It's Coming Home

7/11/96, London, ENG, Shepherd’s Bush Empire

SET 1: Runaway Jim, Cavern > Reba, I Didn't Know, Sparkle, Stash, Scent of a Mule, Sample in a Jar

SET 2: Harry Hood > Bouncing Around the Room > Also Sprach Zarathustra > Maze, The Lizards, Hold Your Head Up > Terrapin > Hold Your Head Up, You Enjoy Myself, Hello My Baby

ENCORE: A Day in the Life

Listen

At last, history: On July 11, 1996, Phish played their first headlining show in Europe. In the modest 2,000-capacity Shepherd’s Bush Empire, the former home of The Old Grey Whistle Test, Phish finally got to give the Old World the true Phish experience, with two sets, no opening act, killer lights, and no time limit, outside of venue curfew. The crowd, full of study abroad students and international travelers and possibly even a few actual English people, is clearly on their side from note one of Runaway Jim all the way through Hello My Baby, where yesterday’s whistlers are now replaced by the more familiar sound of shushing.

One would think that several days of pent-up Phishy weirdness would gush out as soon as they got back in charge, but that would have to wait for tomorrow night’s doozy in Amsterdam. In the meantime, there’s definitely some seepage: Fishman gets not one, but two vacuum solos, the Hood intro and YEM’s vocal jam are restored to their normal runtime, and there’s a very lengthy (and surprisingly good!) Mule Duel. The band jokes about Fish’s hero Syd Barrett sitting up in the balcony, and rather cheekily encores with A Day In The Life, a move they’d be too embarrassed to repeat the next year when they play the actual Albert Hall.

But the band still seems stuck in tutorial mode. They only play three songs that they hadn’t already played this month for Santana audiences, and two of those are the Fishman features; the third, Lizards, is an obvious one to keep among friends, given the lyrics. There’s zero, zip songs from the upcoming album, instead concentrating on some of the highlights from A Live One, including Stash, YEM, and Hood, opening up a second set for the first time since 1991. In a blind listen, most Phish fans would probably place this setlist somewhere in early 1994, an April night at The Beacon or a New England college arena repping Hoist.

The music, too, feels a bit stuck in the past. Apart from a few flourishes — that Mule Duel, again, is pretty remarkable for its Trey segment, which consists of a mini-kit and effects pedal solo that is almost Steve Reichian — the band feels like it has sonically regressed two-plus years, before the experimental boundary-pushing of late 1994 and Summer 1995 and the maximalist pyrotechnics of Fall 95. I’m trying not to be too hard on this tour/year, I really am. But now that we have a “normal” show, it’s really tough not to recall that we’re only seven months and 10 shows past the triumph of New Years Eve, and this band, while still very good of course, never even approaches the transcendence of that New York night.

Aside from not wanting to scare off any foreign newbies that wandered in, there’s a few plausible theories why this might be. A six-month break (minus a couple one-off shows) is unusually long for the band at this stage, the closest thing being the time off between late August 1993 and...April 1994, excepting the 1993 NYE run. Sure, they spent time recording together during those months, but Billy Breathes reflected a change of approach for the band, using the studio as an instrument to a degree they hadn’t done previously and thus consciously distancing themselves from their live approach. 

Photo by C. Taylor Crothers.

Perhaps there’s also a psychological effect of returning to the kinds of venues they haven’t frequented since the early 90’s in the U.S. — a couple thousand fans, general admission, a stage small enough that Trey and Mike are practically rubbing elbows. After quickly getting over large-room jitters, Phish started using American sheds and sports arenas as an opportunity to get subversive, widescreen, or both simultaneously. Finding themselves jerked back into the environments they had mostly left behind 3 or 4 years in the past must have been jarring, as enjoyable as it was for fans who missed those intimate opportunities the first time around. It would take until next year for Phish to realize these venues were an opportunity and not a regression.

But there’s just a general malaise hanging over 1996 that isn’t going away anytime soon, as much as I’m hopeful to find some hidden gems. In The Phish Book, even Trey gives the year a lukewarm review, saying:

“All through 1996 we felt as though there was something new for us to discover about ourselves out there, but we didn’t know what it was. And we were a little dissatisfied with having played more or less the same way for the last couple of years.”

I gave the new-ish songs some credit the other day for setting up a unique Mike’s Song, but I’m going to go the opposite way now. With most of Billy Breathes already written and debuted by Summer 1995, the new song smell is already off of songs like Theme, Free, and Caspian, and most of the fresher crop (Waste, Train Song, Talk) isn’t really the stuff of exciting live performances. It’s not a great sign that the band wasn’t chomping at the bit to play any of those songs tonight, and it’s a sharp contrast to Europe ‘97, when setlists were sometimes more than half “unheard” material.

So without a batch of songs to push them out of their comfort zone, in unfamiliar cities and bumped back to clubs, with the rust of an extended break, the band kind of stagnates. Like the myth about sharks, Phish always has to keep moving to stay alive, and swimming in circles just isn’t enough. Doing so in an attempt to win over some new fans on a new continent is excusable, but perhaps didn’t set the right tone for the year to follow.