Morgan Fisher

Morgan Fisher was born Stephen Morgan Fisher in Mayfair, London. An English keyboard player / composer most known for being a member of Mott the Hoople in the early 1970s. However, his career has covered a wide range of musical activities, and he is still highly active in the music industry. In recent years he has expanded his creative work into the area of fine art photography. From 1966 to 1970, he played organ with the soul / pop band, The Soul Survivors, who in 1967 renamed themselves The Love Affair. They had a number one hit in 1968 with "Everlasting Love", although this occurred while Fisher had taken a break from the band to complete his final year of grammar school. From 1972-73, he formed the progressive rock band called Morgan, with singer Tim Staffell (the vocalist with the band Smile, who later became Queen). From 1973 to 1976, after a brief liaison with Third Ear Band, Fisher joined seminal British rock band, Mott the Hoople, just after the period during which they were produced by David Bowie. Several successful US/Europe tours followed (including two tours and a week on Broadway where a new band called Queen opened for Mott). In 1977-78, while in Mott, Fisher contributed keyboards to John Fiddler's Medicine Head, and when Mott folded, it was Fisher who invited Fiddler to join the remnants of Mott in what would become British Lions. They would record two albums, and have three international hit singles, including Kim Fowley's "International Heroes", Garland Jeffries's "Wild in the Streets", and Fiddler's own "One More Chance to Run". In 1980, Fisher conceived and produced the unique Miniatures album (51 one-minute tracks by Robert Fripp, Gavin Bryars, Michael Nyman, The Pretenders, XTC, Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Robert Wyatt, Ivor Cutler, The Damned etc.). A sequel was released in 2000. At this time he also, in his home studio in Notting Hill Gate, London, recorded an ambient/minimal album "Slow Music" with sax legend Lol Coxhill, and two art/punk albums, "Hybrid Kids" and "Claws" on which he sang and played all the instruments. In 1982, he played with Queen on their 1982 tour of Europe and is introduced by Freddie Mercury to the audience just before the band's performance of Crazy Little Thing Called Love on the band's Queen on Fire - Live at the Bowl album. In 1985, Fisher moved to Japan, and started to make ambient and improvised music. He became a leading TV commercial music writer, including songs written or arranged for Cat Power, Karin Krog, Jose Feliciano, Zap Mama and Swing Out Sister. Japanese artists he has worked with include Yoko Ono, Dip in the Pool, The Boom, Heat Wave, Shoukichi Kina, Haruomi Hosono and Kokoo. He also scored the Japanese anime/live-action hybrid film Twilight of the Cockroaches (1987) and the documentary "A Zen Life: D.T. Suzuki" (2006). In November 2003, Morgan started performing monthly solo improvisation concerts at a club called Superdeluxe in Roppongi, Tokyo. He calls this concert series (still running as of 2011) "Morgan's Organ" and has started to release live recordings of the series as downloads. In 2005, Fisher collaborated with German musician Hans-Joachim Roedelius (of Cluster and Harmonia) on the ambient album Neverless (on the Klanggalerie label). Fisher has maintained a lifelong interest in photography and in recent years has been holding an increasing number of solo exhibitions of his work. He has evolved a technique of abstract photography which he calls Light Painting, influenced by the photograms of Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy, by pendulum-created harmonographs, and in particular by the abstract cinema of Len Lye, Norman McLaren and Oskar Fischinger. Samples of his Light Paintings may be seen at his official website, and several were used in the booklet of his March 2009 album release Non Mon, a collection of his most well-known TV commercial compositions (Japan, DefSTAR/Sony Records). His light paintings were featured on the front cover and in a 7-page spread in the Winter 2010 edition of Artworks Magazine (Carmel, California). He is on occasion mistaken for the Los Angeles film artist of the same name.