1988 - 1997
It all started in Nottingham
sometime in 1988, when the golden-voiced 12-string guitar-playing Gordon
Pollitt and his mate Richard Ward met a frenetic fiddler of Irish, English and
Scots folk tunes, Derek Richardson. All three were inspired by the irreverent
and rebellious approach to music drawing on folk traditions taken by Woody
Guthrie and Bob Dylan, and soon began playing together at open-mic nights.
Richie left early on, but they were joined on accordion by John Davidson, an
anarchist actor, who threw some Cajun into the mix. When Mark Shotter heard
them busking in town as he was walking back from a Forest match, he asked if he
could play the triangle John had with him, and that night at a party a cheese
grater was added to the instrumental mix (later to be replaced by the
washboard) and they rocked! The Wholesome Fish was up and running!
All four members now lived within a few
doors of eachother on Noel Street in Forest Fields, which resulted in hours of exchanging
and practicing folk tunes together, honing and tightening their instrumental
skills and speed of playing. Barry Mullis, newly arrived from Ireland, was impressed with what he saw at
another party and joined them on Banjo and vocals, bringing more Irish tunes
into the set with him, and he organised several gigs in pubs and clubs in
Nottingham and Leicester. When Lee Greenway
moved down from Hull into a friend of Mark's house on Noel Street, his
considerable song-writing talents as well as his ability to play the drums
using just a snare and drum case (for the bass drum) saw him also incorporated,
and the Fish began playing frequently at their local pub, The Carlton (now The
Frog and Onion). As they began generating a fair amount of original material as
well as trad stuff, the Fish's sound reflected some of their common influences - Guthrie, Dylan, The Pogues, The Velvet Underground, Captain Beefheart, The
Fall - a raucous riotous racket played at 90 miles an hour with the technical
expertise expected of those true to the traditions being drawn upon.
1990 saw the start of their residency at
The Albion, which established the Fish's reputation as a party waiting to
happen. This backstreet Nottingham pub was
frequented by Irish people and gypsies in one bar and working-class lesbians in
the other, but every Friday night every barrier came down as all manner of
people from townies to crusty ravers would also descend on the pub for an
almighty shindig when the Fish played! Characters particularly remembered from
this time are Timmy, an Irishman in his 90's who was always the first to get up
and dance, usually not long after that being thrown out for fighting, and Billy
the Spoons, Forest Fields’ resident window-cleaner and magical player of the
spoons and bones. After one year of this weekly revelry and an ever-increasing
amount of other gigs, the Fish had lost Barry but had found themselves a
manager (Aidan Gormley), a real drummer (Paul Walker), a bass player (Steve
Truman), and a tuba player (Val)!
Now playing regularly out of town as well
as the watering holes of Nottingham, Aidan
judged the Fish were ready for a bigger stage. With the help of a bluff
Yorkshireman (Andy Dyson) living and promoting over there, Aidan arranged a
wildly successful Irish tour, resulting in a TV appearance on RTE 2. The Fish
were to return there twice more over the next two years, spreading their brand
of anarchy and mayhem from the North, where they attracted Special Branch
attention after hosting a massive after-gig party just off the Lisburn Road, to
almost the southern-most tip of Ireland on Sherkin Island, where they played
for seven hours until 5am, only stopping because the pub had been drunk dry of
everything except Creme de Menthe! Their best Irish gig was a benefit for Sinn
Fein youth at The Anarchy Night Café in Dublin,
where they reduced an initially Brit-sceptic scowling set of shade-sporting
young nationalists to a heaving mass of dancing flesh with a snarling set of stupidly
fast and punked-up tunes. After the first tour Steve left to be replaced by
Tricky (Richard Danks) on bass, after the second Val left and after the third
Derek left, Bethan Noble coming in on fiddle. Aidan also departed around this
time, having tired of the thankless task of organising the anarchic Fish,
though not before facilitating a successful tour of Scotland
and slots supporting The Pogues and Toumani Diabate at the Nottingham
and Bradford Heineken Festivals respectively. On their final tour of Ireland the Fish met Marguerita from East Germany,
who said she would organise them a tour there, the wall having just fallen.
This she did, and the Fish were to return once a year for the next five years,
playing bars, social centres, self-managed youth clubs and squatted punk
houses, universities, arts centres and folk festivals, making many fondly
remembered friends and urging audiences to hold onto their strong sense of
community as the privatising tide of capitalism washed inexorably eastward.
By 1992 the Fish had a new dynamic
Notts-Scots manager, Scotty (Steven Clark), a manic Italian driver, Marco (who
left to live in Ireland,
never to be heard of again, to be replaced by the equally manic Andy), and a
soundman, Nigel the hippy (Nigel Christie). Ever resourceful, Scotty managed to
get the Fish passes into Glastonbury Festival to play the Blaggers' stages
around the Greenfield
area. Once again, the Fish were to return several times to this festival of
festivals and one year were broadcast live on Radio One at 4am from The Golden Moon tent by John Peel. Another
year Rory McLeod joined them on trombone as they played in The Velvet Rooms.
All was 'cooking on gas' as Scotty would (often) say, with an average of 3 gigs
a week throughout 92 and 93 and on New Year's Eve of 93 Scotty got the Fish on
the bill at The Melkweg in Amsterdam, a coachload of hardcore followers and
partyheads being taken over with them to celebrate in style! The next year was
equally busy, a highlight being the Orkney Folk Festival, where they were the Fringe, and the Alt-Na Main
bikers' festival, where most of the band stayed up most of the night with most
of the festival goers, tripping on acid, watching the sun come up not 10
minutes after it had gone down! John had finally left the Fish just before this
to pursue puppeteering in Spain,
though his loss was less keenly felt when Joel Thomas was recruited on
harmonica, adding that little shot of extra funk to the mix. Not long after,
Jim Walker also joined on fiddle after jamming deep into the night and most of
the next afternoon with the band as they played three gigs over a weekend in Bath.
The Fish were flying! They were
magnificent, a wall of electro-acoustic sound, 'The Velvet Underground gone
Cajun' as a TimeOut reviewer put it. Their set was now mostly self-composed,
with four vocalists, Lee, Gordon, Tim and Joel all writing and singing. They
had now released six tapes and one vinyl EP, selling around 20,000 copies of
all combined, primarily at their constant flow of gigs. They were touring the UK and
abroad and were regular performers on the summer Free Festival circuit.
According to Scotty A&R interest in the band was high: it only seemed a
matter of time before a label realised the huge potential of the Fish to reach
a mass market.
Unfortunately the call never came and the
pressures of constant gigging and touring were increasingly getting to the
band. It was true to say they were a sticky bunch to manage back then, a fact
proved when they (perhaps prematurely) severed their professional relationship
with Scotty to manage themselves. The timing was bad; the temptations to
over-indulge inherent in their 'Folk n' Roll' lifestyle and the inter-personal
tensions exacerbated by the long periods of time together on tours were
creating fault lines in the Fish. In 1995, they fractured. First Mark left the
band to travel and to further pursue his DJing and production of dance music in
the free party scene. Not long after, Tim was sacked for his increasing
sloppiness and Lee also departed to live with a lass he'd met in East Germany,
forming a band out there. Tim joined him in Leipzig
for a while before later travelling to India several times. The Fish were
flapping a bit.
Despite the line-up being pared down to
six, the Fish still packed a considerable instrumental punch, with the dual
fiddle interplay of Beth and Jim and the harp artistry of Joel driven ever onwards
by the pumping drum and bass of Paul and Tricky and Gordon's relentless rhythm
guitar. At this time, the influences they'd increasingly absorbed through their
travels in East Germany and Czech were finding their way into the Fish's music,
with both traditional and self-penned compositions of some complexity being
played with flamboyance. As well as the annual East German tour, the Fish were
now playing some dates in West Germany and toured Holland a couple of times to great
audiences and critical acclaim. However, it could be said that in losing Lee,
Mark and Tim the Fish had lost their edginess, their wild punk energy. By 1997,
ten years on, the Fish were finding it harder and harder to swim against the
stream. Beth and Tricky had got together some time before and now had a child
to bring up, a fact which influenced their respective decisions to leave around
the end of 97 and Joel left not too long after them. Though Gordon, Paul, Jim
and the original bass player Steve carried on for a while under the name of
Easy Pieces, by late 1998 that line-up folded and the Wholesome Fish were
officially dead fish.
The Resurrection of Wholesome Fish
It was April Fools Day 2005 and Beth and
Tricky had decided to get married - it was a bit of a rushed affair after 12
years together. They thought it would be nice to have a decent band for the
evening so hired one..........called Salmagundi, but what they really wanted in
their hearts of hearts was Wholesome Fish. Could they be persuaded to reform to
play at the reception for a bit of fun? Incredibly, given some of the things
that had been said on the various leavings of the Fish, after a few phone calls
and tracking people down, all of the Fish circa 95 agreed to get up and play a
few songs with the exception of Paul the drummer.
The wedding went well and quite a few old
friends of this Fish were there to witness the return. There was even Nigel
back on the sound desk! That night we got asked to do a party…then play the
Lion...then the Frog and Onion and within a few months there were gigs every
other weekend. People were well up for it!
Jim chipped out of things due to other
commitments and though Mark and Lee between them were able to handle drumming
duties a 'proper' drummer was needed. Emma Williams stepped in for a stint - her first gig was at the Off the Tracks Festival in 2006 in front of 500 people
and she did us proud - but she had too many other commitments to stay for long.
Having just left Nottingham hillbilly kung-fu
funk outfit Grain, James Trickey was the ideal candidate and after a bit of
time was persuaded to throw in his lot with the Fish. Early on in 2007 it was
clear that Joel had other musical interests that he wanted to pursue and so he decided
to move on. The reformed Fish played over 40 gigs in 2007, including The Larmer
Tree Festival, the Small World Festival and Nottingham Riverside Festival.
However, by the end of the year they were a little jaded and decided to take
time out to write and record some new material with a view to completing an
album by summer 2008. Gotta keep moving on 'cos only dead fish swim with the
stream!