No Rock And Roll Fun

A FISH OUT OF WATER FEATURES: So we know what Marillion are up to these days, but what of Fish? The former Mr. Derek William Dick is, ACME reports, doing a Kim Wilde and getting some time in down in the garden. His first job was in forestry, so a "back to his roots" observation is a little bit more than a bad pun, although not much.

Funnily enough, our local garden centre reopened a couple of weeks ago and we popped in to see Kim Wilde doing the ribbon-cutting honours; the poor sod was trapped signing autographs for hours in the "furniture department" (somewhere between bread oven and third circle of hell hot) for young people who were clearly wondering what they'd be able to get for them on Ebay. We don't think Fish would have been so gracious, although when he used to play the Liverpool Lomax he would always spend time with his fans after the show, inviting each to buy him a pint. An awestruck Lomax employee once told us how he saw Fish rack up sixteen pints along the wall, consuming them all in the gap between "last orders" and "time, gentlemen, please."

Of course, the last time we mentioned Marillion we were pointed at and called UK Music hipsters by thisStrangeEngine, which actually cheered us up quite a lot; we've never actually been accused of being a hipster before - of any sort; generally, our reluctance to spend more on trousers than we do on pizza in any given month puts paid to our chances on that score.