By his own admission, when Fish originally released 13th Star in 2007, his life was a mess. Broke, directionless and dumped just before his wedding, the Scottish singer-songwriter was close to rock-bottom but had turned his frustration and grief into an album that contains some of his finest solo material. To coincide with the record’s deluxe reissue, Fish looks back on the turmoil that inspired it.
Fish wants to make something clear.
“If you go on Wikipedia, it goes, ‘Blah blah blah… It’s about the end of a relationship.’ But it wasn’t about that. It was about me, about a time in my life when I was just lost.
Absolutely fucking lost.”
The singer is speaking to Prog via Zoom from his home-come-studio in East Lothian. The ‘it’ he’s referring to is 13th Star, his ninth solo album and 13th in total, including the four he made with Marillion. Originally released in 2007 and just reissued in deluxe box set form, the narrative around it is that it’s Fish’s ‘breakup record’, written about his brief, turbulent relationship with then-Mostly Autumn singer Heather Findlay, which ended dramatically a few months before their planned wedding.
There’s an element of truth in that, but it’s also far from the whole story. Fish had actually been wandering in the wilderness personally, professionally and financially for a good few years prior to 13th Star and the break-up that would inadvertently come to define it. Listening to it today, it crackles with pain, anger and desperation. ‘I’m running out of options, I’m running out of road, got no sense of direction, sliding out of control,’ he muttered ominously on the spoken-word introduction to Openwater, which encapsulates his life at the time.
“I was a broken person,” he says now. “It’s an album about navigation and trying to find my way. The open sea, the stars, compass points… Those things were all over it.”
With hindsight, the big man’s career had been an uphill struggle since it began. The release of his debut solo album, 1990’s Vigil In A Wilderness Of Mirrors, was delayed to allow his ex-bandmates to get out of the gate ahead of him with Seasons End, their first record with new singer Steve Hogarth. Since then he’d endured a bumpy ride at the hands of the music industry, prompting him to establish his own labels, Dick Bros Recording Company and, later, Chocolate Frog Records, to give him some sort of control over his music and career.
By the mid-2000s, that struggle had become even more difficult. A costly divorce from his first wife at the start of the decade had almost wiped him out financially. No less devastating was the discove
