StartledThis week while I was browsing news sites, as all bloggers do, I was startled to find on the culture pages of The Guardian, a story about The Waterboys. The Waterboys are my favourite band – by a long way! I've been following them since they began in the early 1980s. The Guardian story features Mike Scott, the band's creator, telling how one of their best known songs, The Whole of the Moon, came about. Here's the song. Just turn on the sound and click the white arrow. This performance was in 2014 but the song was first released in 1985 and it has been played limitlessly ever since. It shows us, right from those beginnings, that The Waterboys are going to explore interior themes to do with personhood and spirituality. Many of their songs spread over all the years exemplify this. An early one I've always liked, from 'the big music' period, is, The Pan Within. Rich Celtic traditionI also like pieces from the period when the group was based in western Ireland. There they tapped into the rich wealth of old Irish Celtic folk music. From that period, end of the 80s beginning of the 90s, one song which has become much played is a ballad called The Raggle Taggle Gypsy. Here it is. Who are the Waterboys.
Well not only Mike Scott - just a few more!Reams of players have had a stint in the Waterboys. The website shows 8 present members and 80 former players. One name though figures on many album credits – in early years and more recently. Scott's calls this man 'the fellow who fiddles.' Steve Wickham's relationship with Scott and the Waterboys is covered very feelingly in Chapter 18 – a strong relationship, severed then renewed. Wickham is superb. That's him sitting by the broken window angle plaster in some ancient pub. He's playing a piece from An Appointment with Mr Yeats – an album entirely of William Yeats' poems set to Mike Scott tunes. Please listen to the fiddle! Off the beat.
IonaAt Findhorn, but on a later sojourn, Scott wrote a song about another Scottish alternative community, Iona, with which he felt some identity. Iona, an island off the coast of Mull in the Inner Hebrides has a rich spiritual history – Druid, Celtic, Benedictine. That community is more specifically Christian than Findhorn. I spent time there and loved it. Iona is often called 'a thin place' – a place where this world and the spiritual world come very close together. Scott thinks about interior, mystical and spiritual entities, so his identifying with Iona fits. New AlbumYes, I was surprised to see the Waterboys featured in The Guardian, this week but there was an explanation. When I first looked, alongside the Whole of the Moon story, there was a promo for a new Waterboys album, Good Luck Seeker. It will be released very soon – 21 August. Critics who have listened to the early release singles are already hailing it as the best Waterboys' album ever. That's been said before. But who knows. Perhaps we are leaping into a new Waterboys' era. Scott with his new wife, internationally acclaimed and controversial Japanese artist, Megumi, is back in Ireland, where some of his best creativity has flourished. He and Megumi have a son and have settled in Belfast. I certainly look forward to Good Luck Seeker and whatever else has yet to come. □ John McInnes Friday 31 July 2020 References: to go to the websites just click the red text. Adventures of a Waterboy by Mike Scott: Jawbone, UK and USA 2012: ISBN 978-1-908279-24-8 Guardian – making Whole of the Moon Waterboys Mike Scott website ##########
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