THE COMPLETE BBC SESSIONS

This is a collection of two concert recordings from Fish recorded by the BBC, both hailing from early in his solo career: a November 1989 engagement at the London Town and Country Club, and a November 1991 gig in Nottingham.

The first show represented here covers the first disc and the first three tracks of the second - that's why Heart of Lothian pops up twice, and why in the first version you can hear him saying farewell to the London Town and Country Club. At this point in time Fish's first solo album, Vigil In a Wilderness of Mirrors, had been in the can for a bit, having been recorded around the same time as Marillion recorded Seasons End. EMI, not wanting to put the two acts up against each other, had decided to delay the album until the new year, so this would be the first opportunity for fans to hear a good chunk of the new material, as well as one of Fish's earliest solo backing groups tacking Marillion material.

In fact, there's more than that besides: the set starts off with a thunderous cover of Faith Healer by the Sensational Alex Harvey Band; it wouldn't be until Raingods With Zippos that Fish would put out a studio rendition of the track, but the take on it here is pretty damn solid and finds both Fish and band on fine form.

Setting this exception aside, the remaining 13 songs consist of 5 songs from Vigil, 8 from the Marillion back catalogue. A good dose of Marillion was probably inevitable - Fish's solo career had barely begun, and it was his Marillion work which brought most of his fans to the gig.

Still, with over half the tracks on Vigil represented, fans were getting a good sampler of what solo Fish sounded like - and the dual lead guitar lineup allows for a good injection of energy into material old and new. This makes Punch and Judy - one of the more energetic, rock-oriented numbers from Fish's Marillion years - a good pick for the first of the older songs to be included here, forming the end of a thunderous opening salvo of Faith Healer/The Voyeur/Punch and Judy.

There's also an outright funky little breakdown partway through the song, a clever move which allows the band to put their own fun little twist on the song - one which simultaneously doesn't feel very Marillion-ish, but nonetheless feels appropriate to the song. Thus, even when he's dipping into his past here, Fish is not content to just go through the motions but is happy to keep developing his material, something which has remained true over his solo career.

The rest of the set is delivered with similar skill, and setting these Marillion classics in with songs from Vigil really gets across the idea that Fish's first solo album was as natural a development of the sound of Clutching At Straws in its own was as Marillion's Seasons End was - both factions taking things in a somewhat different direction, and as fans we are lucky to live in a timeline where both directions ended up coming about. As of late 1989, there must have been every reason to expect that Fish's solo career would be a storming success.

The second show - consisting of the remainder of the second disc - was widely bootlegged as "There's A Guy Works Down The Chip Shop Swears He's Fish", but it's nice to get an official release for it that actually supports the artist. This comes from nearly two years later, and captures Fish on the Internal Exile tour. Here, the proportion of solo to material to Marillion songs has flipped - there's 3 Marillion songs and 6 Fish solo pieces, Fish being able to draw from the cream of Vigil In a Wilderness of Mirrors and Internal Exile in order to put together a setlist which covers the full span of his career.

The musicianship is more focused here, and the sound feels a bit more cohesive than on Internal Exile itself - an album which, though I have warmed to it over time, was a bit disjointed. Here, Fish seems to be settling into a prog- pop trajectory not too far away from the one which Genesis themselves were exploring at the time, and his band prove adept at setting a diverse range of songs into this mode.

This isn't the only source for live shows from the Vigil and Internal Exile tours, mind - when Fish was striking out in the independent sphere he put out a slew of "official bootleg" albums from these two tours for the sake of getting some cheap product. The first show here is different enough from the one captured on the "Pigpens Birthday" gig - which came from substantially later in the Vigil tour - that it doesn't feel redundant next to it. The second show is more evidently a truncated version of the sort of setlist captured on official bootlegs such as "Uncle Fish and the Crypt Keepers", "Derek Dick and His Amazing Electric Bear", and "For Whom the Bell Tolls" - but it's a nice bonus here. And if you just a one-and-done overview of Fish's live act in his early solo career, this is a pretty good summation of his first two years or so.