Deeply personal and wonderfully touching, the highly anticipated Weltschmerz is set for release this autumn. Prog catches up with cover star Fish as he prepares to take one last glorious plunge with his final solo album, He reveals why he’s decided to call it a day... and what he’ll be doing next.

Words: Johnny Sharp Portrait: Kai R Joachim

Fish: “doing a British” with his farewell album?

It’s been a long goodbye, and it’s getting longer. But if any Prog readers are wondering what happened to the retirement plans Fish announced way back in 2016, well, it’s fair to say that life - and indeed uncomfortably close encounters with death - got in the way. And that was long before a global pandemic came into the equation.

The original plan, hatched before 2015’s Farewell To Childhood tour celebrating the anniversary of that landmark Marillion release, was to tour again to celebrate the anniversary of Clutching At Straws, the big man’s last album with the band that made him famous. His farewell tour would follow the release of his 11th solo album, Weltschmerz, in 2017. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, it’s a long story. Let Fish light up a rollie at his home studio in Haddington, East Lothian, and tell you all about it.

“At the end of ’15,” he sighs over a Skype call, “things happened on the tour. I went down with - ironically - a really bad respiratory virus. And then [keyboard player] John Beck broke his arm and that moved the tour to ’16 to do the replacement dates.

“Meanwhile, my dad was ill, and getting worse. They diagnosed him as having bladder cancer. Then my dad passed away. He died quickly, thankfully. And I launched myself into just dealing with a funeral and being, you know, head of the family.”

“I’ve had a brilliant time in music and I’m so grateful music has given me such a wonderful, exotic interesting life. There have been horrible periods, but you’ve got to go through the shit to really appreciate when the good things happen.”

Amid such emotional turmoil, though, more parts of his body were buckling under the cumulative strain of many years of touring. Having already had an operation on his hand, other areas needed urgent attention.

“At the end of ’16, I had to get a spinal operation,” he says, “and I had to have enough time between taking the general anaesthetic on the spine op to get a shoulder operation done, as over the previous year that had got a lot worse.”

It would put him out of action until the end of 2017.

“I went into the garden,” he says - as keen Fish-heads will know, he likes his horticulture - “and I lost a year. I couldn’t write. There were ideas there, but the actual movement from there, to a pen, to paper was not happening.”