Breaking up is never easy, but Fish is ready to retire from the music industry to enjoy a different pace of life. After leaving Marillion in 1988, the Scottish singer-songwriter has enjoyed a successful solo career on his own terms. Now, four years after the release of his final solo album, Weltschmerz, he’s packing up the life he knew and is almost ready to say goodbye. Prog caught up with him ahead of his Road To The Isles farewell tour to reflect on his remarkable career.

Words: Philip Wilding

Our play on Mark Wilkinson’s poster for Fish’s final-ever tour. Wave goodbye!

Illustration: Mark Wilkinson

“To say goodbye is to die a little.”

That was writer Raymond Chandler from his The Long Good-bye novel. Black as pitch, prescient, occasionally cruel and held a pen the way most assassins wield a knife. Dark outlines, characters set as silhouettes coming in and out of the light. His legacy casts a long shadow and it’s probably no accident that the figure peering out from beneath a rain-lashed umbrella on the cover of 1999’s Raingods With Zippos has something Chandleresque about him, laced with a knowing nod to another author, Douglas Adams, who introduced us to Rob McKenna, the abject, ignorant and thoroughly drenched rain god from Adams’s novel, So Long And Thanks For All The Fish.

Say what you like about Fish, but which other singer-songwriter is going to bring us literary nods to both hardboiled noir fiction and the lovely whimsy of Douglas Adams once he’s gone? And going he is.

“I mean, 66 is… it’s not old, old, but it’s fucking pretty old to be on tour, isn’t it?” says Fish, a nod, that half smile, a rueful shrug.

You can see why there was a moment back in time where acting might have been a real alternative career for him; an exasperated eyebrow from Fish says more than most interviewees could express in a sentence or two.

“I was out on tour, in my 50s then, and I knew there was an endgame coming. We’d done the Feast Of Consequences tour, and it wasn’t long after that I had issues with my spine and both my knees were stiff, but one was particularly bad. I went, ‘I’ve got to stop this,’ you know what I mean? The reality was that I was never going to be playing arenas. There was no point in sitting there and going, ‘Oh, if we get this single, if we get the attention, if we get this or that, this is how it is.’ The writing’s on the wall.

“Am I really going to be on a doubledecker tour bus traversing Europe for the rest of my life, the rest of my career? It’s just going to get tougher and tougher. What’s the point, you know? And having done Weltschmerz, I knew I had one big album left in me. I was running out of themes to work with, I didn’t want to keep on repeating myself. I didn’t want to write the equivalent of Marvel comics. I really wanted to finish on a high. When I left Marillion, I left after Clutching At Straws, and I always think it’s the best album we ever did and that was why I wanted to have my solo career end on the last album, on a high, rather than come up with an album where people are raising eyebrows and going, ‘Oh, I see why he’s stopping now.’ I didn’t want to end up playing in the Vauxhall Conference League, on that chicken-ina-basket circuit singing Kayleigh and Lavender. I have a far bigger sense of pride; I’ve got more integrity than that.”

It’s a hazy early autumnal morning when we chat, Fish in the studio and house he’s finally saying goodbye to after all these years. Before winter he hopes to be settled in his new home, a croft on the Isle of Berneray in the Outer Hebrides –to call it remote is to understate things a bit. To paraphrase Chandler, it’s been a long goodbye, but as Fish gears up for one final run of shows –the aptly titled the Road To The Isles Tour –he’s not just saying goodbye to the bus, but to a whole way of life.

We’ve been here before, of course. It’s not the first time that Fish has called it quits, but this is a more reflective and contemplative Fish; less bluster, more considered, and a man who clearly can’t wait to get to the next stage of his life. He’s closing up shop metaphorically and physically. The final deluxe reissues of his first two solo albums – 1990’s Vigil In A Wilderness Of Mirrors and 1991’s Internal Exile – have now landed, closing the circle on a solo career that set a startled music world on its ear when he jumped ship in 1988, as Marillion were on a creative and commercial high.

How did we get here? The Studio, Spittalrig Farm, East Lothian is being sold, Fish is moving north to rebuild, work a croft and begin the next stage of his life. There are lots of echoes in this story: after Marillion, Fish also went north to an old farmhouse in Scotland to convert into his new home and made a life there.