Interview met Fish (Derek Dick)
Fish: “We wanted a new start, a new beginning, a new adventure. We went up to the island of Berneray and bought a croft for gardening and raising sheep. The Farewell tour will make my career full circle.”
In 2020 praatten we driemaal met Fish naar aanleiding van de lockdown en zijn afscheidsalbum ‘Weltschmerz’. De pandemie heeft zijn laatste tournee verlaat naar dit najaar. We hebben geluk in de Benelux: Fish doet in oktober/november maar liefst acht concerten in Nederland, twee in België en twee in Luxemburg op deze Farewell tour genaamd ‘Road To The Isles’ tour. Dat verwijst dan weer naar zijn verhuis naar het eiland Berneray (Outer Hebriden). Bovendien worden er ‘2024 remix’ versies uitgebracht van zijn twee eerste soloalbums ‘Vigil In A Wilderness Of Mirrors’ en ‘Internal Exile’. Gespreksstof genoeg dus om lekker bij te praten met de legendarische rijzige Schot die ooit Marillion mede onsterfelijk maakte. Hier volgt dan ook een bijzonder hartelijk gesprek met Derek William Dick AKA Fish.
Vera Matthijssens Ι 9 augustus 2024
I remember you had a big garden and you were almost self-sufficient in Scotland, but now you are moving to an island. How did you come to that idea, because you have been living there for thirty years?
I think it was a mixture of things, Vera. My mother was with us for four years and she is still alive, but she is now in a care-room and I think during covid-19 I learned a lot about myself. There was a lot of introspection and I already made up my mind that ‘Weltschmerz’ was the last album and I already knew there was a farewell tour coming on the horizon. While I was doing a lot of work on ‘Weltschmerz’, in particular on a song called ‘Walking On Egg Shells’, I was also dealing with issues about family and myself. I realized when being so introspective, that a lot of things started to get a lot of sense. It was a very interesting evolution. It just stuck me in some ways in the sense of a lot of things that had happened in my life, a lot of my attitudes, a lot of the way I live my life. I think it made me weak in a way and I think with all the trivialities, like Brexit and things, I just wanted to change my life. In 2022 my wife Simone and I were supposed to go to Waterloo, to the battle place and we were going to walk on an archaeology trip. We were invited to walk on the battlefields. It was something I always wanted to do, because the place there is special to me. But my wife got pneumonia and there was no way that she could go on an archaeological trip in the heat that was in Belgium at that time. So we went to see her mother and father in Germany as we planned and it was all kinds of trains and cancelled flights and stress. Lately in October we were going for another break. My mother was going to a rest place, so we could have a break from helping her. A friend of ours said ‘you must come’ and he said: you are going to drive for six hours, there you get the ferry and then you do this, you go over the causeway and you go down to a beach. It was a crazy place. Simone and I said that we were not going to Scotland and at the same time we had been thinking seriously about moving from the studio. And we said: okay, the climate change is happening, there is so much ice melting, we will become more of a island, and we just wanted a change in our life. So we wanted a new start, a new beginning, a new adventure. We went up to the island of Berneray, South of Harris, staying at my friend’s place and we fell in love with it. We were driving up and down the Outer Hebrides, a chain of islands and we were just very open-minded and open-hearted and after two weeks and a week of driving, we said: ‘yes, we could live here’. We fell in love with it and we bought – what is called – a ‘croft’. It is like a small farm. It is like 30 acres (forty hectares or something like that). It is a beautiful place. It has its own beach, but the house was really ran down. The croft has not been looked after for 25 years. It was a mess. My wife said ‘if we actually knew how bad the house was at that time, we would have never bought it’, but we bought it on the trust of the people who were selling it. We have been renovating it and we hope to be ready next month and we are building another house which is our home. The first place is going to be like a small café/restaurant, a place where I can do my writing and work. We have a big garden. We’ve got 13 sheep now. We built a small rooftop for them. I am looking forward to go up there and see what’s happening all the time. It is such an amazing place.
I can imagine… it must be very inviting for soul-searching, for composing and for just being yourself…
You nailed it right on the head. That’s exactly what it is. My wife said: ‘I’ve never known you to be so peaceful and relaxed’. My daughter, she really does not like the idea at all. She doesn’t want me to sell the studio, she doesn’t want me to move up North. Well… it is my life. I’ve got to do it.
Otherwise you might regret it afterwards, but making a new garden and being self-sufficient at that place, only that will be a huge job…
This is what I said. I think when I discovered I was on these crossroads of farewell tours, I realized a lot of things. I have to keep on designing, I have to be creative. People have to be busy. Everything I do is in balance. I think during covid-19, the satisfaction that my wife and I got from growing things and growing our own food and suddenly we realized we have to focus on the things that are important. I realized that here, in the studio, I spent all these years developing, building, adding, the green house, the extensions for the bathroom and all the orchard and building all of these sections, I was full. Otherwise I can’t describe it, I was full. The only way I could do anything more to this place was to not do something and rebuild it and I didn’t want to do that. Then I had to call engineers. It was time to move on and on the croft – as you just said – I have to start a garden from scratch, straight from the very beginning and that has been very exciting. I’m going to have to learn new things and go back to some of the stuff that I did when I was younger. I have got a great desire to design and to read books and H.P. Lovecraft again, together with the sheep and the woodlands and everything else. It is going to give my head something to do.
Keeping busy in life is very important…
When everybody says: ‘ah you are retiring’, no, I am not retired, I am just going to do a completely different job. The thing is, indeed this is a Farewell tour at the end of the year, but we live on an island and it is way up north. if you go out of your backdoor and you go towards the beach, on the other side of the hill, the next piece of land is America. It gets very dark up there in winter. We will do like anybody else does, everybody leaves the island for three or four weeks, just to re-energize and catch some sun. What I want to do is maybe for three weeks, four weeks, in the winter, we come over and we do some stand-up shows, maybe talking about a book, maybe two musicians doing acoustic gigs is another option, in really small places. Just doing it for fun…
I think that you will also remain creative, because you cannot stop the things in your head…
That’s what I think too and you know what… every day you keep on meeting people out there. There was a guy… I was standing walking with my bulldog on the island and suddenly stopped a car and the guy started talking to me. He started telling me all these stories about the islands. Afterwards he just went away and I was wondering: ‘who is that?’ People just talk and it is great. He is a huge well of stories.
At the 22nd of July the remixes of your two first solo albums ‘Vigil In A Wilderness Of Mirrors’ and ‘Internal Exile’ are coming out. Why did you decide to do that besides going on a Farewell tour?
All the albums had already those re-mastered versions. And the two ones that were missing from that cycle were ‘Vigil…’ and ‘Internal Exile’. I wanted to re-do my second album, because – it is really strange to say because this is the control room of the studio and I am now selling the studio, so I had this very strange thing going on during the last months – but I am in the studio where I wrote all the original songs for both albums. And ‘Internal Exile’ was the very first album to be recorded here in the studio and the studio was called ‘The Funny Farm’. Chris Kimsey, the Rolling Stones producer, was here. He was the very first producer to watch in the studio and when we did the album, when we did ‘Internal Exile’, it was a difficult second solo album. I had a lot of things going on in my life at that time. I left EMI, I had an argument with the legal rights of EMI, my wife got pregnant of our daughter, I was building the studio here… it was a crazy time. I was still coming out of the Marillion era, the legal rights went to Marillion. So it was a very difficult time to empty your head and write songs. It was a second album and a lot of the material of ‘Vigil…’ was there for a year or so, but with ‘Exile’ I never felt that the album was in tune – and I don’t mean in musically tune. I had ‘Shadowplay’ which was a great progressive rock tune, ‘Credo’ which was a really powerful rock song and then you got different things, nearly country & western in ‘Just Good Friends’ and ‘Dear Friend’. And then you got the folk influences in ‘Internal Exile’ itself and in ‘Lucky’ which is also a rock song. Then we had ‘Tongues’ which was a very heavy dark song. These were all different songs and I don’t think we sat them together correctly. I wanted to remix the album by Calum Malcolm who has been watching me on the last three, four albums. He did a really great job on ‘Weltschmerz’ and the ‘13th Star’ remix he did last year was incredible. I asked Malcolm to do ‘Internal Exile’ and he delivered the album back to me in the original order, the original track list order and I listened to it and all songs felt completely different. There was a new energy, there was a new dynamic, really different. Fantastic! Even ‘Poet’s Moon’, which was a B-side and ‘Carnival Man’ which was a B-side, it sounded so good that people said ‘That should have been on the album’. Recently I played it for three hours and I played the songs in different order and I came up with the order that is on the new 2024 re-master and the album sounds brilliant. It has become a swan instead of an ugly duck. That’s what the album should have sounded like! Now, when you hear it, it is a completely new album.
I can imagine that, I can understand that, because the flow of an album is very important…
It does not sound like an hour, it sounds like 30 minutes. When Calum did ‘Internal Exile’, he really liked to do ‘Vigil’ as well but he asked me, because original producer Jon Kelly did a fantastic, amazing job on it, I said ‘I would love to’. And again with ‘Vigil’, Calum re-energized all the songs and we put them in a different order. And suddenly they became – especially the voice – became a lot more personal. Especially ‘View From The Hill’ that I wrote together with current Iron Maiden guitarist Jannick Gers, was always to me one of the weakest songs that never happened as I really wanted to hear it and when Calum changed it just a little bit, I mean, the recordings that Jon did were incredible and the recordings that Chris Kimsey did, but the mix and what was is done with the sound, to twist the sound, that could be improved. Now ‘View From The Hill’ became one of my favourite songs on the album.
The Farewell Tour is drawing near. What about the preparations and what about your mindset to go on tour for one more time?
It feels strange. I did not want to do too many gigs. I don’t want to go out for months and months in the end. I was scared – when I went out on the road in 2021 for those nine shows – for the Brexit. I hate Brexit so much! I come from a country that voted 70% to stay inside Europe and there are so many problems. I think, with everything that happened in 2021, doing a few shows after covid-19 and coming out in the audience, it was very strange. I was very uncomfortable in 2021, but I wanted to do a tour and I wanted to play the places that I really wanted to play. That is why I extended the tour with shows in Europe. On the next Farewell tour, we are playing all the venues, all the cities, that we want to play and we have got a really interesting set list. I mean, we actually have four hours of material then, because it is really hard to make choices. We are changing the material around, so all the gigs will have songs on demand and others. So it is going to be interesting. For example, Brussels and Antwerp will probably be two different shows. Belgium was the very first country that I ever came to when I was a kid. My mum and dad, when they got married they went on Honeymoon to Belgium. They stayed in a place called Kapellen. So it is very strange that we are going to play in Antwerp. With those friends, I am still kind of in touch with. We are aware of each other, not closely in touch with, but I will see people out there, who I haven’t seen for a long time and that is where it is all about. I mean, my wife is coming with me on tour, so we can be together on this Farewell tour. She can see the shows, meet friends and have fun. There will be a lot of songs I am going to play for the first time live.
It will also invoke feelings of nostalgia…
Yes, the whole thing is all circles closing. Like I said with ‘Vigil’ and ‘Internal’, being the first two albums and now when I was listening to ‘Walking On Egg Shells’ and when I was listening to the demos in the studio that we are now selling, it is very strange, but it is a very nice feeling.
I think once you have made the decision, you focus yourself on that. I think that is the best thing to do, because the place where you are sitting now will be – at some point in time – unreachable. Strange… you have to get over it and I think the place where you are going to is having mind-blowing scenery… How many sheep do you have now?
13, lucky 13. When I come back from the European tour, I go to see for mister sheep (laughs). When I come back from the UK tour in March, the lambs will be coming out. It is really weird. Instead of children I will have sheep.
Do you already have new material that you have written after ‘Weltschmerz’?
I have no idea and I have no wish to make an album. I’ve got too much to do in the croft, in the garden. I think it is good for me to move my head somewhere else for a year.
The band you are going on tour with, are that the same guys as in 2021?
No. I have got Mickey Simmonds on the keyboards. He was on the ‘Vigil’ and ‘Internal’ albums, co-writing. Robin Boult on guitars and Steve Vantsis on additional keyboards and bass. I have Gavin Griffiths on drums and I have got Liz Antwi on backing vocals who was with me on the ‘Raingods With Zippos’ album. It is like an American movie when you get all the old guys together again.
Being on tour is a completely other life suddenly…
Yeah the conversations in the backliner are going to be interesting.
I wish you luck with all your endeavours and see you on the road in Antwerp…
Thank you Vera. Take care.
