“Kay and I started going out in about 1981 and she was a pharmacist at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Aylesbury. I met her and went, “Wow,” and we started going out, fell in love and we were incredibly close. But the band was just starting and I was like a kid in a sweetie shop on every level. Kay was part of the whole thing but when I went down to join Marillion, I gave up everything, “this is what I’m going to do”.

“So we broke up in late 1982 when we recorded the ‘Script’ album, got back together again in 1983, we kind of bounced about. And then we moved to Belsize Park, a very expensive, lovely part of London and then I went away to America on a tour. When I came back she’d gone, that was it. I came back to the flat and there was only my record collection that was left there with my record player. She’d gone. We never got back together again. When I wrote ‘Misplaced’ I was still dealing with the whole thing, “Have I done the right thing?” and the whole Misplace theme was based around Kayleigh, regretting but at the same time recognising that my life had completely changed. I knew that we’d written a great song and irony upon irony, the woman on the video was my first wife, Tamara.

“We’d [Kay – Ed] lost touch completely and, out of the blue, she got in contact with me. We were playing in Bradford and she came along to the gig and we met for the first time since 1984. It was really strange, it was like I hadn’t seen her for a week. It was like really good old friends talking about bringing kids up and talking about relationships and then she disappeared for a while. Then she told me she’d been diagnosed with cancer. We had this contact/support. That’s what we were doing, supporting each other through what were difficult times. She came up to Edinburgh and we went out to lunch together. I gave her the album and she said, “I’ve never heard it”. She phoned me up a day later and said, “I cried all the way back home. I never realised that was how you felt at the time. I never realised you’d put so much into that album”. And the next thing I got a phone call from a friend of hers telling me she’d died of cancer. Last year Kay was telling everyone, “I’m the girl that was in that song” and she was really proud of it. To be able to complete that circle in a way was nice.”Fish (1327)

“It was about my first wife, Tamara. We were going through some very difficult times. This was after we got married and it was shaky. The marriage was always under a lot of strain. I didn’t feel she was particularly happy with the way things had turned out. She wasn’t particularly happy with me. She wasn’t happy. I had to deal with it, I had to make a decision. I had to make a decision on many levels but basically I had to make a decision about me. If I stayed in Marillion I was going to be a very unhappy soldier. I was heading towards a lifestyle I didn’t really want. It was a very unhealthy because I was softening the pain in a very unhealthy way. It was affecting my marriage and that’s why I moved here.

“When I left Marillion I sold the house in the South and I moved up to Scotland. My Mum and Dad were here, they found this place for me. It was during the recording of the song that I found out my wife was having an affair. It was somebody that I knew for Gerrard’s Cross, it was one of the reasons we had to move away and I came home and found him in the house. We held it together with lots of apologies and soon after that Tara my daughter was born in 1991.”Fish (1328)