The Rise and Fall And Rise Of The Waterboys

Prologue: October, 1987

On the Olympic Ballroom stage, Mike Scott sits at the piano, pushes the leather cap back on his tousled-head, fiddles with the sleeves of his shirt, and speaks into the microphone. Could somebody get my travelling bag? he says. It s in the dressing room thanks very much.

As he waits, the band vamp away; stage right, Anthony Thistlethwaite honks on his sax, stage left, Steve Wickham fiddles while the rhythm section burns. Soon enough, the bag is delivered to Scott, and he retrieves what he was looking for.
This a beautiful book called Song Of The Open Road, he announces, and it s written by an American called Walt Whitman. It says here:
Allons! The road is before us!
It is safe I have tried it my own feet have tried it well be not detained!
Let the paper remain on the desk unwritten, and the book on the shelf unopened!
Let the tools remain in the workshop! Let the money remain unearn d!
The band pulses behind him, intuitively reading the cadences of the verse. Scott continues:
Let the school stand! Mind not the cry of the teacher!
Let the preacher preach in his pulpit! Let the lawyer plead in the court, and the judge expound the law.
Then, over a fanfare of fiddle and sax:
Camerado, I give you my hand!
I give you my love more precious than money,
I give you myself before preaching or law;
And again:
Will you give me yourself? Will you come travel with me?
Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?
The music is building behind him, accumulating urgency and energy.
AS LONG AS WE LIVE . . .
The band marshals a crescendo, Thistlethwaite s strident saxophone sounding out a call to arms. Wickham whirls and kicks under the latest in an ever more extravagant succession of hats, elbows flailing, coaxing stellar sounds from his violin.
High and mighty times.
The date is Wednesday October 7th, 1987. We re nearing the climax of an epical, epochal extension of the song Spirit , halfway through the second of two Greenpeace benefit shows. Whitman s century-old lyric perfectly articulates the musicians itinerant credo. Rock n roll has never sounded as trail-blazing, as swashbuckling, as wayward and old world. This could be Patti Smith doing Horses or Van raving through Summertime In England or Bruce roaring Jungleland , or Dylan on the Rolling Thunder revue. The wild night is calling Mike Scott and The Waterboys, a group at the height of their powers, for 16 intoxicating seasons perhaps the greatest live rock n roll band in the world.
Only the world hardly knows it.

Part 1:THE LOST HIGHWAY

Just then a bolt of lightning
Struck the courtyard out of shape,
And while ev rybody knelt to pray
The drifter did escape .
Bob Dylan Drifter s Escape

Now it s August 28th, 2000, and we can cast a cold eye behind. The past is another county, country, continent, its grand passions making fools out of our older selves. Over the last 13 years Mike Scott must ve occasionally reflected on the vows made that night, wondering to whom they were directed (the audience? the band? a lover?) and what they meant. For although Scott is still fast friends with his former comrades, that incarnation of The Waterboys has long since sundered. Only a few years ago, on his solo album Bring Em All In, the singer lamented the ghost of a fiddle/The ghost of a sax/The ghost of a sound that ain t ever comin back .
Except it is coming back. But more about that later.
Right now, Scott is sitting opposite me, in a room in Buswell s Hotel in Dublin, saying thanks for the book I ve just handed him, a battered old volume of Whitman s Leaves Of Grass found in The Winding Stair almost ten years ago. It s a fair trade. After all, he made the introductions.
Scott s aged well since that night in the Olympic. At 41, the unruly hair is frosted with a little grey, but the eyes are still bright, the grey suits of the nineties replaced by the old-school rock n roll dandy garb of leather trousers and a black shirt. He s put together a new version of The Waterboys and he s ready to rock n roll again.
Let s ask him some questions.
First, a little history. Mike, what made Irish-era Waterboys such a force of nature?
It was a special feeling between myself and Steve and Anto, he decides after some deliberation. Each of the three of us had a relationship with each of the others, so there were these doubles going on as well. There was the me-and-Steve energy, there was the me-and-Anto energy, there was the Anto-and-Steve energy, and then there was the three of us together.
And we all just liked each other s company a whole lot. Three very different people, I suppose. I was the kind of focused, driven songwriting one, Steve was this marvellous, high, gifted, sonic energy and then Anto was like a minstrel with his mandolin. And when we found ourselves together, it was really after Steve joined the band, we never thought about it, we just became this trio.
True enough, the mid-eighties Waterboys were one of the few bands of the era, one to compare with The Stones in 68 or The Clash in 79. Scott is still proud of those legendary Irish gigs.
I thought we were the best live band in the world at that point, he admits. Absolutely. And I think we had an influence on other bands that maybe gets overlooked or doesn t get mentioned. I remember REM coming to see us at the Olympia, we did that four-night residency in 89, and we had all these guests coming on stage. And then I read an interview with REM a year or six months later, and they were talking about, Oh we re gonna have mandolins and we re gonna have guests on stage and it s gonna be a lot less formal, and I thought to myself, The boys were at our gig in the Olympia!
Not just REM either. The Wonder Stuff and The Levellers robbed the band s more superficial attributes wholesale, while here in Ireland their influence on local acts reached an exponential level: Hothouse Flowers, The Black Velvet Band, The Dixons, The Saw Doctors, Energy Orchard, The Prayer Boat, The Swinging Swine, The Frames. Even U2 seemed to have appropriated some of their designer tinker chic, not to mention every busker on Grafton and Henry Street.
But it was a two-way exchange. It s fair to say that The Waterboys didn t really become a band in the archetypal sense until Scott moved to Ireland. Before that, they were very much a floating company, right up to the summer of 1985, when Scott still dizzy from Live Aid and his partners Thistlethwaite and Karl Wallinger were putting the finishing touches to their third album, This Is The Sea.
The group had steadily built a following since 1981 s classic single A Girl Called Johnny , the patchy eponymous debut (salvaged from demos after disastrous New York sessions with Patti Smith Group guitarist, Nuggets compiler and curator of rock lore Lenny Kaye) and the rather more exhilarating A Pagan Place. This much we know. Keyboardist Wallinger would soon depart to chase his World Party balloon, but Thistlethwaite was the quintessential Waterboy before anyone even knew what that was. In other words, the former collaborator with early eighties odd men out such as Nikki Sudden and Robyn Hitchcock looked like some kind of Dickensian street urchin gone astray in the New Romantic era.
Anthony? Scott laughs. Yeah, he has that about him. It took a while for our friendship to ferment. At first it was the sound of his saxophone, that s what I heard on that Nikki Sudden record, it was roaring sonic dirt blasting out of the record. And I tracked him down and he came and did some sessions with me. A Girl Called Johnny was the first time he played with me, and I realised that there was a musical partnership there.
Throughout the final This Is The Sea sessions, Scott began scouting out violinists to play on the erogenous epic The Pan Within . Enter Steve Wickham, already well known in Ireland through In Tua Nua, not to mention playing on a brace of tracks on U2 s War album, and guesting with Bob Dylan at Slane Castle in 1984. As soon as they met, Scott sensed that he d found a foil, the kind of sidekick who could solve the sonic schism in The Waterboys, and help move the band towards a more organic sound. In fact, he first heard Wickham on a Siniad O Connor demo recorded at Karl Wallinger s house.
Scott: Karl said, Oh, I ll play you this tape of this girl singer . And I thought she sounded pretty good, but what really caught my ear was the fiddle player. I d always loved that Desire era of Bob Dylan with Scarlet Rivera on fiddle, and although probably nobody knows this, I had been trying out fiddlers in London. And when I heard Steve I recognised the sound that I d been looking for. I think I had to phone him up via Windmill Lane studios. It was quite a trail to get hold of him, he was quite elusive, and then he came to London.
He came to my house first and he sat down on the floor. I ll always remember, he just talked for about three hours and gave me his whole life story and then we went and made music together. I knew this was the guy I d been looking for, and when we got back into the car to go to the airport after playing the session with me, I said to him, If your band ever breaks up you ve got a home in The Waterboys.

It was an offer Steve Wickham could hardly refuse. Released in autumn 1985, This Is The Sea was a landmark record of that year, if not the decade.
A delirious, visionary collection of songs, it was hailed as the album William Blake would ve made had he been in a band, songs of innocence and experience that simultaneously evoked Dylan s fascination with the French symbolists and punk at its most quasi mystical Patti Smith, Richard Hell, Television (Tom Verlaine even played guitar on a blistering rock version of the title tune, later released on The Secret Life compilation).
All the songs on the album, not least the mini-hit single The Whole Of The Moon , sounded as if they could ve been written at any time over the last two centuries.
Wickham joined the band for their winter tour of Europe and America, and with Thistlethwaite rediscovering the joys of the mandolin, they now had a trinity of strolling players who could busk in airport lounges and hotel rooms, bonding, developing the instincts which would make them such a remarkable live act over the next five years. When Wallinger left, it only allowed more room for the freebooting three musketeers vibe to flourish.
That Christmas, Wickham invited Scott, now homeless and increasingly weary of the industry life in London, to spend the New Year in Dublin. The chief Waterboy wouldn t return to Britain for another decade. What followed was the tale of how one of rock n roll s great white hopes became the decade s most glorious and notorious truant.
Scott: I still get asked in interviews now and then, y know, What if you hadn t gone to Ireland? , What if you d done more rock? and Would you have been the next U2? and I just think it s terrible bollocks all that, because The Waterboys, even when we were making rock music, we were nothing like U2. We would never have fitted that suit at all, and I achieved everything that I wanted to do with rock music on This Is The Sea.
That was the fulfilment of all my young rock dreams, and all the big influences that had been upon me had got filtered through and achieved or realised on that record, and there was nowhere else to go except somewhere totally different. And when I heard Steve s fiddle, and he and I sparked together and Anthony picked up his mandolin, that was the somewhere different, that was where I had to go and there was nothing contrary about it at all, it was just absolutely a logical thing to do.
Nevertheless, it was a move that got Scott and his merry men something of a reputation in the business. Imagine if Morrissey had moved to Brittany for five years following Meat Is Murder, or Ian McCulloch hit off for Iceland after Ocean Rain. To many industry insiders, when Scott left for Ireland, he entered a sort of musical Bermuda triangle. Of course, the man himself maintains he didn t lose it in Ireland. He found it there.
So, let s play Bloomsday games. Does Mike remember his first day as a Dublin resident?
I remember the day well, he nods. It had a fatefulness about it. I got off the plane, it was about six o clock in the evening, it was dark, and there was Steve, like this marvellous ragamuffin character, sittin there in the arrivals lounge waiting for me. And we got into a cab, and the news on the radio was that Phil Lynott had died. There was an aura of fatefulness about the day alright.
A few days later, on January 4th, the trio inaugurated their conversion to the acoustic with a live performance on the Dave Fanning radio show. They played two Bob Dylan tunes, the then unreleased Death Is Not the End and a busked Blowin In the Wind (it transpired that they d only recently moonlighted on a Dylan session, playing on a couple of backing tracks produced by Dave Stewart) plus a new Scott song I ve Got A Drunken Head Full Of Reasons Why I ve Got A Broken Heart Inside .
The latter amply sketched out the new group s territory: the high pining sound of Hank soaked with the absinthe blues of a Baudelaire ( The wind is howlin lonesome/And the ghost of Rimbaud rides ). In conversation with Dave, the chief Waterboy outlined the game plan for the next album: it would be recorded live in the studio, with a band, and the minimum of overdubs.
We did TV Ga Ga as well, Mike remembers, which Steven s wife at the time (Barbara Lee) was presenting. I think we did them on the same night. We did that gig at The Baggot Inn as well, that was a very important gig for us supporting (Light A Big Fire). That was the first time we d played as this acoustic band with Peter McKinney on drums and Trevor (Hutchinson) on bass, he s the unsung hero. We d just done a day in Windmill Lane. We recorded Fisherman s Blues and Sweet Thing that are on the (Fisherman s Blues) album, and a whole lot of others, all the country and western covers.
BP Fallon, a friend and confidante of the band, broadcast the fruits of that early Windmill session on his radio show, including another new song, Stranger To Me written in film-maker Meirt Avis house.
Scott was now producing new songs as fast as his comrades could learn them. There was an enormous buzz in Dublin, as word got around that this latest New Dylan was writer in residence. Impromptu gigs were the order of the day: on the Greenpeace boat Sirius, on the street, gatecrashing local gigs the trio would show up to play at the opening of an envelope or the drop of a floppy hat.

The new line-up got its first official blooding on a five date Irish tour that April. The Bridge Hotel in Waterford was the second date on that tour, and remains probably the best live show this writer has ever seen. When BP Fallon invoked the Stones at the Marquee and the Pistols at the 100 Club in his onstage introduction, he wasn t hyperbolizing.
The show represented a ferocious convergence of energies Scott even tumbled on his arse at one stage, proving Johnny Thunders adage that falling over on stage gets you accepted. Today, he has no memory of the incident.
(Bill Graham was also there that night, and for the definitive account of this tour, the interested reader is directed towards hotpress Vol. 10 No 9.)
That Irish tour set the band up for a mighty roll on through England, heading towards a date with destiny at Glastonbury, regarded by many of the British press corps as The Waterboys finest hour. Certainly, BBC bootleg tapes and the material included on the 1998 Live Adventures Of compilation bear this out all the players were in splendid form, having gained in confidence since the spring.
Irish fans got to witness the high drama of this set when the band supported Simple Minds at Croke Park: the epic coupling of The Thrill Is Gone with Van s The Healing Has Begun (Wickham was a huge fan of Toni Marcus playing on Into The Music); Smith/Springsteen s Because The Night morphing into The Pan Within ; Spirit incorporating Yeats Four Ages Of Man ; Savage Earth Heart taking in The Stooges Dirt and William Blake s Jerusalem . This was astonishing stuff, and the last point at which the group could feasibly be marketed as a mainstream act, perhaps even a stadium band. Soon after, Mike Scott stopped talking to the press.
Scott: I really didn t have the will for doing lots of interviews and making loads of videos and stepping back into what I saw as a very unsafe and manipulative world. Also, I had an American manager who I split with the same week that I came to Ireland and he had a contract with me for another two and a half years, and as it happened, the Fisherman s Blues record didn t come out until after that contract had expired, which was just as well. If it had come out before that, we might ve had all kinds of legal troubles. I didn t structure things to avoid that, but certainly it would have been an influence on what was happening.
The next two years would be spent recording an album that would polarize long-time supporters, bamboozle the record label, achieve gold status and cost over a million pounds to record. To complicate matters, Scott fell in love with the manager of Windmill Lane, Irene Keogh.
Surely she could ve gotten The Waterboys a discount?!!
I m sure she did all she could! Mike chuckles. We recorded at Windmill Lane on and off through 86. I know, because I ve recently been working on the tapes, that we did 23 days of studio time in 1986, which doesn t sound like very much, spread out over the whole year, but every few months we d go in for a couple of days. But in 1987 we worked from January to September with a few breaks but almost all the time.
Those studio sessions were marathon affairs, featuring guests from acts like The Fleadh Cowboys and Hothouse Flowers, and at least four drummers. Live and studio bootlegs of the material began to surface on O Connell Street and in backrooms in Temple Bar, including the fan s favourite Saints And Angels , also the name of the fanzine which appeared at the time.
Then there were the endless gospel hoedowns, country two-steps and skit-songs like BP Villain (a birthday present to Fallon, aired on his radio show) and, as always, reams of Hank and Dylan covers. Unsurprisingly, Scott, up to his ears in a multitude of different takes drawn from a store of up to 60 songs, lost his way.
When we started making the record with the fiddle and the mandolin and the acoustic guitar, all these new musics had opened up to us, he ruminates. We could play folk, we could play country, we could play blues, we could play rock and a while after that we could play traditional as well. And we had so many different directions to go in that it was hard for me to figure out what actual direction was the record, and we didn t have a fixed drummer. We Will Not Be Lovers for example, was done in one take, but almost all the other songs were done multiple times as we or I searched for the definitive one.
Was this compounded by personal doubts?
I did have a difficult time in early 87 when we were deep in the Windmill Lane recording sessions, he admits. I d been in Ireland for a year, and Ireland, as you ll know, is a different world than Britain, and it s a different consciousness, and my first year in Ireland I was still who I d been before I came to Ireland. Does that make sense? But after about a year, Ireland had effected change in me, and I didn t know who I was, and that probably contributed to my inability to bring my usual focus to bear on the recording sessions because a lot of my energy was probably devoted to, What am I gonna do? and Who am I now?
In October 87, the band played a series of fundraisers for Greenpeace, including those fabled Olympic shows. However, the record company were far from happy with the band breaking off from making the new record, which seemed no nearer completion. The answer, Scott decided, was to cut out for the west. To be precise, Spiddal, County Galway.

Part 2: FOLLOW THE FELLOW WHO FIDDLES.

Took an untrodden path once
Where the swift don t win the race
Bob Dylan, I And I

Scott had been entranced with the west of Ireland since The Waterboys first supported The Pretenders in Galway in the early eighties. Now though, it stood for something more an escape from the mental congestion of the Windmill sessions.
I needed to be somewhere else for a little while, Scott explains now. I d done so much recording (for) Fisherman s Blues that I couldn t figure out what songs to put on the record and which versions of which songs to use, and I thought, Well, the only thing I know how to do is to keep moving. I thought, Okay, I ll go out, I ll hire a cottage around Galway and I ll write a few more songs to complete the record. Let s have a few fresh songs, cos we re tired of playing these same bunch of songs all the time , 50 or 60 as they were.
Was there any sense of unrest in the band at the time, as in What in the name of Jaysus are we doing?
It s a great question, he laughs. Steve had gone west before me, he d gone to Doolin for much the same reason, so he and I were both on the same road. Anthony now, he didn t understand why we d gone there, he quite liked Galway to pass through on a tour, but he didn t really understand. So I coaxed him to come out and stay with me at the house that we d rented in Spiddal for about a week, and we went over to the Aran Islands together.
What was the average day at Spiddal House like during the Fisherman s Blues sessions?
Very disciplined. Nobody stayed at Spiddal House. We all stayed in the holiday homes around Spiddal. And we would walk or more commonly cycle to the studio in the morning down around the seafront, arrive at Spiddal House and I think we would have breakfast. And we d start at a fixed time, probably 11 in the morning, and we would work til 10 or 11 at night, take a break for dinner, and we worked at doing one (song) at a time because I didn t want to lose my way as I had done at Windmill Lane with the massive amount of music that we were doing. And the first one we did was And A Bang On the Ear .
The Spiddal sessions would go on to make up the entire second side of the album.
Upon its release in October 1988, Fisherman s Blues would earn Mike Scott Bob Dylan s Judas tag in reverse: where the Big Zim got crucified for plugging in, the Scotsman got it in the neck for going acoustic. If an outraged Pete Seeger responded to Dylan s abrasive Newport set by trying to chop through the power lines, then one can imagine disgruntled critics like George Byrne frantically trying to solder Scott s leads back together again. Indeed, one could further the Dylan analogy and consider the Windmill sessions the band s own Basement Tapes, a mix of the Biblical and the batty, full of quirky asides and unlikely profundities.
Undoubtedly though, the band had the ear of the people, and dominated the hotpress readers polls throughout this period. Once the smoke cleared, most heard the record as occasionally incoherent but definitely inspired. Most remarkable was the rearrangement of the melancholy hoedown Killing My Heart as a stoned trad ramble re-titled When Ye Go Away , plus the adaptation of Yeats fairy tale The Stolen Child , featuring narration by Tomas McKeown.
In retrospect, in the midst of an era of shiny happy pop bombast, Fisherman s Blues was radical by way of being trad-reactionary. Like The Band, Scott and friends were shooting not for revivalism, but the continuance of a tradition.
Then there s the multi-instrumentation factor at the Aran Islands gigs in mid 89, Bill Graham would make a conservative estimate of up to 20 instruments split between seven players, with Anto seemingly able to master anything he picked up, reed, string, woodwind or brass.
The spring 89 tour, with Patti Smith Group stalwart Jay Dee Doherty on drums, was largely well-received, although some baulked at what they perceived as daft carry-on, jokey numbers with Tomas McKeown, covers of What A Wonderful World and Je T Aime ; all a bit close to a showband revue for many of the group s former champions.
What does Mike make of accusations that the band were too stiffed on Guinness to function clearly at this time?
Well, only someone who wasn t around would caricature it thus, he says flatly.
But yet, after the next album, Room To Roam, he found it necessary to quit drinking Guinness.
Well, I wasn t a long term Guinness drinker, he explains. Our crew taught me to drink Guinness sometime around the middle of 1989. But you see, all the time I first went to Spiddal, I was never a Guinness drinker. My drink would be vodka and never very much of it either, I wasn t a heavy drinker at all. I discovered Guinness in 89 and, my God, I did enjoy it, it was like a free pass to fairyland, as generations before me had discovered. I drank it for about two years and I had enough.
Nevertheless, there was one urban myth circulating around that time, rumours that various Litton Lane crew were bemused by the sheer volume of flight cases being carted around by the band, presumably for the safe transportation of delicate traditional instruments. However, on investigation, it was reported that the cases were packed with cans of Guinness.
When I relate this tale to Scott, he looks almost sheepish for a moment.
Well, at one time we did take a flight case of cans of Guinness abroad with us, he grins, because if we were touring in Spain or Italy or somewhere, we wouldn t have been able to get it. And the crate would last a whole tour it wasn t that debauched!

That s a claim borne out by the precision and dedication with which the band were embracing trad music. With the addition of Noel Bridgeman on drums, Sharon Shannon on accordion, and We Free King Colin Blakey on flute, the group had forged a lush integration of folk, country and rock, with Wickham s playing often recalling the Social Music volume of the Harry Smith Anthology.
I don t like to dabble in things, Scott confirms. I like to inhabit them fully. It s not like, Get Frankie Gavin or a few of the boys to play on a couple of tracks on the album . It was a commitment not just on my part but all the members of the band, Steve, Anto and Trevor. We went the whole way and we lived the life of traditional musicians.
The result was lovely arrangements of When Ye Go Away , The Raggle Taggle Gypsy-O and Girl From The North Country , all played as 2/4 time hoedowns but with a light touch that didn t obliterate the subtleties of the orchestration. There was also a new tune, Maggie, It s Time For You To Leave , part old-timey love song, part anti-Thatcher polemic. A rousing residency at the Olympia in the summer of 89, plus a return to Glastonbury, saw the ensemble plying a sound almost like Dylan s Budokan album interpreted by Planxty.
Only a rock journalist would ever say something like that! Scott sniffs, all but rolling his eyes to heaven.
It was a far different band than the 86 model. Scott now sported a double-breasted suit and Wickham had become an almost static stage presence, eyes closed, listening hard. All very musicianly, but some of us missed the fireworks. And the worst fears of the anti-trad brigade were confirmed when Room To Roam, produced by Slow Train Coming man Barry Beckett and again recorded in Spiddal House, was released in the summer of 1990. These new tunes were almost fireside homilies, down-home love songs,
paeans to the west of Ireland and all who sailed
in her.
Scott defends the record to this day, and sure enough, it has weathered better than one would expect, with at least half a dozen gems, including Islandman , A Life Of Sundays and A Man Is In Love standing up to the years. However, even Scott had to admit the pitfalls of overdubbing traditional instruments rather than tracking live, not to mention the generally unpersuasive nature of the performances. If anything, songs like Spring Comes To Spiddal and the come-all-ye title tune suffered from the same whimsy which afflicted The Beatles more playful suites (a relevant comparison, given the mix n match nature of the tracks). And more to the point, by the time the album was in the shops, Steve Wickham had left. It was the end of the raggle-taggle era.

Next issue: in the concluding part of this interview, Mike Scott takes the story from Dream Harder to A Rock In The Weary Land and addresses the idea of a holy trinity , live Waterboys reuinion. The Waterboys new album, A Rock In The Weary Land, is currently on release.