The theatre is packed with skinny, seaweed-haired men and women all on their feet doing the hippy-hippy shake. Eyes closed and pulling meaningful faces, they re tripping out on the music being pumped through the PA system. The band on stage are nearing the climax of an extended jam that has been going on for, oh, several years at least.
As the musicians glide through the key changes, exchanging solos like relay sprinters passing the baton, the crowd bursts into spontaneous washes of applause. Two ex-pat American college kids at the back of the hall are writing down a painstakingly annotated setlist, complete with indexes of solos and jams. The smell of dope in the room is strong enough to paralyse an ox, bringing new meaning to the term passive smoking . Everything s groovy. Everything s peaceful. Folk are high on life, the music, the fumes of the wacky baccy. It s the hippy dream before it was spoiled by Manson or Altamont or any of those bad trips.
But this is not the Fillmore or the Roundhouse or the UFO club circa 1968 or even 1974. This is the Shepherds Bush Empire Theatre, February 1997, and the band onstage are called Phish.

WHO THE PHUCK ARE PHISH?
Phish are a four-piece band who began life in 1983 on campus at the University of Vermont. Over a period of ten years on the road they graduated from club gigs in New England to nationwide tours, finally joining the ranks of the highest grossing live acts in the USA in 1995. The peak of the Phish phenomenon (and it is a phenomenon) was last August when the band played the biggest concert in the US that year, a two-day festival on an airbase in Plattsburgh, New York. Dubbed the Clifford Ball, the show attracted 135,000 fans. It featured three shows a day from the band with relief provided by a full orchestra (The Clifford Ball Philharmonic) between sets. On that weekend, Phishville was the ninth largest city in New York State.
Phish have released seven albums. The latest, Billy Breathes, is their mellowest and also most commercially successful, entering the Billboard Top Ten at number seven late last year. The record is just about to be released in Europe.
The group specialise in long improvisational jams, rustic folk ditties, hippy-rock masterpieces tempered with Zappa-esque perversity, songs about pavement, 70s snorecore that, like, totally recalls the likes of Steve Miller and The Grateful Dead, and the odd bout of doo-wop or old rock n roll.
Thing is, you won t find them on MTV or plastered all over the press. With this combo, live performance is everything. Their albums sell diddly-squat compared to their concert tickets. Indeed the band s most well-known recordings are probably bootlegs. Devotees do a roaring trade in swapping and trading live tapes of their heroes at stalls set up at gigs or through the Internet. Do the band mind? Do they fuck. Like The Dead before them, they set up special bootlegging areas at their gigs.
No surprise, then, that Phish are notorious for their loathing of the more commercial aspects of the music industry: they ve only ever made one music video and Rolling Stone magazine didn t pick up on their remarkable story until last year. Up to then the band had to swim against a ten-year media blackout. Yet all that time, like the aliens many of their fans spend their spare time boning up on, Phish were out there; building a following, making records, touring, jamming. All you had to do was ask the nearest tie-dyed Yank college kid and he d tell you all about the band, or indeed its gigantic following.
Phishheads are as much a part of this story as the band are. Their only obvious antecedents are the Deadheads, or here in Europe, The Levellers crusty brethren. To understand the Phish anomaly you ve got to grasp the intensity with which people adore them many heads speak of the group s music in quasi-spiritual terms. There s a core element of their audience known as tourheads who hit the road during the summer months to criss-cross America with the band. Promoters and fans estimate the number of tourheads at about 5,000. They ll pack bedding, food and clothes into the back of a van and travel from show to show, setting up little villages on the festival sites, getting by on trading T-shirts, bootlegs, food, hippy trinkets, stoner bric-a-brac and bongs so sophisticated they could ve been designed by NASA scientists.
The tourheads follow other bands too: The Spin Doctors, The Allman Brothers, George Clinton And The P-Funk Allstars, Blues Traveler and even Metallica have all been known to enjoy their patronage. But at the moment it seems that Phish are the hippest alternative to running away with the circus in the rite-of-passage stakes.

A PHISH IN THE FLESH
It s noon, on the first day of Phish s European tour. I m holed up in a room in the rather swanky Royal Garden Hotel in Kensington with Trey Anastasio, the band s guitarist and singer. Ireland mightn t have a clue about Trey s music but he s no stranger to the ould sod: he stayed with his mother (Dina, author of 50 children s books and one-time editor of the Sesame Street magazine) in West Cork several years ago. As he relates his memories of watching An Emotional Fish in Connolly s of Leap, I m struck by the distinct sense that the planet is shrinking.
Your tours seem to aspire to having more in common with old-time medicine shows or circuses rather than the usual plug-the-album jaunts.
It s always been like that, just the community of people we grew up with in Vermont. Three of us went to this small college in Plainfield, Vermont, a real small town. I think there was 35 people at this little artsy college in the middle of the woods about a mile from anywhere. We used to do these Hallowe en shows when we were first starting and they had an arts building there that was built by the students huge walls that were three storeys high that when you leaned on em they were on hinges and weird walkways. We would do these shows and people would come from all over small towns in Vermont and gather, and it would be like these all night long Weirdfests and we d jam all night and everyone would be running naked through these walkways and stuff. And I think it all just grew out of that.
Do you think you were partly responsible for founding the tourhead culture?
Partly responsible and partly kind of . . . I guess we contributed in a certain way to that and I like it, it s a good situation because people are really attentively focussed on what you re doing. Throughout the years I know the names and faces of people, I know when they came into the scene. Still to this day, when we re playing big rooms. There s this core of people and you get to know em.
Another thing that distinguishes you from a lot of bands is that the process of making records seems almost secondary.
We ve never thought of live music in any way as being commercial, or that playing a concert is a way to sell albums. The concert is it. It s real life. I think probably the reason our albums have been lagging behind our shows in quality is because of that. For years, all we thought about was the live show and then we d kind of slip into the studio as an afterthought, play through the songs that we had been playing live and always be scratching our heads two months later over why the album sounded so flat.
But as well as that, you openly set out bootlegging areas for the audience to record your live shows which can t help but damage your album sales. Don t you ever feel like you re shooting yourselves in the foot?
I don t think so. Bootleg tapes are probably responsible for our popularity.
You don t engage in doing much press or making videos or getting on MTV. Why not?
The 80s for me were such a terrible time for music. There s always some great bands at any given time, but the greed factor in corporate music grew to such a disgusting level in the States with the way MTV was coming on and a lot of the bands were shit anything that you heard on the radio at the time apart from maybe The Pretenders, Talking Heads, The Pogues. But in general the direction that music was going was synthesised, cold, mechanical, boring, non-experimental music. In high school I had been listening to King Crimson and to me we were consciously reacting against the way popular music was going. I think in the 90s things went in a really good direction in general for a while there with Nirvana.
You must have felt you were banging your heads against a brick wall during that video age.
That s the funny thing though, we never did. We always felt like we had this incredibly great thing going right from the beginning y know? The only thing that was funny was that nobody was noticing. We always thought we had what was going on right at these shows and it was this big secret. And before we ever signed to a record company we were touring the entire country selling out places I remember playing two nights at the Great American Music Hall, San Francisco with no record company, sold out in advance.
We would just laugh about it. We weren t actively looking to get signed, we just waited for people to come to us. It really never came up. It seems weird but I don t think we ever even thought about it, all we talked about was getting a better light-show, or a new van or something if we made some money playing live.
But what you achieved in the 80s ran completely against the grain, where young artists were almost brainwashed into Getting The Deal and perfecting their studio technique first.
That whole method of thinking about music came from record companies. They re like, How can we sell the most units? Well, we get these kids in and then they put out this record and they go out and sell the record. But to me the experience of seeing a band live is much more powerful by far. Not that there aren t great records and you can t have a great experience listening to a record, but I always liked live music.
It s interesting coming from Ireland and my Mom living in Ireland and spending time there; the Irish had music all throughout their lives. You go to a pub and there s kids and everyone singing. In America I know people who never sing. A lot of people. They re embarrassed. It s just not the same kind of vibe. And I think human beings need to get together and celebrate and play music, it s just a basic human need.
Probably the only parallel in Europe to the Phish phenomenon is the whole pagan/techno/rave scene. Are you aware of what s happening in the dance community at all?
I am aware of it and I feel like there s a real similarity between what we try to do live and what s going on with these raves and stuff. The only difference is the instrumentation. The intent, with everyone trying to get into this trance-like state, is real similar.
We did this show at Madison Square Garden recently and I ve got a friend who is deeply into the New York underground drag queen danceclub scene, so she brought down a whole bunch of her friends, ten or fifteen contortionists, freaks, drag queens and everything, and they were all at the stage dancing while we were playing. Then after the show they took me all night out on the town up to these little underground clubs that I d never known about, after-hours clubs, and she was saying, This is the best House music in New York City and introducing me to the DJs and all that stuff. I was totally knocked out by the stuff they were doing and struck by the similarity of the vibe in some of these clubs and at some of the shows we do.
Is there anyone else you feel a kinship with at the moment?
Probably my favourite band right now is Pavement. And I like Rage Against The Machine. That s kind of what I always wished heavy metal could be, heavy music that meant something. We ve always felt that we were off to the side of what was going on, even when we were a local band in Burlington and they used to have these guitar wars summits where all the local bands would play and we would never be invited or whatever. Even though we were packin the clubs and these bands weren t, we just weren t hip to what was going on, the trends and everything. And it s always been that way but it s a real nice position to be in I think.
These days if you re not pierced and tattooed and slam dancing . . . it s stayed that way to just an absurd level. Last year we had such a good laugh about it, all of a sudden we re playing the biggest shows in North America and we re still a dirty little secret to the press. It just shows that the media is not as responsible for defining trends as it claims to be.
So how do you feel about coming over here to tour Europe where nobody knows who the fuck you are?
It s funny cos it is similar. We re looking at Europe now as Wow, we get to play in clubs! I heard from our manager a couple of weeks ago that one show in Germany had sold six tickets. I told the guys in the band and they were like Yes! This is going to be great! Cos I used to always like shows better when I felt that everyone hated us and we had to convince them.
We did that last European tour warming up for Santana for a lot of the shows, and that was just frustrating, being a warm-up band. You only get to play for 45 minutes, it was against our whole philosophy. So this time we re doing our own shows, it s our opportunity to play in small rooms again. We re not really looking at this like Can t wait to conquer Europe!
It all comes down to . . . I love to play. My whole dream was to quit my shitty job and play music. Which happened. And that was a great day, that was a big day for me, quitting my job. And from that point on it was like, Okay, now I ve quit my job, how much can I play? One of the things we were talking about on this European tour is since we re in clubs and a lot of them open til 2am, maybe we ll get to play three sets! Cos a lot of the places we play now are so driven by the unions. If you play one minute over eleven o clock they charge you $10,000 or something.
You seem to have twice the appetite for stagework than most bands.
That s what always surprises me. Didn t you get into this because you wanted to play? When did you forget that? When did you trade that love of getting up and playing music for, I dunno, pure greed or power or wanting to be the biggest band in the world, not that that isn t . . . (he trails off, contemplates his coffee, becomes almost agitated for the first time in the course of the interview.) Our caterers just did a tour with Oasis in the States right before they did a tour with us and they said that they never wanted to go on, they had to be dragged kicking and screaming onstage. Just crap. It s just a big fashion statement. Whatever.
For a band associated so much with slackers and bong-warriors you seem to have a remarkable dedication to the work ethic. You re more like a travelling convention of college professors.
Well, you know, I was born in 1964 and I was reading somewhere that the baby-boom goes from 1946 to 1964 and Generation X starts at 64 so I m right in between, having an identity crisis!
Is it true that Ben and Jerry (fabled American ice-cream gurus who once patented a flavour called Cherry Garcia) joined you onstage at the Clifford Ball?
Ben and Jerry actually named a flavour after us. It comes out next week.
What s it called?
Phish Food! You re the first journalist I ve told this to. It was going to be a big secret but by the time your article comes out . . . It s a great flavour. We got to help design it and everything.
What s in it?
Milk chocolate ice cream with really good thick marshmallow and a swirl of caramel and then they have dark chocolate fish that you dig for. It s so good (his face crumbles in gastric-orgasmic paroxysms.) Ben has since moved but he was Mike s next door neighbour. They started the same year we did. I started to wonder if this was revisionist history in my mind, but I remember being in Vermont when we first started as a band and there was only one Ben and Jerry s, it was a little corner ice-cream store. And then recently I saw a history of Ben and Jerry s and it s true. When we first got there in 1984 they had one little store where they actually made the ice-cream. So they ve actually grown in the identical amount of time that we have, so it s kind of interesting that we re gonna have a flavour.
Speaking of sweet-toothed rock n rollers, most successful bands have a very sexually charged relationship with their audience, whereas yours is more platonic. It s more like they don t think of you that way.
They don t do they? Oh well. (grins ruefully) I think they think of our bass-player that way. Y know, those bass-players are so mysterious! Somebody I knew was good friends with Dave Matthews (American soft-rocker), right? We used to know each other when we played clubs and everything. He s a real nice guy. Two of my friends went to hang out with him just a couple of weeks ago, he does these solo acoustic shows. The stage was just getting bombarded with bras and panties and then when they went out to the bus they were like twenty thick, rows of girls just screaming and weeping and they re like How come Phish don t . . .? All we get is these guitar-playing people! I don t know why that is.
Your last album Billy Breathes was top ten in America and it s just getting released over here to coincide with the tour . . .
Every album that we release enters at a high number and then after two weeks disappears. Each album enters higher, so a couple of years from now we ll probably enter at No.1 and then we ll be the first band ever to go in at the top slot one week and go down to number 200 the next week. That s gonna be our contribution to music history!
Did using a producer like Steve Lillywhite make any difference to your approach to recording?
Big difference. The thing that was different about Steve was that he gained our trust in a real natural kind of way. He did it by not telling us what to do. It was funny. He s an incredible guy. He just came in and the first thing he said was Let s go down to the bar and have a beer. And just from talking to him you can sense right away that he s got really good taste. And he s an hilarious guy. We had worked ourselves into a corner in the first six weeks. We started to lose all perspective and all of a sudden to have a fresh set of ears walk in at that point was incredible. With a tune like Free he had a lot of suggestions, it was like a whole new burst of energy.
I believe he had a similar effect on U2 s Achtung Baby! album. They d been burrowing away for months in Berlin with Lanois and he stepped in to give it some clarity at the mixing stage.
I just read an interview with them and I was struck by the fact that their band dynamic is so similar to ours. It was really incredible reading this interview. I m really impressed with the way those guys are running their career. One of the things they said is that they have to do everything by consensus, which can be really exhausting at times. Cos that s what we do. There s this Phish philosophy that it s a democracy and everybody has to agree before a decision can be made. Which is very time-consuming but in the end everyone is equally important. There s a chemistry there that works and if anyone left, that would be it. No question. There s no replaceable parts. n