Morgan Fisher - Career

Career

From 1966 to 1970 Fisher played the 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. Between 1972 and 1973 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, he joined seminal British rock band, Mott the Hoople, just after the period during which they were produced by David Bowie. 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. From 1977 to 1979 the Lions 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. In addition 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 writers, 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).

Since November 2003 Morgan has been performing monthly solo improvisation concerts at a club called Superdeluxe in Roppongi, Tokyo. He calls this concert series Morgan's Organ and has started to release live recordings of the series as downloads on iTunes, Amazon.com, etc. See the External Links below for the Morgan's Organ Myspace website.

In 2005 he 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 are featured on the front cover and in a 7-page spread in the Winter 2010 edition of Artworks Magazine (Carmel, California).