FAREWELL TO CHILDHOOD

Way back in 2005, Fish did a special 20th anniversary tour for Misplaced Childhood, a live performance of which was chronicles on the Return to Childhood album. That was OK, I thought, but the main attraction of the show - Misplaced Childhood itself - sounded off to me, like Fish and his band hadn't quite cracked the problem of reconfiguring the songs to account for how Fish's voice has aged since his days in Marillion.

10 years later, and another big anniversary for Misplaced Childhood beckoned. Fish was enjoying a bit of a late-career peak at this timel with Feast of Consequences being perhaps his most accomplished solo album and the Movable Feast tour showcasing him and his band in fine form - in particular, his voice, which had been struggling for a while there from the late 1990s to the 2000s, seemed to have bounced back somewhat, albeit with the lower range that inevitably comes with age.

At the same time, Fish realised that whilst he was in rare form in 2015, there was no guarantee that he'd be in the same form in 2025... and nor would he necessarily want to be. Indeed, in 2020 Weltschmerz would be explicitly declared as being his retirement from studio albums; whether that sticks or not remains to be seen, but for a good few years now Fish has made it clear that he doesn't want to keep dragging his old hits out year after year until he falls to pieces onstage; he'd rather take a dignified last bow and go out strong than live to become a mockery of his former self, especially since he came close to suffering that fate already in his solo career.

As such, the 2015 tour was billed as the big farewell to Misplaced Childhood: this was it, game over. Fish might or might not include individual songs from the album on subsequent live gigs - though recent live sets do seem to have allowed it to lie fallow - but this would be 100% the last time he'd play through the entire concept album from start to end. And since Marillion had long since stopped doing that, that'd be it outside of tribute acts and the like.

Like the Return to Childhood album, this is a two-disc affair, with the first disc consisting entirely of Fish solo material. This time, Fish keeps this part short, keeping this part to 40 minutes - but damn, it's a good 40 minutes, with excellent picks from across the whole span of his solo albums. (Feast of Consequences is, of course, the title track from what was then Fish's latest album, whilst Family Business hails from his solo debut, Vigil In a Wilderness of Mirrors.) Rather than restricting himself to old standards, however, Fish also slips in a couple of deep dives - Long Cold Day from Fellini Days makes a surprise appearance, and the set opens with a great version of Pipeline from the unfairly maligned Suits album, a song which through subsequent live refinement has only become more potent.

Then disc 2 has the main event - the playthrough of Misplaced Childhood itself. This, I think, is substantially more successful than the version on Return To Childhood, both because the band do a smoother job of adjusting the material to a lower key and because Fish isn't trying to force his voice to do things it can't do (and he's rehabbed his voice to the point where it's a bit more reliable than it was in 2005). Two encores are provided, aptly chosen - Market Square Heroes because it was an early anthem of Fish's when he was Marillion, and The Company because ever since it first emerged it's become something of an anthem for Fish's solo career.

The end result is a substantially tighter set than Return to Childhood (100 minutes instead of a shade over 2 hours), and a better performance. This gives it the clear edge, to my mind, and that's good. Presented in fairly lavish packaging - in a similar form factor to the recent remasters of Fish's back catalogue - Farewell To Childhood joins The Movable Feast in being part of Fish's recent effort to put out some really nice, high-quality live releases, to make up for the somewhat hit and miss nature of his previous live efforts. I can't say it quite measures up to that, but it does more justice to Misplaced Childhood than the Return To Childhood release did.