Carnival rolls into town as Jerry Fish plays Festival gig

The Groove Tube with Jimi McDonnell – tribunegroove@live.ie

Roll up, roll up! The carnival is coming to town when Jerry Fish and his band play the Róisín Dubh, as part of this year’s Galway Arts Festival. The former front man of An Emotional Fish and The Mudbug Club is in typically gregarious form as he prepares to come West.

“I guess I’m at my usual skulduggery of experimenting,” he says. “I think what’s really happened to me is years and years ago – in An Emotional Fish – when I went on stage, I became somebody else. But I guess that person that used to take over me onstage has now become me. I’ve kind of become more performer than human being at this stage of the game!”

Jerry’s new drummer is the one-man powerhouse Rarely Seen Above Ground – aka Jeremy Hickey, whose 2008 debut as RSAG received a Choice Prize nomination.

“It’s a bit like a rodeo!” Jerry laughs. “I’m a massive fan, so I feel very honoured and privileged that he’s drumming with me now.”

Also joining Jerry will be his long time collaborator Grum, a guitarist with swagger to spare.

“Grum is pretty much an underground legend waiting to happen,” says Jerry. “I feel very privileged to be working with him. He’s an old friend; I met him initially with Cathy Davey, her first recordings, maybe three or four years before she did her first album with EMI. She came to me with Grum and a bunch of songs. I guess I’m lucky that I’m the guy that people come to.”

Jerry and Grum are working on new material that may eventually become an album, but will start out as a series of stand-alone tracks.

“I guess I’m doing what I did with the Mudbug Club, which is mix up different genres and people,” Jerry says. “I started an album but halfway through it I decided, I’m just going to release them as they come along, with movies.

“I’m playing around with a director called Paul Mahon and we’re about to do a carnival/motorcycle kind of movie. I’ve always loved circus and carnivals, so I’m bringing all that on board.”

Jerry Fish’s career goes back 25 years, to his days with An Emotional Fish. The band were signed to Atlantic Records, a company with a catalogue that includes Led Zeppelin, Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding. With The Mudbug Club, he made the transition to being an independent artist, so it’s fair to say he’s familiar with the highs and lows of the music industry.

“It’s a precarious life,” he says. “If you decide to be in a band and try and live, and feed your family through that, you’re only asking for it – you are a bit of a mad man! We don’t have security, and in a way it’s scary, but the thing that’s happened with the recession – we’re a little bit more used to it, I guess, and a little more tenacious.”

This tenacity comes through in a Jerry Fish live show. Aware of the doom and gloom caused by the economic downturn, Jerry tries to offer up an antidote.

“Even if we give up, there are genes inside us that won’t,” he says. “And I have a lot of fun with that with the live show. In a way, I think I’m the man between the band and the audience. My job is done if I unite the room as one utopian thing!”

That is what he always endeavours to do – there’s no such thing as a sedate Jerry Fish gig. Would he agree that he invites the audience to be part of the show?

“Definitely, Otherwise, what are we doing? I don’t really get the shoe-gazing thing. It’s about being in the now, if we can all be in the same moment.”

The subject sets him off on another tangent.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune