Things are really going swimmingly for Jerry Fish
Carnival curator and showman extraordinaire, Jerry Fish, will be flexing his gills on Leeside later this month in the wake of his latest single.
‘Ain’t No Woman Gonna Make A George Jones Outta Me’ is the second single from Fish’s new album, ‘Dreaming Of Daniel’, a tribute to the late renowned American songwriter Daniel Johnston, featuring singer and Fight Like Apes frontwoman, MayKay.
Fish fans in Cork will get the chance to see the track performed live when he plays St Luke’s in Cork city on 22 February.
Talking about his new album, which features 13 covers of Johnson’s songs, Fish described it as a “labour of love” that was five years in the making.
“I am very proud of it. It’s a record full of amazingly talented musicians, a fourteen-piece orchestra, a three-piece brass section, backing vocals from some of the best vocal talent in Ireland, praising one of the greatest songwriters of all time,” said Fish.
Jerry Fish aka Gerard Whelan (front man of Dublin alternative rock band, An Emotional Fish), grew up in South London where he was first introduced to rock and roll.
“I wanted to be a rock star since I first set my eyes on Marc Bolan and T Rex in the ‘70s,” said Fish.
“It was in Dublin’s fair city I served my apprenticeship and laid the foundations of fulfilling my dream.”
Inspired by Iggy Pop, Fish spent years playing in garage bands, earning himself a reputation locally as being somewhat of an enigmatic frontman. In 1989, after recording a demo in a basement in Dublin, Fish’s band, An Emotional Fish, were “pursued and courted”, as he puts it, by “every major record company in the world”.
“At one of our early gigs in Sir Henry’s in Cork, we had 36 A&R record company people attend,” recalled Fish.
An Emotional Fish went on to release a couple of singles on U2’s Mother label before signing the biggest record deal Ireland had ever seen at the time with Warner/East West.
With band’s first album enjoying relative success, followed by an international tour alongside the likes of Sonic Youth, Nirvana, and Depeche Mode, the future looked bright for the young Dublin band.
However, with record sales not reaching the heights they might have hoped for and their second album proving a difficult and expensive undertaking, things got a little bumpy for the group. Though highly praised in Europe and the United States, the UK press, most notably the NME, did not like the band.
Fish said: “The record label had spent too much money on An Emotional Fish, and I guess we were considered spoilt goods by a portion of the UK media.”
The band went on to tour with U2 on their Zooropa Tour in France and Italy in 1993. However, while on tour in America later that year, the band was unceremoniously dropped from Warner/East West.
Fish said: “We returned home to Ireland and spent the last of the money we had in the bank producing and recording an independent record, ‘Sloper’. We wrote some beautiful songs and just recorded them ourselves, in a small local studio in Dublin; it was a much easier process.”
After some legal issues with a German label which went to court and dragged on for years, the band, thoroughly exhausted from the ordeal, finally called it a day in 1995.
“I dropped out of music completely, bought a vintage motorcycle, divorced my wife, and happily took to obscurity,” said Fish.
“I was happy to see the back of the endless touring, band politics and boring record company marketing.
I never really enjoyed being a ‘rock star’ even though it was my childhood dream.
After going back to being a “real person” Fish did whatever odd jobs he could find to pay the rent, turning his back on music for close to seven years. However, after meeting the love of his life and having his first child in 2001, something changed in him.
“When I looked into my baby daughter’s face, I thought to myself, I really don’t want to return from a building site covered in dust and tell her, ‘You know, daddy used to be a rock star’.
“So, I took a leap of faith, brought in some investors and all the money I had, and used my wealth of experience in the music business to start an independent record label and record a new album, but this time I would play by my own rules.”
This led to the formation of Jerry Fish & The Mudbug Club, and the rest is history.
When CD sales started to decline in the early 2000s, Fish’s solution was to “run away with the circus”, so to speak, and create a bigger and more spectacular live show.
The result was ‘The Jerry Fish Electric Sideshow’ which he brought to Ireland’s biggest music festival, Electric Picnic, where it has become an annual phenomenon.
‘Dreaming of Daniel’ is the first LP Fish has recorded in 15 years and he said he is now very much looking forward to getting back in the ring.
Check him out on 22 February when he performs in St Lukes in Cork city. Doors are at 8pm and tickets cost €28.50 plus a booking fee.