From the highs and lows of An Emotional Fish to his reinvention as the debonair ringmaster of the Mudbug Club, Jerry Fish has stayed true to his optimistic self, writes KEVIN COURTNEY .
EVERY VILLAGE NEEDS its shaman, a resident soothsayer who doles out homespun wisdom and administers healing potions to his troubled tribespeople. The village of Ringsend might look to one Jerry Fish to fulfil such a role. If you need advice on juggling money, life and relationships, you could do worse than turn to the self-styled ringmaster of his own mad musical circus. If your brow is furrowed with financial worries following the Budget, a bit of Fish philosophy could be just what the witch-doctor ordered.
“The native Americans have a lovely philosophy about unhappiness. They say, if you’re unhappy, you’re either thinking about the future or the past. Because there is no unhappiness in the now.”
We’re in the now – and in the Oarsman in Ringsend, a small, convivial pub just across the road from Ringsend Church and down the street from where Jerry’s mum lives. He recalls a story his uncle told him about the pub.
“The guy that painted the church in the 1950s and 60s had paint left over and he painted the bar here. So the guys felt they could have a pint here instead of going to Mass, ’cos it was the same paint on the walls.”
His family have lived in Ringsend for generations – Jerry’s great-great-grandmothers on both sides were next-door neighbours – but the young Fish grew up in south London in the 1970s, amid IRA bombing campaigns and an all-pervading racism.
“You know, I don’t find it difficult to relate to what Arab people may be going through around the world. And I think the Irish, we’re maybe lucky because we’ve seen so many sides of every coin, you know? We’ve been the good, the bad and the ugly.”
Fish reckons we were getting very ugly at the height of the boom, and that the onset of the R-word might force us to re-evaluate what’s really important in our lives. If we’re looking for guidance, we might find a few pointers in the new album from Jerry Fish the Mudbug Club, their first studio outing since 2002’s hugely successful Be Yourself. Yes, the master is back in the ring, with a new menagerie of tunes, and though they might not save your credit rating, these songs will put a smile on your face as you set your teeth against the coming financial storm.
“I’ve got a song on the album called The Hole in the Boat ,” says Fish. “Now everyone will think that I wrote it because of all that’s going on now, but it was actually written a year and a half ago while I was recording in a dungeon in Temple Bar. And I’d be down there working on songs – I was on my own a lot – and when I came up for air I’d hit Temple Bar and this glut of gluttony, just a den of debauchery and iniquity. And then I’d go back down into this dungeon to write songs, and I felt like I was in the bilge of a ship, pumping out water while everybody masqueraded on deck. So I came up with The Hole in the Boat, thinking that we were really becoming very materialistic and that it doesn’t really suit Irish people.”
There was a time when Jerry Fish found himself up the swampy creek without a paddle, and ended up rowing in a completely different direction. Nearly 20 years ago, when he was just plain Ger Whelan, and singing with An Emotional Fish, he was riding the rock’n’roll tiger.
The band were hot property, enjoying a homegrown hit with Celebrate , and bagging a massive deal with Atlantic Records; the late Ahmet Ertegun, the legendary head of Atlantic, came to Dublin to sign the deal personally.
But the band never made good on the deal – though they were a big success at home, they didn’t make much of an impact outside the cosy Irish music scene. Some of their unkinder critics dubbed them A Promotional Fish, and by the time their second album, Junk Puppets , came out, the celebration had moved elsewhere. The Fish struggled on, releasing their third album on their own label, but they soon floundered.
Still, says Fish, from every negative comes a positive – and his stint as a would-be golden god paved the way for his rebirth as the decadent, devilish, debonair dilettante of Irish swamp-rock. He has great memories, though, of touring the world with An Emotional Fish, playing such iconic venues as the El Mocambo in Toronto and CBGBs in New York. One fond memory is meeting Debbie Harry backstage at Brixton Academy when his band were supporting Blondie.
“I went up to the dressing-room to grab a beer and run back to catch Blondie doing their encore, and there’s Debbie Harry in the corridor in a red dress, stuck to her with sweat, pinned to the wall ’cos she thought I was some crazed fan – and part of me was going, ‘Oh my God, boyhood fantasy’. So I don’t regret a moment of that experience, it was fantastic.”
After the band fell apart, Fish retreated from the rock scene and went back to an old hobby – tinkering around with motorbikes. He also went travelling to “find himself” and ended up finding the love of his life. The couple live in bucolic bliss near Kilkenny on the foothills of Mount Leinster with their four kids. Shedding his rock-star skin and stepping into a new pair of snakeskin shoes wasn’t too difficult a transition, he recalls.
“You remember me from when I was in An Emotional Fish – offstage I was quite a reserved person, but as soon as I got up onstage it would be like Iggy Pop. Some other character just takes over, there’s this entertainer within that just wants to get out.”
Watching Fish do his lounge-lizard thing onstage, you might think he has been possessed by the smoky ghosts of Tom Waits, Willy DeVille, Professor Longhair and Dr John, the Night Tripper. With his rolling troupe of troubadors backing him up, Jerry Fish weaves a strange, heady brew of barrio blues, juke-joint jazz, psychedelia, Tropicalia and whatever you’re having yourself. It’s a persona that fitted him like a well-tailored suit, and eager crowds flocked to Fish’s travelling musical medicine show. The single True Friends was snapped up by Vodafone, and the album became a slow-burner, eventually selling up to 30,000 copies. The band played three consecutive nights at Glastonbury (“We were like the court jesters – it was fantastic”) and turned a triumphant gig at the Spiegeltent into a live album. But though he’s comfortable in his Jerry Fish persona, he’s not about to let this mad Svengali within completely take over.
“At the end of the day, it is just a kind of a cabaret, and if you can bring the audience into the now, whether you’re playing rock or roots or anything, your whole thing is to bring them in and make them feel that it’s all happening right here, right now. That’s the great thing about live performance, isn’t it. It’s all happening now – we’re all in this moment together.”
For the second studio album, he has expanded his Mudbug crew – it features, among many others, two of his old Emotional Fish bandmates, Enda Wyatt and Dave Frew, guitarists Conor Brady and Colm Quearney, Hammond whiz Justin Carroll and two additional vocalists – ex-Tychonaut singer Carol Keogh and Dublin rockabilly star Imelda May.
“I’ve called this album The Beautiful Untrue because of something Oscar Wilde said, that the proper aim of art is the telling of beautiful, untrue things, and I just kind of thought, in a way my job is an escapism of sorts, and I’m learning what I do as an artist – this is the sixth album I’ve made and it’s probably one of the most difficult records I’ve ever made. It’s the first digital record I’ve made, so I have to understand that whole thing. But that’s how I survived as an artist.
“I’ve learned a lot of production techniques from making the second Emotional Fish album with Clive Langer and Alan Moulder. I learned how to produce a record. So now I produce my own records. There were a few years way back when I was sitting there waiting for the phone to ring. And it didn’t ring. So I thought, right, this is actually my job. So I gave myself all these jobs: I am the manager, the record company executive, the artist. My AR department is my wife and we’ve just expanded that, because my eldest daughter has just started to say, ‘Daddy, I like that bit, could you put it back in.’ ”
Fish is relishing becoming the ringmaster once again, and performing that tricky balancing act of controlling his own destiny.
“I’ve never really held down a nine to five and I’ve always survived off my wits, so I suppose I consider myself lucky. It’s really how you see things. It’s how you perceive things. And to me counting your blessings is always more appropriate. There’s another song on the record called Where the Sun Don’t Shine – and I think artists, again, tend to spend a lot of their time in there, d’you know, where the sun don’t shine, and you can get very gloomy and life can seem very bleak.
“The reason I’m positive and I have a positive outlook is that I really think there’s a dark side to me, so I have to keep this light shining. I suppose, to quote Oscar Wilde again, we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. And I like that, because you know, you’re walking down the road, there’s people skipping out of Holles Street every day – and a friend of mine, Stevo Berube, his wife just had a baby, and I was telling him about the cartoon bluebirds that follow you around as soon as the baby is born.
“At the same time that’s happening to a man, there’s a funeral parlour where weeping. And that’s the tapestry of life, and we can’t escape that. You might be standing under a cloud, but somewhere else somebody is sunbathing and having the happiest day of their lives.”
The Beautiful Untrue is out on April 24th on Mudbug Club Records. Jerry Fish and the Mudbug Club play the Academy, in Dublin on Saturday, May 23rd
Labels: interview, jerry fish, the beautiful untrue
