Our play on Mark Wilkinson’s poster for Fish’s final-ever tour. Wave goodbye!
“To say goodbye is to die a little.”
That was writer Raymond Chandler from his The Long Good-bye novel. Black as pitch, prescient, occasionally cruel and held a pen the way most assassins wield a knife. Dark outlines, characters set as silhouettes coming in and out of the light. His legacy casts a long shadow and it’s probably no accident that the figure peering out from beneath a rain-lashed umbrella on the cover of 1999’s Raingods With Zippos has something Chandleresque about him, laced with a knowing nod to another author, Douglas Adams, who introduced us to Rob McKenna, the abject, ignorant and thoroughly drenched rain god from Adams’s novel, So Long And Thanks For All The Fish.
Say what you like about Fish, but which other singer-songwriter is going to bring us literary nods to both hardboiled noir fiction and the lovely whimsy of Douglas Adams once he’s gone? And going he is.
“I mean, 66 is… it’s not old, old, but it’s fucking pretty old to be on tour, isn’t it?” says Fish, a nod, that half smile, a rueful shrug.
You can see why there was a moment back in time where acting might have been a real alternative career for him; an exasperated eyebrow from Fish says more than most interviewees could express in a sentence or two.
“I was out on tour, in my 50s then, and I knew there was an endgame coming. We’d done the Feast Of Consequences tour, and it wasn’t long after that I had issues with my spine and both my knees were stiff, but one was particularly bad. I went, ‘I’ve got to stop this,’ you know what I mean? The reality was that I was never going to be playing arenas. There was no point in sitting there and going, ‘Oh, if we get this single, if we get the attention, if we get this or that, this is how it is.’ The writing’s on the wall.
“Am I really going to be on a double-decker tour bus traversing Europe for the rest of my life, the rest of my career? It’s just going to get tougher and tougher. What’s the point, you know? And having done , I knew I had one big album left in me. I was running out of themes to work with, I didn’t want to keep on repeating myself. I didn’t want towanted to finish on a high. When I left Marillion, I left after , and I always think it’s the best album we ever did and that was why I wanted to have my solo career end on the last album, on a high, rather than come up with an album where people are raising eyebrows and going, ‘Oh, I see why he’s stopping now.’ I didn’t want to end up playing in the Vauxhall Conference League, on that chicken-in-a-basket circuit singing and . I have a far bigger sense of pride; I’ve got more integrity than that.”
