This summer Fish is returning to the road in a very different guise, playing York tomorrow on his FishHeads Club tour after an enforced sabbatical of nearly a year.

At the end of 2008, the Scottish singer visited a voice specialist upon encountering problems on his gruelling 18-month world tour in support of his 13th Star album.

A growth was found on his vocal chords and a surgical operation was recommended for its removal; thankfully the cyst that was discovered was benign.

A recovery period of six months ensued before he could perform again, whereupon Fish’s return to the stage last summer was short lived as complications with scar tissue required yet another operation last December.

Once the problem was finally resolved and Fish was given a clean bill of health, he immediately made plans for resuming live performances.

“It was an incredibly stressful time for me,” he says. “The dread of not only losing my voice permanently but also the possibility of dealing with cancer made me totally revaluate my lifestyle. I quit smoking, took up hill walking and going to the gym regularly and rediscovered scuba diving with the local East Lothian dive club.

“I’d gone to Costa Rica in January on a holiday shortly after the second operation, and found myself trailing behind guys a lot older than me as we hiked up volcanoes and through rain forests. I decided that at 52 I had to get to grips with my life and wake up to the reality that if I wanted to continue doing this then I had to take a different approach.”

Fish sang on stage for the first time in nine months when playing a short set with long-term guitarist Frank Usher at his local, the Tyneside tavern in Haddington, after completing a 96-mile charity hike up the West Highland Way in aid of Cancer Research.

“Some days we walked 20 miles and every night we camped in tents under the stars, but all the while I was thinking about the gig at the end,” says Fish.

“I don’t think I can remember being as nervous as I was when I stood in front of the crowd at the Tyneside. It may have been the home crowd on the home turf but I was very aware of the debut of the voice. It felt like my first gig in 1981 all over again.”

Fish’s radical step finds him performing at small venues this summer as the FishHeads Club trio with Usher and Foss Paterson, the keyboard player on the 13th Star tour.

“I didn’t want to plunge back into the formulaic pattern of write and record the next album and then tour as I wanted to find where my voice was before committing it to recording,” says Fish. “My voice is clearer than it ever was but it needs to be built up gradually to find the strength and ranges again.

“I didn’t want it to potentially struggle in a full electric band set-up and I thought that an acoustic environment would be perfect to put it through the paces.

“The space offered by acoustic versions of songs provides room for experimentation and, combined with the intimacy of the venues we’re playing, there’s great scope for dynamic and dramatic expression.”

The stripped-down sets on the tour will be ever changing with songs being taken from throughout Fish’s extensive solo catalogue and his years with Marillion.

He will be writing new material during this period for his next album, A Feast Of Consequences, scheduled for recording later in the year for release in 2011.

“I decided that the FishHeads Club tour would provide a great opportunity to reinvestigate my approach to song-writing by starting from bare bones of songs and building on that framework rather than depend on the studio environment and the technology as a base to create,” says Fish.

“This way we can introduce new material as the tour progresses and discover the structures, dynamics and performances before I take it into the studio environment. I discussed the idea with producer Calum Malcolm who did a great job for me on the 13th Star album and he’s excited about the ideas.

“It’s going to be a very loose and flexible project with sporadic gigging interspersed with writing periods, rather than huge clumps of dedicated time where writing can get bogged down and touring becomes mundane. This way we should be able to maintain a healthy energy around the album.”

A busy second half of the year for Fish will see him resurrect his acting career in September with a major role in Electric Man, an independent film being shot in Edinburgh with director David Barras for the Strangeboat film company.

“I hadn’t been able to commit to any acting projects for a number of years due to extensive touring and the demands of my music career,” he says. “So when David contacted me, I thought it was an ideal way to get back into it and at the same time work with genuine enthusiastic film makers and learn a lot more about another independent approach in a creative sphere that I’d like to get more involved with in the future, either as a script writer or even as a director.

“The flexibility offered by the acoustic touring means that I can offer myself out as an actor and be open to other projects outside music.”

One such project is Fish’s on-going book Dear Derek, in his words “an autobiography and travelogue”. “I started writing the book about a year ago soon after I got married,” he says. “The substance of the book has a lot to do with relationships and how they’ve affected my life and shaped who I am today. Ironically, while I was writing, the marriage disintegrated and my wife left me just after Christmas.

“As they say in Scotland, my head was full of ‘chocolate frogs’ for quite a while and it’s only in recent weeks that I’ve been able to resurrect the project.”

Dear Derek hopefully will be finished by the end of the year for release simultaneously with Feast Of Consequences. “Obviously there are a few extra chapters now!” jokes Fish.

Fish’s FishHeads Club trio play The Duchess, York, tomorrow. Box office: 01904 641413.