Fish “I don’t take The Voice singers seriously”

It might have eight million viewers hooked but you won’t find the former Marillion frontman planning Saturday nights round watching The Voice.

“There’s a generation today that expects everything fast,” the Scots singer told The Sunday Post.

“They want the fame and money straight away and don’t want to put the work in. They look at shows like The Voice or BGT as passports to success.

“I think you can take anybody with a reasonable voice and teach them to sing a few songs. It doesn’t mean they’ll be able to hold an audience for two hours.

“It’s 30 years since I put my first album out and I’m now working on my 14th.

“How many of these folk will be around in even a year-and-a-half? I just don’t take them seriously and haven’t really got any respect for them.”

Putting the hard graft in is something Fish can certainly claim.

He learned his trade through piling into a van for lunchtime and evening pub shows across the country every week.

However, the decades took their toll on the singer with a couple of major vocal cord operations within the last five years.

But he’s come through with flying colours.

“It’s not the falsetto voice I had in 1982 by any manner of means,” he admits.

“There’s wear and tear but back then I was singing in a very unnatural voice that was putting me under pressure.

“A voice coach would have been horrified.

“But I did a fan club convention last October and between the Saturday and the Sunday I was on stage for six-and-a-half hours.

“And I was talking for five or six hours a day. I still had a voice at the end of it, so it’s pretty good.”

The vocal cords will get an outing on a UK tour which starts at Glasgow’s O2 ABC on Friday before Saturday and Sunday gigs in Aberdeen and Gateshead.

It’ll be a mix of old and new material hopefully all remembered.

“We played Dusseldorf in the ’90s and the place was going wild,” he recalls.

“We went to finish it all with Kayleigh for the encore and I had an absolute blank, just totally forgot the lyrics!”