Exclusive Phatfish Interview

December 2004

On 2nd December, 2004, I had the great pleasure of talking with Nathan Fellingham, founder member and drummer with Phatfish, which has been going now for ten years and is a regular at Stoneleigh Bible week and other Christian events around the country.

Your new CD is called Faithful - it has nine older songs which you've re-recorded, and two new songs. Why have you released an album of mostly older songs? Is it something to do with celebrating your 10th anniversary?

The concept was to do an album focused on our congregational songs. Most of our albums have been performance orientated, with some worship songs, so we wanted an album of all worship songs. It felt like it would be great to collect all of those songs in one place. Some of the biggest songs are "Holy, Holy" and "There is a Day", so we thought we can't really do our best worship songs and not have them on there. It was an interesting process going through the set-list, but we've given it a fresh slant.

You said that most of your albums have been performance orientated. Do you see yourself as primarily a performance band or a worship band - or is there really a difference?

Essentially we see ourselves as both, and we see both as the same, but at different events we have different slants. Ever since we were formed we were involved in local church doing a lot of worship stuff there and leading worship at Stoneleigh Bible week. The two things always went hand in hand - doing worship stuff and doing concerts. Our concerts were less worship-based in the early days because were doing pubs and clubs. Over time worship has influenced us more and more, partly because we have more of a Christian audience.

You've produced a lot of music in the last ten years. As a band, is there anything left for you to say?

The question might be, have we got anything left to learn to pass on, and I would say definitely!

Can you tell me what part the Bible plays in your music?

When it comes to songwriting, the Bible is probably our main source of lyrical content. The song "There is a Day" came when I was reading a book called "The Discipline of Grace" by Terry Bridges. Something struck me very powerfully about the hope that we have of eternity and that one day we will meet Jesus in the air. From that I needed to go back to the word and study and expand that theme. I wanted to see what else the Bible had to say about that. I don't know what we have to say that people need to hear, but people do need to hear the word of God. We need to let it direct and govern our lives.

Is there anywhere our subscribers can see you perform over the next few months?

Not until April and May 2005. In March we're doing quite a few things in our home church in Brighton. The best thing to do would be to check out our website (www.phatfish.net).

Nathan, thank you very much!