After seeing Marillion in London last week, where their current singer Steve Hogarth praised Fish for his excellent lyrics and song writing ability, it seemed only appropriate that I should go and see Fish in person this week at the Concorde2 .
The original date for this tour was way back in May, but this had to be postponed until Dec due to illness. The tour was billed as the ‘Moveable Feast Tour’ after his latest album ‘A Feast of Consequences’ , that was released in September last year and is the singer’s tenth studio album to be released as a solo artist. The support for the night was from Voodoo Room a three piece covers band that play the songs from Jimi Hendrix and Cream.
[metaslider id=25844]
Fish was on-stage at 8:30pm and opened the evening with the quiet introduction of the electric guitar for ‘Perfume River’ from the ‘A Feast of Consequences’ album, The title track from the same album then nicely followed on from this.
‘Manchmal’ and ‘Arc’ of the curve then followed, both from the ‘13th Star’ album from 2008. Fish then spoke to the audience retelling a story of how he was in France several years ago visiting the sites of World War 1 battles, in which both his grandfather’s fought and he found out whilst staying in a hotel in a town called Aras that he was in fact only a few yards away from where one of his grandfathers had dug the trenches for the soldiers and only a few miles away from where his other grandfather was stationed with the RAF. This then gave him the inspiration that was to lead to the writing of the next five songs to be sung (‘High Wood’, ‘Crucifix Corner’, ‘The Gathering’, ‘Thistle Alley’ and ‘The Leaving’) all of which had images from the Great War projected onto the back drop screen whilst he sang them.
The mood was then lifted a bit for the next song ‘Big Wedge’ and then ‘Vigil’. The main set ended with the great sing-a-long classic from Marillion, ‘Heart of Lothian’. It didn’t take too much chanting from the audience to bring the band back on stage for their first encore of another Marillion song, ‘Incubus’. The second encore comprised of ‘Blind To The Beautiful’ and the night was finished off with ‘The Company’.
Whilst the event wasn’t quite a sold out one, I believe that the audience left having seen another great performance from Fish. But having seen both Marillion and Fish within the last week and both playing Marillion songs from the Fish era, I do have to wonder whether if Fish had not left Marillion that the combined forces would have been better and more popular than the individual parts that they are now….
Fish’s A Feast of Consequences album is out now.
Words by Robert Sutton, images by Robert Sutton Photography
