Citizen Fish

7th October 1999

  Mad Pride organised another successful event during World Mental Health Week in October, when veteran punk outfit Citizen Fish headlined a show in front of a packed crowd of 300 users and music fans at the Garage in Highbury.
  The event had been organised to try to bring mental health rights issues to a wider public previously unaware that these issues existed.
  Southwark's own Tony Palfrey opened the event, combining singing and mime visuals to a backing tape of 80s-style electro-pop. He was followed by Survivors Poetry and folk club veteran John Arthur, a singer-songwriter who took the stage with his guitar and performed some thoughtful numbers.
  Brighton-based four-piece The Fish Brothers were next, with half an hour or so of a humorous mixture of Victorian Music Hall and punk rock. They made good use of the infamous Reclaim Bedlam syringe in their stage act, and can normally be seen supporting The Levellers during their British tours.
  After this we had a show from veteran melodic folk- punk band The Astronauts, whose 7th album "You're All Weird" was released only two hours before the event. They treated us to some intense renditions of songs from this album.
  Finally, anarcho-punk legends Citizen Fish took the stage, and their singer Dik Lyndall opened with a lengthy and impassioned speech about why mental health service users should be treated with dignity and respect. After that they played three quarters of an hour of loud and raucous songs and the audience, if the term may be used, went mad, pogoing wildly and risking serious injury with some spectacular stage-diving. And then the event finished and everyone went home to bed.
  The musical acts were interspersed throughout with speeches by Mad Pride board members Pete Shaughnessy and Simon Barnett who took the opportunity to educate the non-users in the crowd about the basics of mental health rights issues. This provoked a great deal of interest from the sympathetic audience, and this event, together with a recent disco and presence at a large bookfair, established links with civil liberties and political lobbies outside the traditional user ghettos which may prove invaluable during the struggles to come, with a few of their more established numbers from the early 80s.

Citizen Fish in action

Fish Brothers working up a storm

Simon Barnett tells it how it is

An appreciative audience for Citizen Fish's blend of progressive punk, ska and trumpet playing