The Waterboy: Mike Scott on the rockers' return

Outside, Storm Rachel is rattling the windows of the Dublin hotel where we meet. And yet Mike Scott is a picture of his usual cool calm, seated in the cozy lounge in front of the fire.
A band who might well be described as a force of nature in their own right, Scott’s Waterboys have just released their 11th studio album, Modern Blues. He’s here to talk about it, and some other stuff too. But as it happens, today is the 50th anniversary of the recording of Bob Dylan’s 'Subterranean Homesick Blues', a record that, to persist with our metaphor, kicked up a bit of a storm on its release. Do such occasions hold any meaning or resonance for Scott these days?

“Well, I’m not a great one for anniversaries,” he begins. “And if I was, I wouldn’t get time to do anything else, as these kinds of things are turning over all the time. But all of those magnificent musical events that happened in the ‘60s – like that recording, Dylan’s first real electric rock 'n' roll session – are important for me.”
In fact, Scott has been absorbed in music since not long after Dylan’s transformation from folkie to rocker.
“I was listening to records from about ‘66,” he reminisces. “My parents had Revolver and Sgt Pepper and, from ’68 onwards, I used to buy a single every week, which I did right through to ’71, when I started buying albums. So I was listening to Bob Dylan, The Beatles, the Stones, The Who and everything else that was going on.”
Scott became a teenager in 1971. It was a big moment for him. He reels off a list of albums from that pivotal year: Tapestry, Every Picture Tells A Story, Hunky Dory, Electric Warrior, Imagine and Led Zeppelin IV among them.
“I think the period from about ‘55 to ‘75/‘76 and the beginning of punk was an incredible time for the evolution of culture and art and, above all, music. And I don’t think we live in times that are anything as significant now. It’s like we live 40 years after a golden age. It’s a weird thing because there’s good music being made now and some great music. However, it doesn’t have the power and significance that it had culturally back then.”
Doesn’t every generation express this feeling about their own music?
“Oh yeah and some people say to me, ‘Ah, but you’re just being nostalgic’. It’s not that at all. The music of that time was much more momentous, much more groundbreaking and much more innovative. We can’t keep innovating all the time, you can’t make great strides in every decade – it just doesn’t work like that. We’re still catching up with and processing the discoveries people like The Beatles and Hendrix made.”
No strangers to musical detours and artistic about-turns, The Waterboys have veered from the Big Music of their early years to the rollicking folk of Fisherman’s Blues to the literary approach of their last studio outing, An Appointment With Mr Yeats. For Modern Blues, an organic rock 'n' roll record with elements of Southern Soul, Scott journeyed to Nashville where, with long-time musical partner, fiddler Steve Wickham, he hooked up with locally-based session players. They included Muscle Shoals studio legend David Hood on bass and noted Memphis keyboard-player, Brother Paul Brown. Why Nashville?
“It’s Music City, USA and it still has a recording industry with studios of a sufficient size for me to go in with a six-piece band,” he explains. “They’re all well maintained too, with great engineers who are trained to do that. If I try to record in the UK, and to a lesser extent in Ireland, there just aren’t engineers who are trained to record a full band all at once. Certainly in the UK they know how to do programming and overdubbing but if I say, ‘There are six of us and we’re going to record everything including drums and vocals’, they look at me as if I’m from Mars. In Nashville they go, ‘OK where do you want to sit?’ and bang – we’re off.”
Did the musicians come with the studio or did he seek them out separately?
“I needed a bass-player and our manager, who lives in Florida, knows the Nashville scene very well and she suggested David Hood, who she’d worked with before. I knew him by reputation and as he’s a working musician and he can be hired, he said ‘yes’. Even better he joined the band and will be touring with us, as will the other musicians.”
So the sound was very much in place before the recording started in earnest?
“Well, I was very methodical about it. I’d already picked the songs, which I’d written over the last five or six years. I went to Nashville for a week on my own and rehearsed with Brother Paul and with Jay, our guitar-player. Then I went back for the week before the main recording and rehearsed with our drummer Ralph, David Hood Paul and Jay. There was a lot of groundwork, a lot of pre-production. I knew I had a short time in the studio and I needed the band to know what they were doing. I wanted us to know each other so we wouldn’t be playing as strangers. I wanted us to swing. It all worked well, we hit the ground running and played very effectively.”
It shows. Songs such as the infectious ‘November Tale’, the swampy ‘I’m Still A Freak’ and the more pop-sounding ‘The Girl Who Slept For Scotland’ sound strangely familiar and fully-formed, yet fresh.
“I’m very pleased with this selection of songs,” Scott insists. “‘November Tale’ was one that changed the recording process. It was a folk rock kind of number; our lead guitar player came in and played it pure Memphis, like Cornell Dupree or someone like that. I thought, ‘That’s the way we’ll do it.’”
Apart from working on the new album and touring heavily, Scott has been busy in recent years mainly looking back and revisiting past glories. His 2012 memoir Adventures Of A Waterboy was a critical and commercial success, while the 25th anniversary of Fisherman’s Blues saw him release a 7CD box set, and tour with the original band.
“That whole Fisherman’s Blues record and era is like a wavelength that I can tune into. And it’s a wonderful, wonderful wavelength. The tour with the old band was one of the greatest musical experiences I’ve ever had. So, I love going back to that music. Perhaps on the album after the next one I’ll bring back Anto [Thistlethwaite] and Trevor [Hutchison] and we’ll make another album like that. It’s like how Neil Young will swing between different bands – he’ll bring back the Stray Gators for a Harvest-type thing. Then, every six or seven years, he’ll go out with Crazy Horse. I can do that too.”
He wasn’t always as busy. From the end of 1990 to late ’94 he didn’t tour at all.
“I did maybe three gigs over that time. I was very tired, very burned out after the whole Fisherman’s Blues/Room To Roam era. I don’t think not touring did me any harm.”
An Edinburgh native he has lived all over, including New York where he still has a place. But it’s Dublin he has called home for the past six years.
“It’s slightly more bohemian than the UK, more loose and easy-going. I like the Irish imagination. It’s freer and it has a good side – the creativity. It also has a bad side, the 'cute hoor' side."
He lowers his voice and moves closer, almost whispering: “It’s a wonderfully weird country and you’re a funny lot. And as a Scot, I’m qualified to say that.”