RETURN TO CHILDHOOD

Return to Childhood is a live album capturing a concert from the tour Fish undertook to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Misplaced Childhood. Although Marillion did still include the occasional Fish-era song in their repertoire, they'd taken to leaving most of Misplaced Childhood on the shelf, understandably since their musical direction had evolved away from it and Steve Hogarth's vocals style wasn't as good a match for much of the material. (By comparison, Hogarth's approach to some songs on Clutching At Straws works much better, in part because musically that album found the band evolving in the direction they'd follow on Seasons End anyway.)

As such, Fish pretty much had a clear run when it came to taking the lead on celebrating this anniversary. The structure of the setlist is simple enough: disc 1 is where Fish takes a bunch of his solo material out for a spin, and it's a fairly solid set of song choices, particularly since he's freed of the need to plug his most recent studio album and so can simply select a clutch of bangers from across his repertoire.

Then disc 2 serves up the main course - Misplaced Childhood itself, as interpreted by his solo band. There's been plenty of releases of live renditions from the Fish-era lineup of Marillion, but obviously this stands out from them a little due to the different personnel involved. There's also a clutch of encores touching on the rest of Fish's career with Marillion - Incommunicado and Market Square Heroes to showcase one of his last and first singles of his stint with the band, and Fugazi as a final mission statement.

Though the setlist is well thought-out and means that the album ends up being a little different from the typical Fish live show, at the same time for some reason this show doesn't grab me. The recording quality is decent enough, but the live mix feels off - it's one of numerous Fish live releases where his live band are really giving it a lot of oomph, and his vocals end up a bit overwhelmed. There's no getting away from the fact that not only did this gig take place 20 years after the album's release, but also it was a good long time after Fish himself had performed the epic in full - and in the intervening years his voice had changed and evolved inevitably.

Some alterations to the keys of the songs were undertaken to account for this, but it still leaves the whole thing sounding just slightly off to me - the Misplaced Childhood performance is in this weird place where on the one hand, Fish and the band know they aren't going to make it sound exactly like Marillion did, but on the other hand this is a nostalgia tour so they keep drifting back in a Marillion-mimicing direction rather than adapting the material more freely. I actually think if they'd given themselves more licence to retool and re-imagine the material it would be better; as it is, Fish and company spend the second disc sounding a bit like an especially polished Marillion tribute act. That might be exactly what people wanted - but if you've already heard live gigs from Fish's time in Marillion, you'll probably prefer those to this, and as for the Fish solo material featured here it's good, but there's ample live renditions of this stuff out there too. On the whole the set is solid but inessential.