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Fish - The Moveable Feast (European Tour 2013-2015) CD (album) cover

THE MOVEABLE FEAST (EUROPEAN TOUR 2013-2015)

Fish

 

Neo-Prog

4.85 | 7 ratings

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Warthur
Prog Reviewer
5 stars Early on in his solo career, Fish went fairly cheap and cheerful when it came to live albums - shortly after he crashed out of his second major label contract and became an independent artist, he put out a clutch of "official bootleg" releases on the cheap in order to generate money to start his own label and set up his own studio, and for much of his subsequent career his live albums have been put out on a similar basis.

That doesn't mean that they're all bad - more that they are hit and miss, particularly since Fish and his solo band's financial standing has been shaky enough that it's been sometimes necessary to push product out there to make money fast. At its worst, this has meant Fish has ended up putting out live shows where there were, admittedly, some technical snags here and there, or which capture his voice in less than perfect condition - because he needed to put the material out there to get some quick income, regardless of the reputational hit which might result.

The Moveable Feast, however, feels like a different proposition: it's part of Fish's series of live releases which are presented with a similar form factor to the recent remasters of his back catalogue. Like the Gone Fishing set, it seems to represent an attempt to up the production value of Fish's live albums' packaging; in addition, it also provides some of the best-sounding live material from Fish we've heard in years.

It helps that, as the title hints, the album is sourced from the tour for A Feast of Consequences - one of Fish's absolute best solo albums. In fact, it gives you two entire shows from that tour, allowing the listener to hear how the tour started out and what shape it ended in towards the end.

The first show you get here is from 2013, close to the album's release. Thankfully, after a number of live releases where I felt Fish's voice was, perhaps, not 100% (or not captured well), he seems to be on form, and with great material like A Feast of Consequences and the cream of his solo back catalogue to choose from (not least some select cuts from Marillion), he and his band provide an eye-opening performance.

If they are shaky anywhere, it's on parts of the Marillion material. It would be utter foolishness to expect Fish to hit the same notes he did back when Script For a Jester's Tear released, and so some adaptation to the song is inevitable and necessary - but the end result is that some of the material sounds a bit off, especially if you are used to the Marillion-era performances.

By comparison, the slow, foreboding take on He Knows You Know is a particular highlight of this set - in part because that's a song which lends itself to a low croon rather than the higher notes that other early Marillion songs call for. And, of course, the band and Fish are entirely comfortable with the new material, not least because that's been written for Fish's current voice, not the voice he had when he was 25.

The second show hails from 2014 - a year and four days after the first set, to be exact - and in terms of its setlist it has enough overlap that it's clearly from the same tour but enough distinguishing it to save it from being a mere rerun of the 2013 show. In particular, Fish and band are now confident enough with the new material to attempt the entire five-track High Wood suite from the album (on the 2013 show, they played only a subset of it).

And let me tell you, this show is a banger - if the first show took a while to creep up on me, this had me gripped from the start. Between its two sets, The Moveable Feast is an absolute revelation. We always knew that Fish was a great frontman - numerous Marillion live releases from his era stand as testimony to that. The glut of live album he'd released over the course of his career - sometimes compelled by commercial circumstance rather than inspired by artistic choice - has eroded that reputation slightly, in part by capturing shows with patchy technical issues or Fish's voice struggling in a warts-and-all manner.

It says a lot that, even though I do like several of Fish's earlier live albums, I can't say I outright love any of them the same way I do his best studio albums. The Sushi set from 1993 is probably the best of his early solo career live releases, and then after that it all gets very patchy. With The Moveable Feast, Fish finally produces the five-star solo live album we all knew he had in him, but which circumstances had conspired to thwart until now.

Warthur | 5/5 |

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