Music: The Waterboys

An appointment with Mr Scott

Formed in 1983 by Mike Scott, The Waterboys have been in essence his band along with a revolving nucleus of musicians, playing in a number of different styles but with celtic folk and rock’n’roll at its core. The band dissolved in 1993 and Scott pursued a solo career before reforming in 2000. Scott has previously emphasised a continuity between The Waterboys and his solo work. “To me there’s no difference between Mike Scott and the Waterboys; they both mean the same thing. They mean myself and whoever are my current travelling musical companions.”

Last year the band released An Appointment with Mr Yeats, an album that feature the words of famous Irish poet W.B. Yeats, along with the music of The Waterboys. “My mother was an English lecturer and I remember her talking about Yeats in the house as a child, usually in hushed tones. In 1970, when I was 11, she took me to the Yeats summer school in Sligo and I went to some of the readings and lectures which gave me a sense of who Yeats was;  I came to him in my own time…  I like his poems and I like his use of language and the subjects he writes about. And I noticed that some of them suggested music in my mind, suitable for musical treatment.

In 1988, on the Fisherman’s Blues album, we did ‘The Stolen Child’ (one of Yeats’s poems) and ever since then I’ve kept going through his poetry books until I had enough for a show which was The Appointment With Mr Yeats, and which became the album.” 

Yeats was the recipient of the Nobel Prize, and became a giant of Irish literature. “He’s Ireland’s national poet in the same way Robert Burns is Scotland’s national poet and Shakespeare is England’s bard. His quotes are used in daily conversation, and a lot are familiar beyond Ireland like No Country For Old Men which is one of his lines. 

“Yeats was fascinated by myths, legends and mysticism. That’s part of the pull of his work. People sometimes over-interpret his work, and some people can’t deal with his mysticism, and try and treat it like a folly because they don’t understand it… I’m not sure what the Yeats glitterati make of it, but I don’t actually care! I’ve read a couple of biographies of Yeats by people who don’t get him.”