"THERE CAN COME A STRANGE BEAUTY OUT OF IT ALL"

Illness, old age, death, war. They don’t sound like the most promising ingredients for making what turned out to be one of the most uplifting albums of the year. But that’s what Fish has done on his new – and, he says, final ever – album, Weltschmerz (literal translation from German: ‘world pain’, generally: world-weary).

There’s a lot to unpack here but let’s start with the concept behind Weltschmerz. Ostensibly a double album – two CDs comprising 10 tracks, totalling around 84 minutes of music – the idea took hold in the aftermath of the death of Fish’s father, Robert, in 2016.

“You can prepare for somebody close to you dying. You know they’re going to go, and you mentally build all the walls to deal with this emotion that you know is going to come at you. Then it happened and it struck me in a completely different way to what I expected. I just focused, blocked everything off. Then when the funeral was over I locked myself in the garden for, like, seven months, just doing nothing. I couldn’t write. Couldn’t do anything. I didn’t get the first thing written on paper until the end of 2017. That was Little Man What Now?.”

Talking via Skype from his countryside home outside Edinburgh where he’s lived for 30 years, Fish goes on to explain how his father’s death was followed soon after by his own multiplying health problems: operations in 2017 on his spine and, separately, his shoulder, have been followed more recently with operations on his heart and his hands, and a near-death experience with sepsis (caused by the body’s response to an infection).

“That was all within the tail of the comet of my father’s death. I was in and out of hospital all