Paul Martin

The Jazz Butcher was the vehicle of prolific singer/songwriter Pat Fish, an archetypal British eccentric whose sharp observational wit and melodic gifts navigated the group through over a decade of constant line-up shifts, stylistic mutations and even a series of name changes which found the band performing variously -- and apparently randomly -- under such titles as the Jazz Butcher Conspiracy and the Jazz Butcher & His Sikkorskis From Hell. Fish was born Patrick Huntrods in London in 1957, and raised primarily in Northampton. He first began performing while studying philosophy at Oxford in the late 1970s, fronting the short-lived Nightshift; a subsequent band dubbed the Institution later joined forces with their rivals the Sonic Tonix, establishing the nucleus of players who later formed the core of the Jazz Butcher sphere.

Fish first concocted his Butcher persona in 1982, quickly enlisting his Oxford mates to join him in a band of the same name; even from the outset, the group's...