Leslie Fish
| Leslie Fish | |
|---|---|
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| Background information | |
| Born | New Jersey, United States |
| Genres | Filk |
| Occupation(s) | Musician, author, writer |
| Website | lesliefish |
Leslie Fish is a filk musician, author, and anarchist political activist.
Along with The DeHorn Crew, in 1976 she created the first commercial filk recording, Folk Songs for Folk Who Ain't Even Been Yet. Her second recording, Solar Sailors (1977) included the song "Banned from Argo", a comic song parodying Star Trek which has since spawned over 100 variants and parodies. These two albums (originally on vinyl) have recently been put back into print on joint CD, entitled Folk Songs for Solar Sailors. She recorded the comic song "Carmen Miranda's Ghost", which was the source for the short story anthology Carmen Miranda's Ghost Is Haunting Space Station Three, edited by Don Sakers (in which she has one story and the notes on the song). Her song "Hope Eyrie" is regarded by some as being as close to the anthem of science fiction fandom as is possible in such a disparate group.
Fish often weaves Pagan and anarchist themes into her music. She has also set to music many poems by Rudyard Kipling. She is a popular guest at science fiction conventions, and she can often be seen at the large filksings with her distinctive 12-string guitar, "Monster", which Leslie says plays best when it is given good Scotch whisky.
She sings (and makes several appearances) in the film Finding the Future: A Science Fiction Conversation, which makes extensive use of her music. She was interviewed and performed in Trekkies 2.
Fish has been involved with numerous political causes, most notably anti-war activism during the Vietnam War, and is a longtime member of the Industrial Workers of the World, a fact referred to in several of her songs (e.g., "Wobblies From Space", "Leslie's Filks"). She is also well known as a gun-rights activist, and has asserted that private gun ownership is the only true protection of individual freedom (a topic touched on in several of her songs). Because of her distrust of the stability of modern society, she has in the past worked to organize groups for carrying on civilization after what she (at one time at least) considered the imminent collapse of the current society. Her album Firestorm was in large part meant as a set of instructions for surviving a nuclear war, on the reasoning that it would be easier to recall them if they were in lyric form.
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