“I was just lost… but if you just fall to the floor and lie there, you’re just going to take a kicking. I had to stand up and fight”: When Fish made an album about the most difficult time of his life

By his own admission, when Fish originally released 13th Star in 2007, his life was a mess. Broke, directionless and dumped just before his wedding, the Scottish singer-songwriter was close to rock-bottom but had turned his frustration and grief into an album that contains some of his finest solo material. To coincide with the record’s deluxe reissue, Fish looks back on the turmoil that inspired it.

Fish wants to make something clear. “If you go on Wikipedia, it goes, ‘Blah blah blah... It’s about the end of a relationship.’ But it wasn’t about that. It was about me, about a time in my life when I was just lost. Absolutely fucking lost.”

The singer is speaking to Prog via Zoom from his home-come-studio in East Lothian. The ‘it’ he’s referring to is 13th Star, his ninth solo album and 13th LP in total, including the four he made with Marillion. Originally released in 2007 and just reissued in deluxe box set form, the narrative around it is that it’s Fish’s ‘break-up record,’ written about his brief, turbulent relationship with then-Mostly Autumn singer Heather Findlay, which ended dramatically a few months before their planned wedding. There’s an element of truth in that, but it’s also far from the whole story.

Fish had actually been wandering in the wilderness personally, professionally and financially for a good few years prior to 13th Star and the break-up that would inadvertently come to define it. Listening to it today, it crackles with pain, anger and desperation. ‘I’m running out of options, I’m running out of road, got no sense of direction, sliding out of control,’ he muttered ominously on the spoken-word introduction to Openwater, which encapsulates his life at the time.

“I was a broken person,” he says now. “It’s an album about navigation and trying to find my way. The open sea, the stars, compass points... Those things were all over it.”

With hindsight, the big man’s career had been an uphill struggle since it began. The release of his debut solo album, 1990’s Vigil In A Wilderness Of Mirrors, was delayed to allow his ex-bandmates to get out of the gate ahead of him with Seasons End, their first record with new singer Steve Hogarth.

Since then he’d endured a bumpy ride at the hands of the music industry, prompting him to establish his own labels, Dick Bros Recording Company and, later, Chocolate Frog Records, to give him some sort of control over his music and career.

By the mid-2000s, that struggle had become even more difficult. A costly divorce from his first wife at the start of the decade had almost wiped him out financially. No less devastating was the discovery in early 2005 that his office manager had been siphoning off mail-order payments into a separate account she’d set up. Fish was awarded £168,000 in damages after filing a civil suit against her.

“She disappeared,” he says. “It was a fucking mess. But the way I look at things, if you just fall to the floor and lie there, you’re just going to take a kicking. I had to stand up and fight my way through it the best way I could.”

Fish had always channelled the drama in his life into his music; this would be no exception. The idea for the album that became 13th Star began swirling around his head in 2006, shaped by recent circumstances in his life. There were the financial body blows he’d taken, but also a more general sense that he was stuck in an endless loop that was leading nowhere.

His most recent albums, 2001’s Fellini Days and 2003’s A Field Of Crows, had barely moved the needle career-wise, and while the Return To Childhood tour, which found him revisiting Marillion’s 1985 album Misplaced Childhood, was hugely successful, even that felt like being stuck on a hamster wheel, doing the same thing over and over.

Then there were the relationships he’d embarked on in the wake of his divorce that had led nowhere. “My life had no direction,” he says. “I was lost personally, without a shadow of a doubt. And from a writing perspective, I knew that’s what I wanted to write about: being lost.”

The period around 13th Star at least provided two fixed compass points. Bassist Steve Vantsis had been playing in Fish’s band since 1999’s Raingods With Zippos, though he hadn’t been directly involved in the songwriting process. But now the singer needed someone to step up on that front, and Vantsis proved the perfect person for the job.

When he started coming up with ideas, I thought, ‘Wait a minute, I can work with these,’” says Fish. “He was bringing in lovely little acoustic riffs and bits and pieces, but at the same time he was bringing in different stuff – loops and sequencers.”

The other steadying force in the process was producer Calum Malcolm, who had made his name working with The Blue Nile, Prefab Sprout and Hue And Cry. When Fish had set up his home studio, Funny Farm, in 1991, he’d turned to Malcolm for advice, and the latter had done some mastering work for him. When previous producer Elliot Ness moved to Israel, Malcolm was the ideal replacement.

“Calum’s a beautiful person; he’s not somebody you ever get angry with,” says Fish. “He was a good buffer between Steve and me, because things did get prickly at times, specially as we got into the later stages of writing and the relationship exploded.”

There was one other key presence in the period leading up to 13th Star. Fish met Heather Findlay at an awards ceremony in December 2005, and their initial flirting soon turned into a relationship. “After my divorce, I’d bounced around these hole-in-the-heart relationships,” he recalls. “I needed stability. But the one thing I know now is never get involved with someone when you’re trying to fill a hole in yourself. It’s the worst thing you can do, and that’s what I did.” So it proved.

Foreshadowing the turbulence to come, their relationship ended after a few months (Fish – 19 years older than Findlay and already the father of a teenage daughter – puts this down to his reluctance to commit to having children with his new partner). But by the end of 2006, their relationship was back on, and even more intense than before. On Valentine’s Day 2007, he proposed to Findlay on Micklegate in York. She accepted, and a wedding date was set for August. Suddenly, it seemed like Fish had found the direction he craved.

Musically, too, things were moving forwards. The singer and Steve Vantsis had been working on several of the songs that would appear on 13th Star, among them the album’s eventual opening track, Circle Line, which found the singer using the titular London Underground route as a stand-in for the frustrating lack of direction in his own life, and the powerful yet graceful love song Arc Of The Curve, which today stands as one of Fish’s finest solo songs.

Two of his lyrics were inspired by a holiday he and Findlay had taken to Egypt during the first part of their relationship. Manchmal (German for ‘sometimes’) was based on the old fable of the turtle and the scorpion, in which the former carries the latter across a river, only for the scorpion to sting it halfway across. “That would become very relevant,” he says, drily.

The other song sparked by their Egyptian trip was 13th Star itself. Fish’s lyric was inspired by the yellow stars he’d seen painted on the blue roofs of the ancient tombs in the Valley Of The Kings – a direct connection to the theme of navigation and direction that would come to define the album. He later claimed that the number 13 represented the 13 women he’d had significant relationships with in his life. “Ah, that was bollocks,” he says now. “It was something I made up for the press. It worked, though. Plus 13 is my lucky number.”

Except it didn’t seem so lucky this time. Sessions with musicians including regular Fish guitarist Frank Usher, Mostly Autumn guitarist Chris Johnson and keyboard player Foss Paterson, plus Vantsis and producer Calum Malcolm, were due to begin on June 4, 2007. However, things were thrown into turmoil just a couple of weeks before that when Findlay walked out on both Fish and their relationship.

Talking about it today – and writing about it extensively in the liner notes to the 13th Star reissue – he says he should have seen it coming. Theirs was a tumultuous relationship, swinging between passion and tension. There were frequent arguments. The final straw, he says, was when he asked his fiancée to sign a prenuptial agreement. She refused. When he brought up the issue again, she announced she was calling off the wedding.

With the recording of 13th Star due to begin in just a couple of weeks, Fish had two options: cancel the sessions or plough on regardless. Cancelling was never going to happen.

“After the relationship exploded, I was not in a good state of mind. Trying to get my head around writing an album was difficult, and Steve was an anchor in the studio. He could have walked away and said, ‘I’ll come back in three months when you’re over this.’ But it was a case of: ‘No, we’ve got to make an album.’”

Mired in the misery that comes in the aftermath of a break-up, Fish retreated to his greenhouse – nicknamed The Bluehouse “because it was painted blue, not because I was blue” – to finish off lyrics. “I’d take CDs out there and listen to them,” he says. “Just me on my own with a bit of paper.”

Some of the new lyrics he came up with seemed to reflect the tumult in his life. Where In The World predated the split, but changed to become a portrait of someone paralysed by loss. It begins with the line, ‘This time last year I was in love...’ before seemingly addressing his break-up: ‘Before I knew it you had disappeared/ Without a word, you stole my dream.’ “I did feel self-conscious about that lyric,” he admits now. “It was very self-pitying.”

Other songs took on a different cast, not least Square Go (‘My soul a glacier, I move alone’), which was written from the perspective of a disillusioned ex-squaddie but could have easily been a snapshot of Fish’s own mindset at the time.

It wasn’t all darkness and despair. Zoë 25, originally titled Micklegate after the place where Fish had proposed to Findlay, was his attempt to capture the same sense of transient love that Ray Davies did with The Kinks’ Waterloo Sunset. The title character was inspired by the Page 3 girl Zoë McConnell, who he’d spotted in a copy of The Sun that had been left lying around the studio, resulting in a song that played out like a more sweet-hearted, less desolate update of the Marillion song Chelsea Monday. (Fish tracked down and met the real-life Zoë, who politely declined to appear in the video for the single.)

Mostly, though, 13th Star was an album of emotional synchronicity. His attempt to write a record that reflected the directionless state of his life had been reflected back on him. “It just matched up,” he says. “A lot of these things were already in place, then something comes along that colours it in a different way, gives it a different perspective.”

Nor was the turbulence that shaped his life over. Towards the end of the tour in support of the album, he discovered he had a growth on his vocal cords, necessitating surgery. And then there was the short “joke” of a marriage to a woman he’d met in Vietnam (“Talk about being on the fucking rebound,” he says).

The flip side is that the same period also saw him reconnect with an old German friend, Simone, whom he’d first met in the 1980s. By 2010, they were in a relationship, and married seven years later; they’re still together.

And 13th Star itself? He says he has no idea what Findlay thought of it: they’ve not spoken since the end of their relationship. “I don’t even know if she’s listened to it,” he says. For all the tumult that surrounded it, he himself remains proud of the album. “Regrets are a waste of time,” he says. “You learn from your mistakes, and that’s what I did there.”