The Waterboys' Mike Scott: "If you play in a circle, you can record 12 songs in a day, and they might all be pretty good"

In 1985, Mike Scott had brought The Waterboys’ Big Music – reverb, revelation, ringing guitars, the full moonlit apparatus of rock transcendence – to its peak. The expected course was further ascent. Instead, he changed element.

He came to Ireland – to Dublin, Windmill Lane, Steve Wickham’s fiddle, Anthony Thistlethwaite’s mandolin, and then west, towards Galway, Spiddal House and the Atlantic weather. The result was Fisherman’s Blues, a magnificent record, which pointed away from rock’s main road and out towards stranger waters.

Released in 1988, the album was not so much the destination as the first surviving map, with 13 songs drawn from a colossal body of tracks, covers and jams. The later archival releases – Too Close To Heaven: The Unreleased Fisherman’s Blues Sessions, Fisherman’s Box and now Atlantic Rain – are not mere appendices.

They are soundings from the deeper voyage that Fisherman’s Blues only partly disclosed. The question, then, is not simply how the record was made, but where this epic journey began.

“It was a gradual evolution,” Mike Scott explains on a warm summer morning in a quiet Ranelagh café. “It began on tour in late 1985. Steve Wickham had just joined the band, and his fiddle was very portable, and Anthony Thistlethwaite, our sax player, also played mandolin.

“I would always have a guitar, and so suddenly we found we could play a complete sounding music in hotel rooms or on tour buses. And another thing about Steve joining the band, it opened up this music club brotherhood that hadn’t existed in the same way before. We would play cassette tapes and listen to Cajun music, old roots music, and that influence came into the band.”

By the time Scott arrived in Dublin, he was already untethered. His London landlord had sold his flat, and on a day off during the tour he had thrown his belongings into storage and gone back on the road. For two months he lived out of a suitcase as The Waterboys toured Europe and America.

So, when he reached Dublin on January 4, 1986, there was no grand plan – just the same suitcase, a room in Steve Wickham’s house, and the vague assumption that he would stay for a while. Instead, a few weeks became two years – a detail often blurred by the public mythology, which tends to hurry him west, as though he passed quickly through Dublin on his way to Spiddal and the Atlantic edge.

Wickham suggested a rhythm section – Trevor Hutchinson on bass and Peter McKinney on drums. They rehearsed for two days in Temple Bar, and what Scott heard was not a folk-rock rhythm section at all, but something funkier, more elastic. That tension became part of the record’s secret.

Even on ‘Sweet Thing’, cut on the first day, you can hear it. The fiddle and mandolin pull the music towards folk, while the bass and snare push from somewhere closer to funk. During recording, instead of the structured, layered approach of the first three Waterboys albums, they set up in a circle – five musicians facing each other, playing live, catching the magic in the air.

VOLUME OF MUSIC

“We spent a day in Windmill Studios recording our floating repertoire,” Mike details. “That brought that sound out. ‘Fisherman’s Blues’ was one of the songs we did that day, and when we next went on tour, there was a lot of that material in the show.

“With Steve playing tunes in between songs at rehearsals, gradually I got pulled into the tunes and learned them. Then I had other guys like Vinny Kilduff, a pipe player who played in In Tua Nua, and John Dunford, our sound man – they were great trad guides. So, by the end of 1987, I was deep in trad music.”

By the time the sessions began moving west, Mike says he had hit a wall. The freedom of the Fisherman’s Blues method had become its own problem.

“I got burned out working on Fisherman’s Blues at Windmill,” he details. “We’d spent so long on it, and it was fairly constant work and late nights. The volume of music was overwhelming, because if you play in a circle, you can record 12 songs in a day, and they might all be pretty good.

“Then a few days later, you’re sitting with 24 songs and trying to make decisions. And I’d find something to love in all of them. It just overwhelmed me, I couldn’t make decisions.”

His solution, perversely, was to write more.

“I needed some time out,” he says. “I thought, I’ll go to the west and write some more songs. I didn’t need to write any songs – we had 30 or 40 already. But in my idiocy, I thought, I’ll go west and finish the album with new songs, instead of trying to redo the older ones from the previous two years.”

The west of Ireland had also begun to exert its pull.

“I’d become very enamoured of it on little trips the previous year,” he says. So, John Dunford, the band’s soundman, drove him around Clare, Galway and Connemara looking for somewhere to rent.

The answer came by chance. “There was a fiddler from a session in Galway who said, ‘What are you doing here?’ I said, ‘I’m looking for a place to write.’ He said, ‘My old man’s got a house. I’ll meet you tomorrow and take you out.’ So, we drove along the coast to Spiddal.”

The fiddler was Seán Lennon. His father was Charlie Lennon, the noted traditional composer and fiddle player, connected to the De Dannan world through Frankie Gavin. “I didn’t know who he was,” Scott says. “But there I was, renting his house in Spiddal.” He stayed for six months, while still officially keeping his place in Dublin – one foot in the city, the other already on the Atlantic edge.

The band recorded at Spiddal House, a big old location on the Atlantic edge that they temporarily turned into a studio. Listening to the Fisherman’s Blues story, I suggest that Mike seems like one of those people for whom the world has a habit of opening up – the right musicians appear, the right rooms become available, another door swings open just when he needs it.

“No, no,” he says, cutting across the idea. “It happened in Dublin. I moved to New York in 1991, and I couldn’t put a band together. I spent two years there and never found the chemistry, never found the right combination of people. But when I came to Dublin, it just fell into my hands.”

The scale of the Fisherman’s Blues archive is immense – almost 400 multi-track reels. Decades later, listening back to them was a strange experience. Some recordings Mike recognised from old cassette mixes, while others seemed to have vanished entirely from memory.

When he compiled Fisherman’s Box in 2013, Mike used the record company’s reel catalogue as “my bible”, chasing the hundred or so songs he already knew existed. But the catalogue also contained reels marked simply ‘jam’, ‘unknown’, or with no useful title at all. At the time, he skimmed past them. There was already too much to process.

MULTITRACK REELS

Later, he realised that more than a fifth of the multitrack reels had effectively no documentation. When those reels were explored, the lost music of Atlantic Rain began to emerge. That is how songs such as the majestic ‘The Waves’ returned from the deep. Mike still does not really remember recording it.

It had probably been dismissed at the time because it was “just a jam” – but that, he now suggests, was the point. The band was so good that even the casual playing had value. ‘Come Back To Galway’ was different. That had clearly been rehearsed.

“There were a few full takes that were obviously worked out,” he says. There was a proper arrangement, an intro, hooks from Steve Wickham and Anthony Thistlethwaite. But Mike found it too embarrassing to sing because it was partly about himself and Wickham. Then the band went west to Spiddal, began work on ‘And A Bang On The Ear’ and a flood of other songs, and the track was simply forgotten.

Looking back, Mike thinks the original album could have been far more expansive.

“It should have been a double album,” he says, “maybe even a triple album. I had no problem capturing great performances, but what to do with it once it was on tape? I just didn’t have the perspective.”

• Atlantic Rain: The Lost Fisherman’s Blues Recordings is out now. The Waterboys play 3Arena, Dublin on September 5.