Sugar Mice In The Rain

And so begins day one of the 2012 Fish Convention.

We were up bright and early for a stunning cooked breakfast in the guest house we are staying in. Considering we went out for an Indian last night and then spent the rest of the night annoying the locals in the pub by hijacking their jukebox. We actually had a good laugh with them.

The Assembly Rooms was a half hour walk away from the guest house, which worked breakfast off!

Morning one always starts with a "what has Fish been up to in the last three years...." session. He was in fine fettle! There is a new album coming out in the new year, and a tour, but the dates up in the venue had no Cardiff gig, hopefully that will change.

We then had an hour long acoustic session, which included a brilliant version of Sugar Mice from the Clutching At Straws album. There was also quite a lot of tom foolery going on with Mickey Simmonds, who used to play keyboards for Fish back in a day! That's the great thing about these conventions ... they are very relaxed and no one takes things too seriously.

The evening session tends to be more formal, and proper concert based. We had It Bites as support. Remember them? Calling All The Heroes and all that? They have released two brilliant albums of late called The Tall Ships and Map Of The Past. Well worth checking out.

And then Fish took to the stage. A very long running joke from the Marillion days is the endless requests for Fish to sing Grendel, a 17 minute epic, which he hates and hasn't played live since the 80's. He finally relented, and opened the set with it. The place went mental! We had a two hour journey through his catalogue of solo and old Marillion stuff ...

We left shattered and ecstatic and this was just day one ....