I know I said, when I featured Bon Jovi's two versions of “It's my life” at the beginning of the month, that that sort of thing was quite rare, ie an artist essentially covering their own song, and it is. But I've found something even more weird, and it's from my favourite ever band, Marillion.
The song “Berlin” appears on Marillion's first album after Fish left for a solo career, and it's a great song, heavy with Cold War rhetoric, obviously written well before the Wall came down. The strange thing about it is that it actually surfaces, in another form, on a previous album. In fact, it's the last they made with Fish, the downbeat “Clutching at straws”, and it's not part of the actual album released, but an extra track added to the CD remaster that was released ten years after “Seasons end”. But the music and lyric had been written during the sessions for “Clutching at straws”, lyric by Fish, so you could say that the song had been around really since 1987.
When Fish departed, the band were left with a lot of material he had written or collaborated on, and the original version of “Berlin”, which had a totally different lyric but virtually the same melody, and was then called “Story from a thin wall”. This was then the song included on the remaster of “Clutching at straws” in 1999.
Meanwhile, the lyric that powers “Story from a thin wall” seems to have been taken by Fish for one of his own first solo songs, on his debut solo album “Vigil in a wilderness of mirrors”. The song “Family business” has the same lyric as “Story from a thin wall”, but new music.
This is, therefore, the only time that I can see when a band not only covered their own song, but a former member of that band also covered it, and each of the three versions, though similar, are radically different. Admittedly, it's only the lyric that links the two Marillion songs with the Fish one, but even so, it's interesting. And to hear the same song sung with completely different lyrics is also very intriguing.
Anyway, below I've included all three versions: first, the original, “Story from a thin wall”, with Fish on vocals, unused until 1999, then “Berlin”, with new singer (at the time) Steve Hogarth, from the “Seasons end” album, released 1989, and finally Fish's solo “Family business”, used on his “Vigil in a wilderness of mirrors” album, which hit the shelves in 1990.