Fish (no relation to Phish), late of Marillion (though he wishes everyone would quit talking about that), always held his various broken hearts so close that they burned from body heat. So when life threw him a genuine own goal—he courts the female singer of a female progressive band, they engage, they set the date, she walks—naturally his defenses turned explosive and poured out into verbiage.
Excepting the magnitude of the betrayal, this strongly suggests Marillion’s 1985 “Misplaced Childhood,” a high-water mark for the band, the singer/lyricist, and the neo-prog movement such as it was. On that album a girlfriend’s Dear John marked Fish’s spark (an LSD-laden sugar cube from another ex formed his fuel).
But the third thing about Fish, aside from his love bumps and still-sharp quotidian observations, lifts him boldly into the front-runners: his fearless conceptual leaps. “Misplaced Childhood” started with one soul’s hungover misery and ends in a rushing vision of world peace transcendent of that suddenly-obsolete scourge nationalism.
“13th Star” starts in the workaday grind of the “Circle Line,” Fish’s discontent mutterings punctuated with guitar snarls. He pushes through Cheeveresque bedsitter sequences in London, a mid-point “Arc Of The Curve” as PowerPoint presentation of love from ripening to rotting; and finally to sailing, sailing, alone over bounding black water. He follows the “13th Star” but never tells you exactly what that means. Like Jim Carrey’s Truman, the narrator may have to go to the end of his world to find escape. And like many wise artists, Fish understands that a little mystery is good for the soul. Not to mention repeat listenings.
– Andrew Hamlin
