Haddington, in the Scottish Council of East Lothian, has fewer than 10,000 inhabitants, and one of them is the greatest poet who ever lived.
He is known as Fish.
Born in Edinburgh in 1958, Derek William Dick spent his youth in Dalkeith, eventually settling in Haddington sometime around 1990. Although his songs are not always autobiographical, his upbringing certainly shaped the spirit of the following verse about a middle-class boy:
He met the world as a Dalkeith boy
Raised from a shaft at Monktonhall
In a well oiled cage
That locked away his dreams
An '85 veteran face from the gallery
A ghost from the civil war in the family
He stood his ground on the picketline
'Til all that he was left with
Were his father's cough
And his mother's eyes
That would hold a tear
For the very first time
When the government took his job away
Now fist in hand he'll stand in line
Declare his name and mark his time
To some the only proof that they're alive (“Lucky”, 1991)
It was only later, as a solo artist, that he would indulge his Scottish nationalism and write openly about the struggles of a people who are made to feel unwelcome on their own land…in other words, an Internal Exile.
He is best known as the lead singer of the English progressive rock band Marillion, a role he fulfilled between 1981 and 1988. I previously wrote about their third album, Misplaced Childhood, being my favorite. I’ve also quoted song lyrics elsewhere, some of which are from B-sides and non-album singles.
Of these, my favorite is Three Boats Down from the Candy, which candidly-captures the hedonistic abandon of one-night stand culture, which had become, according to Fish, a “new moral cancer”:
You’re a memory trapped on polaroid,
A puppet, drawn on celluloid
So drink the wine confess your sin
Just flotsam in a silent void!
Fish remains poetic at his most cynical. This is perhaps his greatest gift to modern music. He is essentially a living romantic, in the sense that he always reveals a glimmer of light and some shimmering beauty in the peoples and places he describes. Through metaphor, some incredibly clever, he makes the human soul shine above the brick, steel, and concrete of the approaching 21st century.
It’s six o’ clock in the tower blocks,
The stalagmites of culture shock (“Heart of Lothian”, 1985)
One of his best poems, featured on his final album with Marillion—Clutching at Straws—is hauntingly beautiful, describing the naivety of female youth, and the turbulent outpouring following inevitable heartbreak. Everyone can relate to being disappointed that life is not as good as the book, so to speak. A girl realizes, as she “nervously undressed, in the dancing beams of the Fidra Lighthouse”, that love is not some fairy tale, and that we all play our part in warm wet circles.
We all shed the same tears in the end, the same stories lived again. How fitting that, upon announcing his retirement from music, Fish’s final album is simply titled Weltschmerz.
“I saw teenage girls like gaudy moths
A classroom's shabby butterflies
Flirt in the glow of stranded telephone boxes
Planning white lace weddings from smeared hearts
And token proclamations
Rolled from stolen lipsticks across the razored webs of glass”
This is great music
Great lyrics, MZ, thanks. This guy is possessed of Hyperborean spirit.