At home with Steve Wickham

Credited as the man who put the fiddle into rock and roll, Steve Wickham’s distinctively soaring violin has graced classics such as U2’s ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’, In Tua Nua’s ‘Somebody To Love’ and a sizeable chunk of the Waterboys’ canon including ‘Fisherman’s Blues’.

Along the way he has guested on record or live with Elvis Costello, Sinead O’Connor, World Party, Hothouse Flowers, Declan O’Rourke, Maria McKee and REM, to name just a handful.
But it’s with the Waterboys that he will be most associated, and he has been with the influential outfit on and off since 1985. Not long after he joined he convinced Mike Scott to relocate the band to Galway, resulting in their landmark 1988 album Fisherman's Blues and the follow-up Room To Roam. Now back on the road with the band, we find him relaxing at home in Sligo between festival tour dates which included a recent date at Glastonbury and an upcoming appearance at the Midlands Festival. He shares this rural idyll with his artist wife Heidi and two of his three children Daisy (15) and Tom (11).
“It’s an old style cottage which we had built about 10 years ago,” he says. “It’s in the country even though it’s only about four miles from Sligo town. We can’t get a mobile phone signal and there’s no broadband, but apart from that it’s great. We’ve a polytunnel in the garden where we grow our own vegetables.”
Though a born-and-bred Dubliner, Wickham has lived in Sligo since 1991 where he moved after he left the Waterboys for the first time. ”I got a taste for the west of Ireland after the Galway experience. My partner at the time had a summer house out here, and I got involved with Irish rural re-settlement. We tried to get a house in Clare but ended up in Sligo, and I’ve been here ever since.
“I left the band in 1990 at a time when a lot of changes were happening with other people leaving. I did a lot of other stuff like the Texas Kellys, and Mike more or less kept it going for a couple of years, then he went off to America. I did a gig with him in 1999 and it felt good, so he decided to do the Waterboys thing again and it’s been great ever since.”
Presumably, the pace of life in Sligo is radically different from the hectic business of touring the world with a rock and roll band?
“Actually, when you have a family with the kids and their friends coming and going it’s not all that quiet,” he says. “A quiet time for me these days is going out on the road with the band (laughs). I love being at home but I love travelling too – I’ve always had that wanderlust. It takes a while for me to settle down when I get home, you get so used to living in hotels. My wife would say that I’m a tad untidy when I get back off the road and she’s probably right.”
Not surprisingly, the Wickham household is a musical one, with a piano taking pride of place in the living room as well as a record player and a large collection of vinyl.
“I inherited a huge collection of fantastic records recently, and I’ve been going through them one by one,” he says. “I like the tactile thing of the LP and I even like the sound of the crackling before the music plays. But the warm bass is what I like most about it – you just can’t get that on CD. And there’s the ritual of putting on the record and turning it over half way through. It keeps you engaged with the music. There’s a whole philosophy of records which has been lost. There’s often a thought or an idea on the first side and maybe another thought on side two, which hasn’t translated well to CD.”
In their early incarnation, The Waterboys were known for their “Big Music" but after Wickham joined they were credited with creating the “raggle taggle” phenomenon. “I don’t know how that came about, but I remember I’d be dossing around singing the ‘Raggle Taggle Gypsy’ and Mike would be asking, ‘What’s all this?’ He went into Claddagh Records in Dublin and bought all that Bothy Band and Planxty stuff – he’s a thorough researcher of musical roots. He might have mentioned the phrase ‘raggle taggle’ to describe it and it stuck. But I think the whole raggle taggle label wasn’t accurate, and it kind of demeaned what we were doing. We were a rock band as far as I was concerned - we thought we were going to be bigger than U2. We certainly gave them a run for their money here in Ireland in the late 1980s.”
The latest Waterboys album Book Of Lightning has been hailed as a return to form, and the single ‘Crash of Angels’ has just been named single of the week on the influential BBC Maconie & Radcliffe show. How does he compare playing and touring with the Waterboys in 2007 with those heady days of the late 1980s?
“It’s better in a way. We had more music in the old days, in the sense that the band was bigger and there were always sessions going on. I’d pick up a fiddle or a banjo, and myself and Mike would have a bit of a session. Now you tend to focus all your energy on the show – you don’t stay up ‘till three in the morning like we used. I think we do better shows than we did back then. It’s been a busy year – Midlands will more or less be the end of the European leg but we’re heading off to Australia and Japan later this year.”