How do you make a music video when the country has been plunged into lockdown? That was the problem facing Fish and directors David Lam and Hannah Thompson when making the promo for Fish's Garden Of Remembrance, the latest song to be taken from his final solo album Weltschmerz.
As the daughter of artist Mark Wilkinson, Hannah Thompson grew up around Fish. "Our relationship with Fish has always been very close," she says. "He's always been like a friend or family, even."
Lam and Thompson had been filming a documentary about elderly people in a care home when, after a day's filming, Wilkinson played them Garden Of Remembrance, a song about a married couple dealing with the onset of dementia. It hit home.
They shot Fish in his house and super-imposed him onto a model. And the singer's emotional performance?
The emotion was real. "I mean, when I recorded the vocal with [producer] Callum Malcolm, I was choking," says Fish. "It's a very personal song for a number of reasons.
"Having worked as an actor, I just employed a lot of minor movements and let myself go. Rather than swallow the emotion, I just let it come up. It caught everyone by surprise."
"It was astonishing how much of himself he gave to us," says Thompson.
Watch the 'making of the video' documentary below.
Weltschmerz is released on September 25. Pre-orders are being taken at Fish's own website and you can also pre-save or add the album to your Spotify, Deezer or Apple Music.
