This Party’s Over
Deeply personal and wonderfully touching, the highly anticipated Weltschmerz is set for release this autumn. Prog catches up with cover star Fish as he prepares to take one last glorious plunge with his final solo album. He reveals why he’s decided to cal
It’s been a long goodbye, and it’s getting longer. But if any Prog readers are wondering what happened to the retirement plans Fish announced way back in 2016, well, it’s fair to say that life – and indeed uncomfortably close encounters with death – got in the way. And that was long before a global pandemic came into the equation.
The original plan, hatched before 2015’s Farewell To Childhood tour celebrating the anniversary of that landmark Marillion release, was to tour again to celebrate the anniversary of
Clutching At Straws, the big man’s last album with the band that made him famous. His farewell tour would follow the release of his 11th solo album,
Weltschmerz, in 2017. What could possibly go wrong?
Well, it’s a long story. Let Fish light up a rollie at his home studio in Haddington, East Lothian, and tell you all about it.
“At the end of ’15,” he sighs over a Skype call, “things happened on the tour. I went down with – ironically – a really bad respiratory virus. And then [keyboard player] John Beck broke his arm and that moved the tour to ’16 to do the replacement dates.
“Meanwhile, my dad was ill, and getting worse. They diagnosed him as having bladder cancer. Then my dad passed away. He died quickly, thankfully. And I launched myself into just dealing with a funeral and being, you know, head of the family.”
Amid such emotional turmoil, though, more parts of his body were buckling under the cumulative strain of many years of touring. Having already had an operation on his hand, other areas needed urgent attention.
“At the end of ’16, I had to get a spinal operation,” he says, “and I had to have enough time between taking the general anaesthetic on the spine op to get a shoulder operation done, as over the previous year that had got a lot worse.”
It would put him out of action until the end of 2017.
“I went into the garden,” he says – as keen Fish-heads will know, he likes his horticulture – “and I lost a year. I couldn’t write. There were ideas there, but the actual movement from there, to a pen, to paper was not happening.”
When he finally got back on the road for the Clutching At Straws tour in December 2017, his workload had increased after the retirement of longtime tour manager Kelvin ‘Yatta’ Boys-Yates.
“I ended up doing it all myself,” he says. “I ran my immune system to the fucking ground, and I got [bacterial skin infection] cellulitis, which became sepsis.”
Sepsis, also known as septicaemia, is a form of blood poisoning that can cause organ failure and is seriously life-threatening.
Thankfully, he recovered.
“That was 2018,” he says, “and then in the spring of 2019 I got sepsis again, good and proper. It was twice with a space of three or four months,
“I’ve had a brilliant time in music and I’m so grateful music has given me such a wonderful, exotic interesting life. There have been horrible periods, but you’ve got to go through the shit to really appreciate when the good things happen.”
and it was an ambulance with a blue light. The second time they had to stop halfway to give me oxygen.
“The guy said, ‘Another 40 minutes and you’d have gone right into critical.’ If my wife hadn’t phoned up… because the first time it made me delirious. She called and I was like, ‘Awww, fuuuck off, I’m alright! Where’ve ye put me trousers! Blah blah blah…’ Off my face.
“The second time I was driving home and felt so tired I felt like I’d been driving all night. Then I went into convulsions, temperature went up to 40 degrees, I was freezing cold. And both times if she [wife Simone] hadn’t phoned the ambulance I’d have been dead. I’ve been scared in my life, but I was never as scared as sepsis. The first time I had it I was like, ‘Okay, I’ve come through it, I can tick it off now.’ And then the second time was like, ‘What the fuck is happening?!’ So that was all that trauma…”
Meanwhile, Fish needed to move his mother, who has dementia, into his home and build on it to accommodate her. It never rains, but it pours, eh?
“It all caused a lot of depression,” he says. “Very dark and black.”
Would it be a little crass for Prog to observe that at least the album that’s come out of all this is one of the best Fish has made? Musically, it’s a cinematic affair coloured with sumptuous orchestration, beguiling sound effects and atmospheric arrangements – amid plenty of memorable tunes co-written once again with bassist Steve Vantsis and guitarist Robin Boult – while lyrically, Fish is a reliable but decidedly vulnerable narrator.
Opening with the dramatic sweep of Grace Of God, whose title hints at how most of us might feel in his shoes, it ruminates touchingly on his ailing parents on Garden Of Remembrance,
relationship angst on Walking On Eggshells and nods towards his impending retirement on This Party’s Over. Elsewhere, more topical issues seem to surface. His offsetting of violence against vulnerability on the punchy Man With The Stick (released as lead track of the Parley With Angels
EP in 2018) now seems particularly apposite in the era of Black Lives Matter, the 15-minute Rose Of Damascus
sketches a life trying its best to be ordinary within a war zone, and Waverley Steps tells the tale of a rich, successful man reduced to begging at a railway station, before the title track tells us: ‘I’m simply a man of our time, confused and bewildered’, before building into a defiant rage and vowing ‘the fight isn’t over, this war still has to be won.’
He had the title Weltschmerz
(German for ‘world of pain’) before the latest episodes of his own long
“With this album, I just decided, fuck it. I’m going to be dealing with some very difficult subject matters. I had a lot of conversations with people about all these things.”
“We had Brexit, which really got to me, you know, because my wife’s German. And then there’s Trump, and I’m watching the hatred and the division, and meanwhile, I’ve been reading about Germany in the 30s, and I could see the links.”
running personal soap opera began to unfold (turn over to page 40 for the back story), and one initial trigger that shaped the idea was the Bataclan terrorist atrocity in Paris in November 2015, which he heard about while on tour in Germany.
“I could not believe the brutality. It was unreal. And then suddenly it felt like we were targets. I went into the backstage area at the next gig going, ‘Where’s the security guards here?!’
“Then we played London and there were about 400 no-shows. I talked to one woman who said, ‘I wasn’t sure I was going to come today. And it took me ages to decide what to wear.’ And I’m going, ‘What do you mean?’ She said, ‘Well, I was wondering if I should wear black, because if anything happens in the venue, then it would be easier for me to hide and get away.’
Fuck me, man!
“Meanwhile, we’d just had the Scottish referendum [Fish is in favour of independence], then we had Brexit, which really got to me, you know, because my wife’s German. And then there’s Trump, and I’m watching the hatred and the division, meanwhile,
I’ve been reading about Germany in the 30s, and I could see the links.
“My wife says, ‘You watch too much TV’ but I’ve always been sensitive to things going on in the world. You start feeling overwhelmed by everything that’s around you and you feel helpless. So yeah, it was Weltschmerz without a shadow of a doubt. And that is why we have so many mental health issues going on.”
That’s another issue Fish could doubtless hold forth on at length, and it partly inspired the penultimate, 13-minute track on Weltschmerz, Waverley Steps (End Of The Line).
“On this album there was a lot of self-analysis going on, but it was a subconscious self-analysis,” he says and so it seems on this track.
Before a musical backing sometimes reminiscent of the smoggy drama of Bitter Suite from Misplaced Childhood, it tells of a man who ‘homed in on the goal, he took off like a rocket’ and ‘arrived on the scene like a well-timed explosive’ as he ‘followed the rails to the bright city lights’.
Later, however, he meets the girl of his dreams who ‘appeared in a sunkissed field, wild flowers in her hair/With a black hound beside her of which he wasn’t aware’. ‘Blood flowed with the wine’,
we hear, and then there’s mention of lawyers, of unborn children, and
finally, the protagonist ‘stepped off the grid, fell out the system’, to end up on the titular steps, ‘tied to the black dog, faithful beside him at the end of the line’.
“So, I mean, fucking hell,” he says, “I’d written about myself and I didn’t even realise, which was really strange.”
On the face of it, the lyric grew from Fish reading the story of a young soldier, “basically suffering from PTSD”, who froze to death on the steps of Edinburgh’s Waverley station. “And I thought, this isn’t a guy who has let himself go, he made a decision.”
It brought his own mental health into focus again. When he says: “I went into the garden”, he’s not speaking metaphorically – his green fingers might just have been his saving grace.
“I found great solace in growing stuff, planting stuff, looking after stuff. It was just that soulful thing.”
The notion of nature as a positive force is one of the more soothing symbols to be found in Weltschmerz, most prominently on Garden Of Remembrance, the lead single.
“The lyric was about me watching my mum and dad, the end of days for my dad, and their end of days, and my dad was becoming incredibly forgetful – he had Alzheimer’s towards the end – not diagnosed but you don’t need someone to tell you.
“And then my 87-year-old mother has been with us, in care, since January ’19. She’s never been diagnosed with dementia, but… we know. And that song’s also about me and my wife, because I think all of us have that worry that we’ll go on to become mentally impaired in our own lives.”
The stunningly simple but emotionally piercing video for the song, directed by David Lam and Hannah Thompson (daughter of illustrator Mark Wilkinson). Filmed the day before the UK went into lockdown, it turns the restrictions of social distancing into a powerful metaphor for the distance that old age and its associated problems can put between two people, as a young couple face each other from either side of a glass screen stretching along a deserted Scottish beach. Meanwhile, Fish sits alone in an art gallery surrounded by symbols of his life and career, and a single tear rolls down his cheek as hands rest on his shoulder to console him. Crying on demand? We’ll make an actor of him yet.
“No, you just let it out. When you’re singing on stage, you get emotional but you stop it. You choke it, before it gets to the point where it’ll ever come out. But we actually filmed it at my home in front of a white screen – the gallery behind me is a model.
“In the video I’m aware that I’m also shielding my mother, who’s only a few yards away in a bedroom in the building. So it was very easy to allow the emotions to just soak up. And at the end of the video that’s my wife, Simone, her hands on my shoulder.”
Equally affecting in a different way is Walking On Eggshells, which explores the heart-wrenching experience of living with a volatile partner. Fish sings of ‘The piercing shards of porcelain from dinner plates that served your rage’ yet still vows, ‘I’ll replace the broken china, repair the broken frame. Count the days and blessings ’til you’re home again.’
Fish pauses for a moment as we talk, before, as ever, being unable to resist his instinct towards brutal honesty:
“I don’t want to get into too many details because it’s unfair, but I’ve been involved in a relationship where you’re very much in love with somebody, but that person has got mental health issues. One minute they’re madly in love with you on the next minute they fucking hate you. And especially with the bipolar side, it’s very, very difficult.
“You can say something quite innocuous and it’s a trigger. Suddenly, by seeing that name, you don’t love them. It comes raging back at you. And then it’s suddenly turns back and everything’s okay again.”
Easy listening fans might want to approach Weltschmerz with caution.
“Well, with this album, I just decided, fuck it. I’m going to be dealing with some very difficult subject matters. I had of a lot of conversations with people about all these different things. One of the unfinished songs that didn’t make the album – and
I kind of regret not having it – had a working title of The Cutting Song, and it was about self-harming. I was talking to nurses and doctors when I had problems with my spine, and it’s another thing that links up to the idea of Weltschmerz. It’s the pain of the world – some people deal with through cutting and some people deal with it through gardening, or writing…”
Fish has also spoken of a “damn the torpedoes” approach – going all out to write a record laying his feelings on the line, as a final, defining statement before retiring. But given all the obstacles that the gods seem to have littered in his path over the past few years – Covid-19 being the latest – does he not suspect that someone up there’s decidedly opposed to him hanging up his microphone?
“No, but it is getting a bit like Brexit. The Germans have a phrase, right, called “doing a Polish”. It’s basically where you leave a party suddenly, without saying goodbye to everyone. But since Brexit, there’s a joke about “doing a British”. Which is saying goodbye to everybody and never fuckin’ leaving! But I have to be disciplined. When it’s time to leave the party, it’s time to leave.”
Can this be the same Derek William Dick who was quoted as recently as 2008 saying: “they’ll be dragging me offstage screaming when I’m 65”?
“The stage is wonderful, the stage is great. But I had a stool on the last tour, and I had to take a break because my spine was becoming so compressed.
“I’m 62 years old now, and I’m gonna be on a Nightliner [tourbus] driving all the way through the night, getting shivelled and shaggled all the way through. And you get out and your bowels have been through a blender and you get up and the first thing that your body wants to do is evacuate. You get off the fucking bus, but the venue’s not open ’til two o’clock. So you’ve got to walk for half a mile down to the nearest service station to have a dump. I’m sixty-fuckin’-two years old – I could do without that in my life.”
Such are the painful realities of making a living in a young man’s game when nearing retirement age.
“In all honesty, I think I’ve made a mistake here. I’m now locked into having to do all these shows in 2021 for the Weltschmerz-Vigil tour, and then there’s going to be a year probably from the last gigs or at least nine months before I can do a farewell tour. So that probably won’t be until 2023.”
By which point of course, they’ll be dragging Fish offstage when he’s 65, only he insists he won’t be screaming.
“I’m looking forward to getting clear water in front of me,” he says. “I’m sitting in the [home studio] control room at the moment. Next summer, this will be gutted. I’m taking all the soundproofing out, all the equipment, I’m stripping it back to brick.
“It’s symbolic, right? I’m going to turn it into a writing room. I’ve had a brilliant time in music and I’m so grateful music has given me such a wonderful, exotic interesting life. There have been horrible periods, but you’ve got to go through the shit to really appreciate when the good things happen. I’ve got a wonderful wife and family, we both love our garden. I’ve got my season tickets to Easter Road to see Hibs [Scottish Premiership club Hibernian] when they eventually allow people back in, I’ve got imagination, and I’m lucky I’ve got a mind that works. The retirement isn’t born of tedium, or anything else is because I really want to do something else. And now what I’ve got is an album that is as perfect as it can possibly be, and it feels like a great way to go out on a high.” At which point he starts laughing. “Of course now, it’ll be the irony of all ironies this becomes a really fucking huge album and there’ll suddenly be all this demand to carry it on.”
Weltschmerz is out on September 25 via Chocolate Frog. See www.fishmusic.scot.