GIG REVIEW: Fish in Sweden x2

 I have returned from Sweden after a visit for the specific purpose of seeing two Fish shows - one in Gothenburg on 10/28/24, one in Stockholm on 10/29/24 - from his farewell tour (the "Road To The Isles" tour).  No special reason for picking those two cities.  But there aren't any North American gigs, these worked with my schedule, Sweden seemed like a fun country to which I'd never been, and a place where they understand English and understand vegetarians.  So, here's a kind of walk through what I saw.  

The players/cast of this little play were Robin Boult (guitar), Steve Vantsis (bass), Mickey Simmonds (keys), Gavin Griffiths (drums), and Elisabeth Troy Antwii (backing vocals).  And also I think some guy called Derek William Dick, AKA "FIsh" (lead vocals).

Each gig opened with the milling around period in front of a big display with a way too hypnotic graphic of a fish swimming in front of the "Road To The Isles" logo, while the PA very softly played lounge covers of rock songs.  All sounded like the same singer: possibly Richard Cheese, although I can't say for sure.  There certainly were a lot of them.  On the whole I had a better pre-show time in Stockholm, maybe because I know exactly how long the wait would be and more likely because I glommed on to the few English speakers I heard nearby and talked to them rather than spending so much time looking at the phone screen.

Finally the familiar strains of "La Gazza Ladra (The Thieving Magpie)" preceded the house lights going down, and the band's arrival.  I had an interesting moment during the first gig watching Fish own the frontman role.  I was like third or fourth row, very close to the mics, the stage was quite elevated relative to the floor, and had been imagining how this 195 cm (6'5) behemoth of a singer would tower over everyone.  When Fish finally shuffled out, at first I didn't see a rock god.  I saw a portly old man wearing basically pajama pants, the same weird old guy who rambled into the camera about whatever for two hours most weeks during the "Fish On Friday" years.  He looked human and ordinary.  Then Mickey started playing "Vigil" and Fish did his thing, clearly grooving on hearing dozens of people yell his lyrics back at him and cheer disproportionately loudly for the spotlights panning over them on the "a voice in the crowd" parts.  When he started clapping, there was no question that everyone would try to mimic it and dance to his proverbial organ.  He knew that we were here to celebrate him, and both his confidence and gratitude felt legit.  This was someone who was born to perform, however ready he allegedly is to be done with all its associated headaches.  

Then the band was into stomping versions of "Credo" and "Pipeline" - a high energy opening batch of songs, by the way.  Very much a hard rock show rather than a lounge show, contrary to what I'd thought I might be getting based on live recordings.  By the time Fish was using the scarf thing he was wearing as a hood and/or a cape to pantomime the lyrics from the bridge of "Pipeline," the stage was unquestionably his.  After that, even moments of vulnerability like taking a seat afterwards and talking about his recent health issues just seemed like the rock star letting his (nonexistent) hair down a bit and chatting.  For these few hours, it was Fish's world, and the rest of us were happily living in it.

Recent illnesses shaped a huge chunk of the stage banter, especially the first night.*  A viral illness had apparently kept our singer from doing the singing and forced him to cancel one Norwegian gig, so he mentioned at great length how grateful he was to be able to do the three gigs in Gothenburg, Stockholm, and Copenhagen after he was sure he'd be losing the whole week.  Reportedly Steve Vantsis was now the sick one ("We share!  So, I don't think he knows what's going on.  Hey, Steve, we're in Gothenburg!").  He really seemed excited to be performing.  Highlight of stage banter later in the night was Fish joking that swilling his presumably throat-friendly ginger/lemon stuff was killing his big rock star mystique with every sip.  Now, with lots of chatter between almost every song, we got nice renditions of "Shadowplay," "Weltschmerz" (with the screen flashing the title lyric so as to encourage singing along - a useful trick for the newer presumably less well known songs), "Long Cold Day," and the big duet version of "Just Good Friends."  Yes, it was a thrill to see that guitar solo from JGF performed live.  And recent cold or not, I really didn't notice any straining at all and sometimes took specific note of how powerful Fish's voice was throughout both gigs.  Man's still got it!

The quality vocal performance and the even more quality frontmanning were important, since the gigs were set up with everything pointing towards the vocals/vocalist.  The band was a well oiled machine, and seeing their routine two nights in a row confirmed my suspicions of how smoothly they've prepared their stage mannerisms, including the scripted "spontaneous" moments when, say, Mickey and Gavin would share a joke, or Fish would dance over to stand by Liz's mic.  Robin's efforts really made the songs rock but he tended to stand in the back and rock out in a calculated way so as to avoid taking too much focus off Fish.  Steve's stage presence seemed like a bit of a disappointment in Gothenburg - so restrained - although hearing about his illness made a little more sense out of it.   Mickey is perhaps the biggest non-vocal contributor to the overall sound, yet he stood off to the side in his nice shirt** looking chill and playing only the needed notes, like he was making a show of not showing off even during his solos.  Watching Gavin at work, he's... I don't know how to describe it technically, but a very down-beat focused drummer.  All of his big hits were on the down-beats, so even when he was getting a little fancy, the focus always stayed on the skeleton of the song - in other words, the singer.  Really, Liz was the only one animated enough to ever take any real attention away from Derek, but during quite a few songs she didn't have much to do, so she spent a lot of time standing by her mic swaying and occasionally providing some deceptively precise tambourine.  All sight lines lead to Fish.  All attention points to Fish.  There were never any illusion that these gigs were not about this particular guy's force of personality, and as mentioned, he definitely lived up to it.

The well-oiled machine comment also points to the setlist.  It's a solid collection of songs that I'm never going to mind hearing, in this well chosen order.  The opening batch of songs rocked.  We overall skewed heavily pre-1994 to make more of the crowd happy but did make significant room for some newer stuff to make the diehard Fishheads, and the Fish, happy.  After the romantic chemistry between our two singers on "Just Good Friends" (no leering or anything - they kept it chaste and classy) the setlist immediately followed that by giving Fish a chance to shout out to his actual wife, Simone and dedicate "Cliché" to her (from Gothenburg - "this song was always about her, even though I didn't know it yet and she didn't know it yet").  After a certain song suite that maybe a chunk of the audience didn't know, the encore was then entirely hits from Vigil and Misplaced Childhood - we'd "earned" that much. 

I suppose at some point I should also mention how it felt to see this show two nights in a row.  I mean, part of the whole reason for catching multiple gigs was my knowing that they were going to be swapping songs in and out of the setlist over the course of the tour.  In fact, Fish mentioned a few times in Gothenburg having just put together this tweaked version of the setlist for the occasion.  Thing is, I think the song rotation is only for the benefit of the band, not the audience.  It's around "Long Cold Day" that I fully accepted that the Stockholm show would be identical to the Gothenburg show.  They'd found a version of the set that they liked and proceeded to do that exact setlist for all three nights of the Sweden/Denmark three night stand, and I think one or two of the shows following that too, before changing things up again.  Even the jokes and stories between songs covered a lot of the same notes.  Yes, Fish, I know about the "cup of shame" because you already explained it last night.  Yes, Fish, I get your reference to the movie Red, because you already explained it last night.  So if I'm asked which gig I enjoyed more, well, I have a natural bias towards Gothenburg because then it was fresh to me.  Stockholm I always knew what was coming next.  Gothenburg was a smaller crowd but it seemed a more enthusiastic crowd - fewer morons yelling for "Grendel," more rocking out.  I have to remember, though, that totally could have just been me being closer to the stage that night.  And it could have just been me being more enthusiastic and rocking out more, because it was my first.  

Seeing the show twice got me to further appreciate the nuances in their act, like the way there were breaks built in for Fish to rest his voice.  He left the stage (both nights) during Robin's big guitar showcase that closes "Cliché."  He sat down for a minute to drink water (both nights) during the ending of "Digging Deep" where Liz basically takes over the song.  And even with so much overlap in the stage banter, it was fun to see him sort of workshopping material one night to fine tune the next night.  For instance, in Gothenburg he sort of started on a riff about how he has some form of arthritis because of "Viking blood" dating back to their conquest of Scotland.  By Stockholm, he'd come up with a punchline to go along with that: "so, I see that the countries where the Vikings lived, Sweden and Norway and the like, are doing really well.  So I have to ask, why the fuck did you leave Scotland?!  You left us to the English, you bastards!"  Even little things to compare - during "Raingods Dancing" the screen projected the wrong snippet of lyrics at one point in Gothenburg, but they got it right in Stockholm.  In Gothenburg I appreciated the pale purple lights during "Lavender" but was thinking what a no-brainer it would be to change the lights together with the lyrics.  I mean, I can't have been the only person to envision "[blue lights]: lavenders blue, dilly dilly, [lights turn green]: lavenders green," right?  Well, I was not, because then whoever was working the lights in Stockholm did actually do it that way!  Anyway, it's a very good setlist.  I sure as fuck won't compain about getting to see "Plague Of Ghosts" performed twice.  Yet, yeah, I do certainly wish they had rotated some songs!  I do get a little envious of a few particular cuts played elsewhere when I look at the setlists from other stops on the tour, and I'm sure it'll be the same for the UK leg next year.  Hopefully there'll be a comprehensive live album.

Speaking one last time of "Cliché" before I finally move on, the live version didn't include  that annoying repeating of half of the song like on the record.  It had one runthrough of "the best way is with an old cliché," followed by a big long guitar session.  Lyrical climax, musical climax, boom.  I approve.  This was followed by one of the few songs not to get an introduction, "Incubus," which immediately got enthusiastic participation from the first "ooh, wah," and got me to marvel at how well a few surprisingly young women in the crowd in Gothenburg knew every nasty, bitter, woman-hating word of that song (and also, later, of the even nastier, whether one recognizes that fact or not, "A Gentleman's Excuse Me").  "Incubus" was followed by the "Plague Of Ghosts" suite, in its entirety.  

Yeah, so I got to see fucking PLAGUE OF MOTHERFUCKING GHOSTS!  For someone who'd never seen Fish and though I might never do so until I got an overpowering whim to, ahem, make it happen, I certainly couldn't have imagined that he'd finally rediscover "Plague" and go back to playing the whole thing like he used to in '99.  Man, "Digging Deep" rocks.  Contrary to what I speculated in my live-albums post, at least in Gothenburg "Chocolate Frogs" was received with total silence and rapt attention (granted, that part does include a loud background sound tape that would drown out most casual chatter).   "Raingods Dancing" served as the absolutely heartrending climax it's always been born to be, and projecting a few key lyrics and aggressively asking the crowd to sing along proved that it is possible to get a crowd of people to sing a bizarre phrase like "raingods with Zippos" if you're a big enough rock star.  And then during "Wake Up Call (Make It Happen)" they did the big ending I'd always fantasized about seeing in person, dismissing the band members one by one and leaving the crowd to clap along, chanting "we can make it happen" until we seemingly summoned Fish back to the stage for one last chorus.  I can't believe that I actually got to be part of a "we can make it happen" clap-along!  I believe in my heart, and I hope I'm right, that this performance got some of the more casual fans who didn't know Raingods to hunt down "Plague Of Ghosts" and listen to it a bunch more times. 

My big nitpick, because of course I have to nitpick, is that for some reason in Gothenburg they just didn't do the second verse of "Wake Up Call" that includes the "we can be dancing in the rain" part that I adore so much.  Just skipped to the end.  The next night, in Stockholm, after milking the first chorus for long enough that I was ready to conclude that they'd made an insane choice in putting together the live arrangement... Fish sang the second verse!  It was worth going to two shows solely to see them do that part properly.  I am not joking.  And I can't believe that I actually got to be part of two "we can make it happen" clap-alongs!

From there, with just Fish and Mickey returning to stage for the aforementioned last chorus, we got a vocalist-and-piano rendition of "A Gentleman's Excuse Me."***  From there a slightly off-key, or at least different, rendition of a familiar chord pattern quickly got everyone excited to hear "Kayleigh," which Fish had brought back after not performing it since 2015's "Farewell To Childhood" tour.  Quickly followed by "Lavender" as expected and "Heart Of Lothian" as sort of expected but still nice to hear - people were quite literally bouncing up and down with the excitement of the moment.  After another encore break, Fish waxed one more time about how he didn't think these gigs would happen and marvelled that a "short show" ended up being two hours and twenty minutes long.  Which it was!  Time flew!  He asked for the house lights to come on (seems a little less spontaneous the second night, haha), and closed with "The Company."  We spun around like ballet dancers and lustfully sang along, Fish gave Gothenburg a "take care and stay alive!" and Stockholm a "this was the show that was," fin.

So, did seeing a Fish gig before the very end live up to my dreams?  Well, I got the chance to celebrate my fascination with this flawed but brilliant piece of the music world in person.  I get to die a little bit happier now that I've seen "Plague Of Ghosts" live.  Any complaints seem trivial.  Those were two special nights. 

A few mostly non-music points:

- Not Fish related at all, but remember how in a little snarky endnote in the Raingods post I scoffed at the idea that any of Rick Astley's non-"Never Gonna Give You Up" hits were remembered by anyone?  Well, one afternoon in Stockholm while getting out of the rain to grab a cup of glögg (a punch made with hot mulled wine that they push hard for the tourists), I heard "Together Forever" in the wild and had to say "oh, number one, this is totally Rick Astley, isn't it?, and number two, I definitely have heard and remember this song."

- On the printed setlists from the Gothenburg gig that we grabbed for after the show, "Plague Of Ghosts" was listed as "PLAQUE."  I'm way too amused by that.

- Shout out to Andy and Irvin, my single serving friends from the Stockholm gig.  The former had an experience that you kind of can't script - on a vacation together with his long-term long-distance girlfriend, they broke up.  I guess things were amicable enough that they still had the tickets together and still attended (until mid-show when J. had to leave and catch her plane or something), so quite possibly the last moment they'll ever see each other occurred in the middle of a Fish show, during "Cliché."  I don't know quite how one would feel in that moment, except that there's probably a Fish song for the occasion.****  

Setlist (same for both gigs)

1)  Vigil

2)  Credo

3)  Pipeline

4)  Shadowplay

5)  Weltschmerz

6)  Long Cold Day

7)  Just Good Friends (duet version)

8)  Cliché

9)  Incubus

10)  Plague Of Ghosts:  Old Haunts

11)  Plague Of Ghosts:  Digging Deep

12)  Plague Of Ghosts:  Chocolate Frogs

13)  Plague Of Ghosts:  Waving At Stars

14)  Plague Of Ghosts:  Raingods Dancing

15)  Plague Of Ghosts:  Wake Up Call (Make It Happen)

[Encore #1]

16)  A Gentleman's Excuse Me

17)  Kayleigh

18)  Lavender

19)  Heart Of Lothian

[Encore #2]

20)  The Company

This post concludes the "Benjamin Loves Fish" writing project.  Regardless of how few or many actually read these, they've been a joy to write.  What next?  Well, I'm going to briefly let my charismatic singer-songwriter projects lie fallow while I get back to the other stuff I blog about.  At some point in the future, perhaps not until 2025, I will move backwards in time and forward with writing to write about someone into whose work I've been wanting to deep-dive for ages - Warren Zevon.  

This was the Fish blog that was!

*Although it's also worth mentioning his explanation at the Stockholm gig that the ear monitors basically keep him from hearing much of what audience members are screaming at him, explaining why he got a little testy with a few people ("so when you yell at length like that, I mostly hear 'blah blah blah blah blah.'  So please, shut the fuck up!"). 

**Speaking of outfits, based on the two gigs I saw, everyone has his or her designated costume from which they don't deviate.  Mickey is by far the best dresser of the band, although I'll allow that one's interpretation of "best" depends on how one feels about whatever it is you call what Liz wears... a bright red tinged vest top over a vinyl jumpsuit, or some such.  She's certainly the odd one out in terms of dress (and, per Fish's stage banter, age), but she definitely brings her A-game as far as hairstyle goes.

*** Singe they left the stage, then came back to finish "Wake Up Call," and went from the end of that direcrtly into the beginning of "Excuse Me," does it count as an encore break?  I'm saying yes based on the printed setlist, which did indicate a break between those two songs.

****"Sunsets On Empire," perhaps.