Photograph courtesy of Martin Hunter
"That’s what I do, it’s my contribution to albums and it comes down to sculpting and whittling all the time, throwing away anything that’s superfluous." Fish – lyricist, front man and purveyor of prog – pauses from chatting about the albums which have shaped his life, to reflect on the thing that has shaped his career: ‘wordsmithery’.
Indeed, it is his passion for words which acts as the linking thread between most of the albums on this list. For whatever critics have made of him in the thirty years since Script For A Jester’s Tear was released – and, frankly, many prog fans have wanted to twat sneering critics with their replica ‘Grendel’ masks – it’s hard not to be charmed by his insistence that words and word-craft still matter.
Best of all, you might not like stuff that matters to him, but he seemingly doesn’t care. As he prepares to release his tenth solo album, Feast Of Consequences, and hit the road again, he’s become one of the grand old men of prog. Despite his insistence that his favourite albums might change as rapidly as the weather in Leith, his choices are a blend of the comforting and the revealing. Like the genre that made his name, these are albums about as cool as a star-covered cape and as fashionable as Emerson, Lake And Palmer. But like prog itself, the Big Man from Edinburgh has never courted the brittle applause of the hip. Thank Tolkien he’s not going to start now.
Fish is currently on tour, with his new album Feast Of Consequences set to be released later this year – for full details head to his site here; click on the image below to begin scrolling through his choices
