ACOUSTIC SESSION

Recorded "live in the studio" at Fish's own Funny Farm Recording Studio, Acoustic Session offers exactly what it suggests - Fish accompanied by acoustic guitar, base, and drums (played by Dave Stewart - that's the Scottish session drummer, not the Canterbury scene keyboardist!) and without the shimmering keyboards and soaring electric guitar we're more used to hearing accompany his work.

In terms of presentation, this product shows every sign of having been put together in a hurry - a little quickie to act as a treat for the fan club and perhaps a bit of extra product for the nascent Dick Bros. Record Company. Still, the thinking behind this is sound. Commercially speaking, the MTV Unplugged series was riding high at around this time, reviving an interest in acoustic reinterpretations of rock music, and artistically speaking, Fish's material lends itself to the treatment better than you might expect.

Other artists originating in the 1980s neo-prog boom Fish helped spearhead have tried their hand at this sort of thing, of course - Marillion had Unplugged At the Walls, Less Is More, and Live At Cadogan Hall, and Pendragon have also turned their hand to this. Fish did it before any of them, however, and it turns out his songs are ripe for the treatment. It certainly helps that there's a strong streak of the protest song in material like Lucky or Internal Exile, and that traces of folk music had been weaving their way into Fish's recent albums which could be further teased out here.

It's notable that the balance here is skewed very much towards Fish's solo material - of the 9 songs here only 2 are Marillion-era picks, Kayleigh and Sugar Mice, and in this context the solo material holds up well. Sugar Mice translates quite nicely into this format in its early stretches; conversely, the rearrangements and alterations necessary to make Kayleigh or the latter parts of Sugar Mice work in the absence of a Steve Rothery-esque guitar solo or the magic of Mark Kelly's keyboards are a bit more extensive, but it works a treat. (Neither song were tackled by Marillion on any of their various acoustic projects to see release, probably because those came well into the period when Marillion would habitually not revisit the Fish era at all on stage or in studio except once in a blue moon.)

Is this one for the prog snobs who'd prefer artists to err towards ever-increasing complexity in their musical ambitions? No, clearly not. But Fish has never really pandered to that crowd anyway - not in his solo career, not in Marillion. But in terms of really teasing out new charms in Fish's material, Acoustic Session is rather lovely.