The Waterboys live at the Olympia, Dublin

With The Waterboys being between albums, tonight’s acoustic show was a case of evolution-in-progress, allowing Mike Scott, Steve Wickham and Richard Naiff the opportunity to excavate gems from the back catalogue too rare or oddly cut to fit the full band format.

Not that the atmosphere wasn’t formal enough, a sit-down show with the emphasis on virtuosity rather than volume. Sure, they opened with ‘Sweet Thing’ but there was no busking it here boys, each tune being arranged with the sort of detail more suited to O’Riada’s chambers than skin and hair flying sessions (case in point, a reworking of Scott’s lovelorn lounge ballad ‘Something That Is Gone’.)

A couple of new tunes suggested that the songwriter’s muse has worked its way down from the brain to the breast, eschewing the loftiness of Universal Hall for altogether more secular passions. ‘Dunderhead’ was a toothy Dylan-esque put-down (“You should be bound and gagged/And electronically tagged”) while ‘Strange Arrangement’ emerged as the most fallible and troubled tune Scott has written in an age, a transparent examination of conscience with a dose of Sam Cooke soul.

Elsewhere, old songs were recast for bow, strings and keys. ‘Too Close To Heaven’ was quite the colossus, and an unsung sister song to ‘This Is The Sea’. Wickham essayed a scalding distorted violin throughout the lucid dreaming of ‘The Return Of Jimi Hendrix.’ There was a tour of the sacred isles by way of ‘Peace Of Iona’ and ‘The Wonders Of Lewis’, employing the kind of practical magic that suggests if Scott hasn’t read Jonathan Strange And Mr Norrell yet, then he will soon. And to finish with a flourish, the sensual-celestial overload of ‘The Pan Within’ unfolded into ‘Higher Bound’, ‘Fisherman’s Blues’, and the long slow dance that is Ray Charles’ ‘Come Live With Me’.

As Bernard Shakey might say, verrry innaresting.