THE COMPLETE BBC SESSIONS

Covering sets promoting two separate albums:Vigil in '89 and Internal Exile in '91 this is a nice rather than essential anthology from the early years of Fish's solo career.

The first disc suffers from some rather indifferent sonics and surprisingly less-than- satisfactory musicianship.There is a feeling of unrehearsed-ness and even Fish's room- filling charisma cant quite rescue this from the mundane.Marillion standards "Script" and Fugazi are OK here but I expected more.

The second disc is a far more polished affair (even though we get treated to Heart Of Lothian twice!) with edgy performances of Vigil and Credo and a powerful,joyous delivery of Incubus complete with almost rabid audience participation.Fish literally spits the lyrics out to a baying crowd - this version of Incubus is as good as any I've heard! Other tracks to note are a wonderful version of Market Square Heroes and the final encore rendition of Heart Of Lothian.

Disc 2 is as good as disc 1 is average but this is definitely a 3 star offering and a worthy addition to any Marillion/Fish fan's collection.

Fish's BBC sessions is a double disc live album that has two shows recorded from the Vigil and Internal Exile tours. Old Marillion standards and newer Fish material is played with vigor, vitality, and the audience is with Fish all the way. Although the audio quality isn't spectacular, you can hear each musician clearly and you can tell that Mr. Dick is having a blast up on the stage and the audience's rabid participation only goes to show the dedication and the overall love the audience show to Fish.

The first disc is a concert recorded during the Vigil in a Wilderness of Mirrors tour, and it really shows Fish having a blast up on the stage singing and conversing with the crowd. The Vigil material is played with energy and the musicians really get into a groove throughout the entire show. My only complaints lie in some of the Marillion songs played. First off, Punch and Judy has this really uninspired middle section that really throws off the mood of the piece. Script for a Jester's Tear is played perfectly until the very end, when they play the quiet, "Losing on the Swings" motif again and that really throws off the atmosphere of the piece as well. After a rousing version of Warm Wet Circles, the first part of That Time of the Night is played. but it segues into Slainte Mhath. Now if you're like me, you'd rather hear That Time of the Night instead of Slainte Mhath. Fortunately, there's a rollicking version of Fugazi that makes up for all the little hiccups that the other Marillion songs make.

The second disc is from the Internal Exile Tour and has a nice mixture of Vigil pieces as well as old Marillion classics, and all in all half the disc is comprised of Marillion songs (with two versions of Heart of Lothian, don't ask me why he had Heart of Lothian twice in one show). Anyway, the audience participation and their devotion to Fish is also blatantly obvious in this show, they sing right along with Fish during Kayleigh and Incubus with vigor and intensity, it's really quite an aural treat. In my opinion (and the opinion of Mr. Riviere who reviewed this album before me) this disc is an improvement over the first disc, mainly in terms of audio and band performances. The first disc is quite nice set wise, but there is too much of a loose and unprepared feel amongst the band, and those errors are wiped clean from this disc.

In the end, BBC Sessions is another of many live discs from the Vigil/Internal Exile of Fish, and while being a nice collection of new and old, isn't the best Fish live outing available. It's a good addition to any Fish/Marillion fan's collection, but outside of that, there are many other Fish live albums to choose from (his live album to studio album ratio is pretty much 3 to 1), and while this isn't a bad one, there are many I would rate higher. 2.5/5.

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.