![]() ![]() Scott recently spent five “intense” months working on a new box-set, The Magnificent Seven: The Waterboys Fisherman’s Blues/Room to Roam Band, 1989–90. The follow-up, Room to Roam, released in 1990, was equally in thrall to traditional styles. I was touring the world! I wanted The Waterboys to be one of the most successful bands ever.”įisherman’s Blues (1988) was the first Waterboys album infused with what Scott calls “that Celtic music spirit”. Karl Wallinger did an interview claiming I was hiding. “I might have been enchanted with Ireland, but I wasn’t trying to escape or retreat from anything. “The Waterboys myth, that ‘Mike Scott ran away from success’, is s-e,” he says. His “Irish adventure” is often characterised as a retreat from the prospect of mass popularity, but speaking to me from his Dublin home, Scott is having none of it. In January 1986 he left London for Dublin, and immersed himself in roots music: not just Irish and Scottish folk, but country, 1950s rock ’n’ roll, blues and gospel. He felt he had taken the cinematic sweep of the band’s “big music” to its limits. Following the success of their third album, This is the Sea (1985), and its anthemic single, The Whole of the Moon, there was a growing expectation that The Waterboys would be the natural successors to U2, at the time busy recording The Joshua Tree and approaching their pomp. ![]() “Absolute b-s.” Mike Scott is robustly debunking the “reductionist” narrative surrounding his band, The Waterboys: the one which states that he “ran away” from the prospect of the group becoming a household name in the mid-1980s.įormed in 1983 as a vehicle for Scott’s widescreen songs, The Waterboys made critical and commercial inroads with their eponymous debut and its follow up, A Pagan Place (1984). ![]()
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January 2023
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