Fischer-Z

John Watts’ 36-year career includes 20 albums and around 3000 concerts and festivals worldwide. He has been successful both in Fischer-Z and as a solo artist throughout Europe, with album sales in excess of two million. Peter Gabriel, Steve Cropper and Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ Brass section have all contributed to his recordings. Watts has performed to crowds of 167,000 alongside James Brown in East Berlin, toured with both The Police and Dire Straits, was on the bill of the final Bob Marley European festival tour and has toured the USA and Canada. In more recent years Watts has developed a reputation as a multi-media artist, poet and playwright, and has often been described by fellow artists as ‘a force of nature’. He has amassed an impressive and eclectic range of creative work and his performances are characterised by Watts’ verve, warmth and humanity.

Watts developed his musical career in punk clubs while studying clinical psychology and working in mental institutions. The first Fischer-Z album Word Salad was released in 1979 on United Artist Records, alongside releases by their contemporaries The Buzzcocks and The Stranglers. Word Salad was a cult record in the UK (John Peel supported the single Remember Russia) but Fischer-Z achieved an even bigger critical and commercial success across continental Europe. There were several appearances on The Old Grey Whistle Test and a first Top of the Pops appearance with the successful European single The Worker – the story of Watts’ father’s daily commute to London. The second album, Going Deaf For a Living, firmly established his ability to convey worldly political issues in narrative songs against a background of quirky pop and reggae-influenced music (comparisons were made with both Talking Heads and Ian Dury). The So Long single (1980) was featured heavily on the fledgling MTV channel.

Fischer-Z’s European success was cemented with Red Skies Over Paradise (1981), described by Der Spiegel as “a candid and passionate appraisal of Cold War Europe”. The album included songs that resonated with audiences right across continental Europe. Berlin, Marliese, Battalions of Strangers, Cruise Missiles and the title track have all been described as classics of that era and sales topped a million. Watts’ reputation was firmly established as a leading exponent of overtly political pop songs. He disbanded the original Fischer-Z line up in the summer of 1981, feeling the band had drifted too far from their original art punk ideals. Watts’ first two solo albums One More Twist (1982) and The Iceberg Model (1983) included the anthemic single One Voice and experimental The Iceberg Model track. He briefly formed a band called The Cry and released a pop/dance album Quick Quick Slow (1984) produced by the highly respected American Jimmy Douglass. In the 1980s, Watts was very deeply affected by the political events unfolding as Thatcher tried to beat down the trade unions in Britain. His Dark Crowds of Englishmen song is about the miners’ strike and the disappearance of a way of life.

Watts reformed with a new line up in 1987 and had single successes including The Perfect Day (1988), based on lonely-hearts ads and Say No (1989), a call to arms for the poor and the powerless – taken from the albums Reveal (1988) and Fish’s Head (1989). He made the Destination Paradise album (1991) at Peter Gabriel’s Real World studios including Further From Love and the title track, which highlighted civilian suffering in times of war. The next two Fischer-Z albums Kamikaze Shirt (1993) and Stream (1995) continued to combine a political point of view with songs grounded in Watts’ real-life observations and experiences. He returned to his solo career with Thirteen Stories High (1997), one of his most admired indie guitar-style albums. Many songs such as I’m a Reptile and Angel of Gardenia are firm favourites with the fans. For his next album Bigbeatpoetry (1999) he branched out combining poetry, prose and song lyrics with a DJ and beats. An era of multimedia projects began with Ether Music & Film (2002) where he travelled internationally, recording musicians in the streets and in their own homes using only his laptop. The entire project was filmed and released as an album and a DVD.

Real Life Is Good Enough (2005) was a noisy two-piece, electric guitar and drums album which Watts made with Sam Walker. It was compared with The Black Keys early albums. The sister album, It Has To Be (2006), consisted of tunes drawn from his interaction with strangers encountered in ten different European countries who shared some of their life experiences. He wrote a song for each of them. The album package included poems and short stories written by Watts. The Morethanmusic album (2010) added a kaleidoscope of orchestral and filmic colour to Watts’ work and included a first single Head On, inspired by his observation of a seven-year old child watching the live execution of Saddam Hussein on a mobile phone. A second single URSo, has proved to be one of the most popular live songs from the album. Watts made a film to accompany each track on the Morethanmusic album.

In 2012 Watts embarked on the ambitious World-Go-Round project incorporating his play, The Last Picasso, performing poetry from his book The Grand National Lobotomy and developing new songs. The play is an absurdist black comedy. Watts “created nothing less than a completely new genre. A miscellaneous mixture of a musical play, rock concert and a multimedia performance”. (Morgenpost Hamburg, February 2012). In The Grand National Lobotomy Watts paints himself and his art in typical pithy and self-deprecating style in a piece entitled ‘Eggers’, “…a story writer, poet and starving living legend of English descent, who will cover anything you like from Live 8 to prostate, Gordon Brown to Eva von Braun, Karl Marx to stripey underpants, Stockhausen to Waterman, Botticelli to vaseline, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, Beck to Becks…”

The new Fischer-Z album, This is My Universe, released in March 2016 includes the track Martha Thargill where Watts revisits the miners’ strike and the disappearance of a way of life, 30 years on. The title track This is My Universe brings together his music, poetry and philosophy of life to great dynamic effect. He casts a dark and rueful eye over love and marriage in the pop single Just-a-Man and creates a manifesto for the proactive and genuine romantic in Just Like Justice. His eternally recurring political theme appears once again in the songs Tale of Bales and Winston.

Watts is currently performing both with a Fischer-Z band and solo. Keep an eye on the TOUR page for updates on this year’s European tours…