Too High, Too Far, Too Soon
It starts with a fanfare. A single trumpet, blowing high and wild, glimmers of sunlight jabbing holes in a stormy sky. Behind it, guitars, not so much strummed as hammered, wire and wood pushed to their limits. The chording is almost Spanish, calling up the drama of a spaghetti Western, a Morricone showdown. Two gunmen, hands crooked over their holsters, waiting for the first toll of high noon. A honky-tonk piano slides into the mix, maybe from the saloon where an argument over cards or a girl started, to finish the matter at hand in a crack of gunfire, of blood in the dust.
It builds, it builds, you can smell the tension, the tremble in the trigger fingers, sweat easing out from the band of the stetson. One last howl from the trumpet, a single pure high note holding for that second longer than it should and then and then and then
BANG. The drums, finally, a cannonade, regiments of worn boot heels marching in lockstep across a windblasted mountain range. More guitars, electric now, overdriven, snarling like predators running down their prey. And a voice, sneering, insouciant, a challenge, a dare.
‘So here we are in a special place
What are you gonna do here?
Now we stand in a special place
What will you do here?
What show of soul
are we gonna get from you?
It could be Deliverance
Or History
Under these skies so blue
Something true…’
Now that’s how you start an album.
The album in question is This Is The Sea, the third record from The Waterboys, released in 1985. It’s the home of their best known track, The Whole Of The Moon, a staple of wedding discos everywhere. The entire album is a wild flurry of wild-eyed poetry carried on the back of music barreling along with the unstoppable momentum of an out-of-control stagecoach. Think Springsteen arm-wrestling with Van Morrison on the peak of a Scottish mountain in the middle of a thunderstorm.
There is a name for this stuff, a term coined by head Waterboy and sole continuing member, Mike Scott. He calls it, with admirable simplicity, The Big Music. For a glorious moment in the mid-Eighties, it was all and everything to me. U2, Simple Minds, Big Country, even early goths like Echo And The Bunnymen knew that nothing succeeded better than excess. Huge-sounding, theatrical, dramatic, wide-screen, lyrics a torrent of verse with the vision and scale of Blake and Pound and Whitman. Celtic hearts and bones, looking west to all the promises of the Americas. This is still, even now, thirty years down the line, music which grabs me by the lapels and goes in all tongues for a big hairy kiss.
The Waterboys had it all. They could have sounded the trumpet from the mountaintop and armies would have followed them. Instead, Mike Scott chose a quieter path. He decamped to Ireland, gathered a family of musicians around him and rewrote the mythology.
Fisherman’s Blues, as the start of Waterboys Phase 2, seems like a wildly different offering to what came before. An amble down Irish folkways, soaked in tradition using largely acoustic instruments, it feels like a record with little to prove, without fire in its belly. But listen closely and you can hear how Scott and his raggle-taggle band of brothers have simply refined the sound. The poetry and passion are still there. And Mike’s still a storyteller. He starts the album with a clear map of this new journey—a map which, by necessity charts where things began.
‘I wish I was a fisherman
Tumblin’ on the seas
Far away from dry land
And its bitter memories…’
The Big Music left scars, clearly.
Fisherman’s Blues would become The Waterboy’s biggest selling album, building a new fan-base while hanging onto those who had raised their banners alongside the group before. One more album, Room To Roam, carried on with the folk feel. Then Mike, ever restless, moved on again, returning to a rockier sound for Dream Harder before losing heart, shuttering the band and trying music under his own name.
These records, Waterboys music in all but name, garnered a modest following but the armies ebbed away. It felt as if the visionary we loved had lost his mojo, wandering in the desert in search of a sound he was finding increasingly hard to hear.
Finally, following an onstage reunion with old Waterboys from the first two chapters of the story, Mike raised the four-striped flag again in 2000, understanding the new century needed his brand of what he called ‘psychedelic elemental roar’ and, with the experimental A Rock In The Weary Land, restarted the engine. The cover shows him on mission, shoving the headstock of a Telecaster into the camera lens while stormy skies roil behind him.
And the ride continues to this day, as Mike and his ever-changing band explore new horizons. From blues to soul to Americana and even hip-hop, the feel is different but the spirit remains in place. The passion, the giddy rush of wordplay, the sheer joy of poetry (which exhibited most clearly in 2010’s ‘An Appointment With Mr. Yeats,’ a touring show and album which set the verse of W. B Yeats to music) are the links in the chain which continue to connect us to The Waterboys.
All that history, all those songs and stories, finally brought me to Oxford last week to commune in person, to finally join the congregation of The Church Not Made With Hands. Mike and The ‘Boys are touring a new record, a double concept album on a central figure of the counter-culture, Dennis Hopper. Those expecting a lazy greatest-hits set were in for a shock. The middle section of the concert was a run through the highlights of that album, complete with art, a ragged choir and projections. A bold move which could have sucked all momentum out of the evening. But the songs are fantastic, and the subject an object of continuing fascination. Let’s face it, if Mike can call in contributors like Fiona Apple, Steve Earle and a certain Mr. Springsteen to help out, you know the music is good.
Scott strode the stage like a gunfighting angel, resplendent in spangled denim and a huge Stetson, wrangling heavy weather from his beloved Dan Armstrong Perspex guitar and a filigreed Zemaitis which sang and hummed, spitting aural fireworks. Flanked by the latest iteration of the band, including long-standing members Famous James and Brother Paul (who cooked up a storm with piano and organ on a raucous blast through Medicine Bow), there was little chance to catch our collective breath. The hits were there, of course, and by the encores most of the crowd were on their feet. It was a celebration but also a marker laid, a flare lit.
This did not feel like the end of a story, or even a chapter. Everyone on stage was energised, engaged, ready for the fights and the dances to come. It was typically Waterboys—just another milestone on the endless journey towards transcendence.
