26-02-2025
Fish: the Marillion frontman bows out with dignity
'My name is Derek, and I am a fish for two more weeks,' announced Derek Dick, at the close of a passionate, powerful, moving and elegiac farewell concert at the London Palladium.
The burly, balding, bearded and bespectacled Scottish rock singer who answers to the nickname Fish is retiring at the age of 66. 'My bookkeeper called and said, 'What's this money going into your account?'' he explained in a lilting Edinburgh brogue that peppered every sentence with implicit amusement. 'I said is it more than fifty quid? Well, it's not Spotify then! Then it dropped what it was: it's my pension. It's nice to get money off the government for a change.'
Fish has been an interesting presence, making wordy, elaborate, theatrical and deeply unfashionable progressive rock with Marillion and solo for 44 years. He has had some hits but he's not a big star, walking away from the flashier Marillion in the late 1980s when they were on the cusp of stadium-conquering stardom. He has spent most of his career in the margins crafting deeply personal albums that he often funded and released himself to a loyal but shrinking fanbase. 'It gets harder this life as you get older,' he admitted, in one of many frank, funny, touching monologues, underpinned with slyly humorous bitterness about the music business, the paucity of streaming royalties, the encroachments of AI, the bureaucracy of touring Europe after Brexit, and all the 'corporate shite' he feels he has endured over the years. Taking a swig from a bottle, he wryly noted 'It's water. I'm a grown up! Besides, I can't afford the price of wine in this gaff.'
Fish has been working towards this conclusion for some years. He released a final album, Weltschmerz (German for 'world-weariness') in 2020, put his recording studio in East Lothian up for sale, and is coming to the last weeks of a long final tour through Europe entitled Road to the Isles, that will conclude with two sold-out shows at the Glasgow O2 Academy on March 9 and 10. Afterwards, Mr Dick is retiring to a working 35-acre Croft farm in the outer Hebrides with his third wife, Simone.
It's one of the more unusual farewells I've witnessed in the rock world, but there seems little doubt about his seriousness, rendered in cathartic and emotional performances of poetic, unwieldly songs that dig deep into his complex inner life. His voice has a nice thick tone but sometimes lacks tuning finesse, yet he more than made up for that with the charisma of his delivery. 'I'm a writer who can sing, not a singer who can write,' he admitted, thanking the audience for supporting him all these years and saving him 'thousands in therapy bills'.
I've got to be honest, I haven't paid much attention to Fish myself over the years. His brand of prog rock already seemed dated when he first emerged in a post-punk world, and he has made little attempt to move with the times, operating in a comfort zone that draws on early Genesis, Yes and mid-period Pink Floyd, sometimes with Caledonian elements reflecting his heritage. On stage at the Palladium, his five-piece band were all supremely accomplished musicians, albeit with a pub-rock demeanour, the whole presentation undermined by low rent concept art videos. There were aspects of empty elaboration to overlong arrangements, a kind of blokeish jazz for people who don't like fancy chords, arty modulations or tricky rhythms.
But Fish himself made the difference, the intensity of his performances emphasising how much is really going on in songs such as swaggering political protest anthems Credo and Big Wedge, broken ballads Just Good Friends, Cliché and A Gentleman's Excuses and old Marillion hits Kayleigh, Lavender and Heart of Lothian. Somehow, he even held the attention through the long, moody, synthesizer-led six-part song suite Plague of Ghosts, which included the singalong refrain 'Raingods with zippos, a tinman hides a broken heart.'
Fish made a final amused and embattled speech about the challenges of the modern music business, before delivering a powerful rendition of his 1994 song Raw Meat. It is a song that hasn't previously featured on his farewell tour, addressing the privations of life on the road, which he dedicated to all musicians. 'We'll always have the strength to carry on,' he sang, with ironic and elegiac resignation.
As the band fell silent behind him, Fish delivered a final defiant a capella line, insisting 'I'm nobody's fool but mine.' It was a genuinely touching ending, greeted with a roaring standing ovation. 'Thank you for the years,' he said. It's belated, I'll admit, but he turned this old critic into a fan at the very last.
