Fish's Introduction To Kayleigh


I think it would have been impossible for me to approach a best of collection, without taking account of the song that changed my life, more than any other track that I had been involved with writing. Kayleigh turned Marillion from being a band that was known for making albums, into a band that was capable of writing world wide hit singles. I remember when Steve Rothery came into the room in Chessington, where we were actually rehearsing and writing the Misplaced album. And came in with this riff, and I immediately identified it as the possible twinning with this little lyric that I had, in the little black book with the poems in. It was about a lot of different people. It wasn't just about the one girl, as everybody expected it to be at the time. There was a girl called Kay, who had a middle name Leigh, but I changed the spelling in such a way that it took the focus away from her, I thought at the time. The band hated the idea of me using the name of a present girlfriend as the title of a single, and tried to convince me that it would have been a great idea to use Kathrine, or Jennifer or Laura as the name of the track. But I held my ground, and I'm glad I did. And its quite funny to actually think that in the book of childrens names that's about at the moment, if you look up Kayleigh, its got references: name of single as written by band Marillion. As well as being the single that changed my life about, I've got a lot of fond memories to that summer of '85, and Live Aid and just the way everything changed from driving about in busses, to being in Lear jets, if only for a moment in our lives.

Recorded at Hansa Studios, well the original version was recorded at Hansa Studios. And of course, the video was where I was able to use the old rock star bit of "Would you like to appear in my video". And I met me wife, Tamara, so it meant a lot to me. But at the same time, when I came into the Yin & Yang albums, what I didn't want to do, was just churn out the same version that has been on so many compilation albums, and I wanted to allow my solo band, thats been really around me since 1988, to interpret it. And the version that's out on the Yin & Yang albums is the version that was recorded at the Funny Farm Recording Studios in early '95. And this is it. The single that changed my life. Kayleigh.