of expressing my opinion without asking anyone to buy an album.

“The song’s inspiration lies mainly in my opinion that we should let the generals decide when we go to war because at least they know what the hell war is about — politicians tend to snap their fingers and send toy soldiers in.

“What people tend to forget is that once all the fireworks have gone off and the situation stops getting 15 minutes on the news every night, there are still thousands of guys there who are away from their families.

“Everyone worships the army when it is pulsing across deserts in armoured personnel carriers or fighting in the streets but when it comes to the more mundane stuff, the MTV generation switches off.

“That goes for the Government as well. It annoyed me after the Gulf War, when Gulf War Syndrome was first identified, that the government’s attitude was ‘thanks for doing a great job boys, but we won’t be giving you any compensation’,”

Never scared to speak his mind on sensitive issues, Fish’s decision to mix politics with music is unlikely to gain him brownie points with the major record labels.

“One of the problems nowadays is that in the corporate music environment that we live in, people don’t want get involved in politics or controversial issues because it could lead to a loss of sales.

“Having a strong opinion automatically means that there will be other people with different opinions who disagree with you, and I think that record companies can be a bit scared of anything that is a bit too contentious. You don’t have the political writers about nowadays except for in the underground or independent labels,” he added.

Despite releasing “Pilgrim’s Address’ on the internet, he is not a fan of MP3 downloads.

“I don’t like them because they are putting musicians out of work and making my life a hell of a lot harder.

“I am sitting here paying a band to record an album, which takes a lot of time, and I find it insulting that someone can come along and put it on the internet with a link to download it for free.

“This whole idea of free music can get a bit annoying to someone whose principal source of making a living is through selling music.

“I know that people are recording my CD’s rather than buying them, and I can only hope that the genuine fans understand that If they don’t buy the albums, the artist doesn’t have a living and he stops making albums. If you like the artist then show a bit of respect and buy the album.”

The ever-evolving music industry is a very different beast to the one that Fish rode with Marillion in the 80s, so does he think the old songs would be as successful if they were released today?

“If Marillion came out now they wouldn’t last because the pressure is immense. It didn’t happen for us until our third album — how many bands would get that chance nowadays?

“The 80’s were exciting times because the A&R guys were still in control of the record companies, and because there was a lot of money about, people were keen to invest in bands, which in turn meant that there wasn’t as much pressure on people to deliver numbers for shareholders.”

On the subject of manufactured boy/girl bands, Fish is happy to discuss the repercussions on struggling bands that actually make their own music.

Pausing for thought, he added: “The people who are buying chart records are kids, and I am not talking about teenagers.

“Promotion and marketing now outweighs what is going down on a disc.

“Marketing has become so difficult that the record companies are looking to pick people up who are like blank sheets of paper, so that they can be painted however the company wants them to look.

“A lot of the writing that is done for these Pop Idol, blonde-haired Frankensteins is not done for them — they are just puppets.

“Accountants run the industry now, and so no-one is prepared to take any risks or break a successful formula.

“Everyone is playing safe because they are so paranoid about their own personal security within the industry, which is why there is so much formula music around.

“There is no point changing the industry — it has to change itself.”

No matter which direction Fish attempts to swim in the months ahead, it is unlikely that, in terms of sales figures, he will ever surpass the formidable achievements of his biggest hit to date, Kayleigh, which still receives prime time airplay on radio stations throughout the world.

Lyrics to the poignant love song are indeed autobiographical, but according to Fish the song was a collaboration of many of his past experiences and relationships.

“Kaleigh is about a lot of people. One of the lyrics, ‘dancing in stilettos in the snow’, actually came from an image that one of my girlfriends had produced at textile college.

“I knew the song was a winner but didn’t expect it to be that big. I am really proud to be associated with a song that is still played on the radio today, but I think I have written songs that are as good if not better in my solo career, but they didn’t get the same exposure.

“You can write a great song, but if it isn’t played on the radio and people aren’t aware of it then it is only a great song in the minds of a few people.

“The song I did with Sam Brown, ‘Just Good Friends,’ should have been a hit single, and I think that if I was on a major record company it would have been,” he added.

So in terms of ambition, what are Fish’s future aims, and does he dream of emulating his past success?

“The music business at the moment is not the one that I joined in the early eighties and I don’t personally feel very comfortable interacting with majors. I don’t like the intrusion on my private life to that kind of extent and would loathe to be someone like Robbie Williams or Madonna — you’ve got to have a perverse joy in that kind of exposure to actually deal with it. I really enjoy making music, but I think that when it gets to a certain commercial level it just becomes far less enjoyable.

“I think that to a large extent fame makes things more impersonal in that you play bigger gigs, have to use more trucks and production and have a bigger crew.

“At the same time, being famous might get you a better table at a restaurant but there are a lot of waiters hanging about expecting bigger tips — that was one of the Marillion problems in that there were a lot of people sucking the band dry.”

No self-respecting journalist could interview someone called Fish without asking him how his nickname came into being.

According to the singer, it hails from revengeful tactics he used against a miserly landlady, who also happened to be a classic tea drinker.

He explained: “When I worked as a forester in the north of Scotland, my old landlady used to charge me for using her bath, so as a bit of revenge I used to take hours in the bath listening to the radio with a can of lager.

“One of my mates called me Fish after spending about two hours waiting for me, and the name just stuck.”

Tomorrow evening’s gig at Galashiels’ Volunteer Hall should be a poignant moment for Fish, who played his first gig with Marillion at the town’s Golden Lion in 1982.

“I am actually really excited about playing Gala again because I haven’t played it since my first Scottish tour,” said the Fish, who would seem to have swum full circle.

Tickets for the gig are still available from Replay record shop (01896) 758249.

For more information on live dates, future releases, including a triple box set of pre-1989 official Marillion bootlegs and two new Fish DVDs, visit the official Fish website at www.the-company.com