Swimming against the tide
FISH and I are sitting at a table in the imposing Art Deco café of the American Hotel in Amsterdam. It's two in the afternoon and the man who, irrespective of whatever else he does, will always be known as the former singer of Marillion, has just got up.
He has ordered a breakfast coffee but now it is time for something a little more potent, so he reaches into his travel bag and pulls out several phials of brightly coloured pills and powders. Rock'n'roll is all very well, I think to myself, but it's a bit early for that kind of malarkey. "This is my ginseng," says Fish. "This one's Berocca, Guarana, vitamin B, cod liver oil and so on."
Later we are at the trendy Paradiso venue and the ginseng has obviously kicked in. Fish is on stage in a Scotland football strip having earlier told the crowd that if he ever meets Ruud van Nistelrooy he will avenge Holland knocking Scotland out of the European Cup with a six-nil drubbing by nutting the said footballer. The sell-out audience, all 1,100 of them, laugh like a dam bursting and continue dancing feverishly - as they have for the past two hours.
Later, much later, we are in an Irish bar and Fish is surrounded by a constant stream of well-wishers, both Dutch fans and a fair number of Scots who have hopped over to Amsterdam just for this gig. Had Fish been handing out £100 notes they couldn't have looked much more chuffed. I mention all this because most of my friends and acquaintances greeted the news that I was to interview Fish with two responses. The first was, "Oh the guy from Marillion?" The second was, "Is he still alive then?"
Fish will always be known as the guy from Marillion, the bloke who sang ‘Kayleigh' or ‘Lavender' or any of the other songs the prog rockers released in the 1980s. Ironically, his solo career has lasted twice as long as his time in the band, but if it hasn't made as great an impact, he has at least learned to be stoical about it.
As to Fish still being alive, the 1,100 fans at the Paradiso will happily testify that he seems to be in rude health. Any tour debauchery that took place in the 1980s has been replaced by a hardcore homeopathy habit and a spot of boredom-relieving light theft.
"My tour debauchery now is restricted to stealing toiletries, although I'm more of a towel man these days," grins the singer. "I only take towels that have the name of the hotel on them. I've got some great ones, from Burnley Civic Hall to Carnegie Swimming Baths, and some really cool ones from Japan. If I ever got married again the first thing on the wedding list would be ‘no towels'."
It says something about the man born Derek William Dick that he can still crack the gags. His personal life and career have seen more highs and lows than a veteran weather presenter. From a job with the Forestry Commission to filling stadiums with Marillion, he has seen his fortune rise and plummet more times than he cares to count. His solo career has given him number one independent singles and Top 40 entries. It has also, on occasion, brought him to the brink of bankruptcy. Along the way his marriage has broken up and his German wife, a former model, has taken their daughter to live in Germany.
"I used to be bitter but if you didn't pick yourself up you would just get a kicking," he says. "In early 2000, a lot of people advised me to go bankrupt but I wanted to fight it out for two reasons. One was to keep my publishing rights. There was this great danger that I was going to lose all my copyright. The prospect of hearing Kayleigh on the radio all my life and knowing that somebody had just picked it up in a fire sale would have been galling. The other reason is that I just decided I had to get on with my life. I had a daughter to bring up."
Fish's latest album, Field Of Crows, came about during this turbulent period. The original inspiration for the album was the time he spent touring British troops in Kosovo. The Field of Blackbirds marked the spot where Serbs and Ottoman Turks had fought themselves to a bloody standstill in the 14th century.
"It's outside Pristina," recalls Fish. "It's a hellish place. They all burn anthracite there so the sky is orange. The whole area is dirty and polluted with tens of thousands of plastic bags draped over barbed wire. Eighty thousand men died between the two sides. Field of Blackbirds is quite a romantic name, but for me field of crows seemed more appropriate with the carrion crows feeding off all these bodies."
He returned from Bosnia to his own personal and financial meltdown. To clear his head he would take a walk through the woods at the back of his Haddington house, sit on the stump of a tree and watch crows flap over the fields. It all sounds very gloomy but it seems to have galvanised the singer.
"I think I revitalised myself down there," he says. "I realised that there were a lot of things out there that were bigger than me." For an album born of such unhappy circumstances, Field Of Crows is turning out to be a bit of a success for Fish. The French have taken it to heart and the Germans and Dutch are also keen. Fish thinks this is ironic as it may well be his last album.
"I'm very grateful that I have a fanbase that has been loyal enough to keep it going, but the ocean shrinks a little bit more each year," he says. "There is a point where you have to jump ship. There isn't another place to go from here and that is why this is maybe the last album."
At the age of 45 this is the first time Fish didn't want to climb on the bus to tour an album. The appetite to sing in front of a crowd is still there but the will to fold his six foot five frame into a six foot two tourbus bunk night after night is slipping. The plan is that the proceeds from this album and tour will provide enough of a war chest to launch a new career as a scriptwriter.
He has already had bit parts in The Bill, Rebus and A Young Person's Guide to Being A Rockstar. A short while back he filmed alongside Kris Kristofferson in the George Clooney produced 'Nam drama The Jacket.
"The film industry is the only place that is still rock'n'roll," says Fish. "The movie industry might have just as many sharks as the music business but I sat on the set of The Jacket watching them thread film through a camera and it was like being a wee boy again. The last time I felt like that was when I was in a music recording studio for the first time.
"Saturday night in our house in Dalkeith was religiously movie night. My dad was a movie buff and he used to take me to the pictures. When I was a teenager it was just a lot easier to find a band and get into music than it was to get into acting."
Fish says he knows that he will not be another DeNiro, but can't help the hairs on the back of his neck rising at the thought of getting in front of the camera. Better yet, if he had his way he would not be remembered as the guy from Marillion but the guy who wrote those great movie scripts. He says that Field Of Crows actually started life as a movie script.
I don't know if the boy from Dalkeith will make it in Hollywood but I wouldn't put it past him. When Fish was still a forestry worker, he once consulted a Galashiels fortune teller who told him he would have three careers in his life.
"The first one you are in now," said the Gypsy Rose of Galashiels. "The second one is going to make you famous and you will be known throughout the world. The third career will be completely different from the first and second. In your move to this new career you will upset a lot of people but it will make you more famous and it will be the one that takes you to the top of the hill."
"I don't really believe in that stuff," says Fish, "but it's a nice comforter on those days when it's really going shite."
Fish plays The Liquid Room, Edinburgh (0131-225 2564), April 7 and Carling Academy, Glasgow (0141-418 3000), April 8. Field of Crows is released on April 19
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