In September 1998, Fish was coming off the back of his 1997 album Sunsets On Empire, which he’d co-written largely with a then relatively unknown Steven Wilson (Porcupine Tree had only released their fourth album Signify in 1996, and a deal with Kscope was still over a year away). Today, as the one-time Marillion frontman talks to Classic Rock from his home studio, where he recorded what he says is his final ever album, Weltschmerz, and ponders what he’ll do next, he recalls those early days of the magazine.
It appears it was not a happy time for him. “1998?” he muses. “I was about to go into the throes of a divorce. I lost my house and everything.” Thankfully he seems much more pleased with his life almost a quarter of a century later.