ABSTRACT
Mike Scott, founder and principal member of the Waterboys, represents a problematic presence within modern Irish popular music. For one thing, he’s not Irish; he’s Scottish. But Ireland became the answer to many of the questions that Scott had set himself as a young musician growing up in Edinburgh in the 1960s and 1970s. It was in Ireland that he discovered (or believed he had discovered) a way of being spiritual in a relentlessly materialist modern world; it was amongst its people, and especially its musicians, that he discovered (or believed he had discovered) a way of investing contemporary popular music with the power of an older, deeper, more meaningful tradition. And it was in the small seaside village of Spiddal on the west coast of Ireland, where much of Fisherman’s Blues (1988) was recorded, that Scott believed he had discovered what it might mean to be a Celt. The story of the writing and recording of Fisherman’s Blues is well known.
In late 1985 Scott found himself as a well-established figure on the British popular music scene, inventor and principal purveyor of what the contemporary music press referred to as ‘the Big Music’. This style – named after a track on the Waterboys’ second album, A Pagan Place (1984) – connoted a loose range of musical and lyrical attributes, including a large ensemble sound and vaguely spiritual themes. The ‘drama and romance’ (Scott 2012: 70) of the Big Music was brilliantly encapsulated on ‘The Whole of the Moon’, a track from the band’s third album This is the Sea (1985). Produced by Scott himself, the song (which remains the band’s most successful release and in many ways their signature tune) turns on the difference between a character who experiences a life filled with ‘drama and romance’ and a narrator who can only observe it. The music itself is complex and multi-layered; a basic rock texture of drums, bass guitar and piano is overlain with ‘classical’ brass parts, synthesisers and various effects (such as the ‘comet’ at 3.53). Scott was well placed to exploit the growing reputation of the Waterboys
when, out of a mixture of pressure, boredom and frustration, he took a left turn. One of the musicians recruited to help contribute to This is the Sea was an Irish violinist named Steve Wickham. In January 1986 Scott found himself
in Dublin on Wickham’s invitation, ‘a weeklong trip’, as he subsequently noted, ‘that turned into six years’ (2012: 90). When they were joined by Waterboys saxophonist Anthony Thistlethwaite (who had re-invented himself as a mandolinist), the three musicians started collaborating on a new form of music that was to develop into the band’s defining sound for the next seven years. This ‘raggle taggle’ style was heavily influenced by American acoustic roots music – blues, Cajun, country and gospel; Hank Williams became a particularly important touchstone.1 But another principal component – perhaps the most fundamental – was the different approach to the idea of music that Scott encountered in Ireland. This different approach concerned not only a particular kind of music – the
cluster of forms and styles grouped under the name of ‘traditional’ – with which Scott had hitherto been only passingly familiar; it also related to the way in which he perceived music as operating at large throughout Irish society. Scott came to believe that music was a part of the authentic fabric of life in Ireland in ways which it was not in any other place he had encountered. This realisation descended upon him during a festival in Kenmare in Co. Kerry in May 1987, while he was listening with his girlfriend to ‘trad’ supergroup Patrick Street:
