The Waterboys

The Waterboys have been through numerous line-ups and many different musical styles since their original emergence in the early 1980s, but the one constant and primary driving force throughout is Scotsman Mike Scott. He started his career in the bands Another Pretty Face, Funhouse, and The Red & The Black before linking up with multi-instrumentalist Anthony Thistlethwaite to form The Waterboys, taking the name from a Lou Reed song. Their 1983 eponymous studio debut featured the single “A Girl Called Johnny,” which was written by Scott in tribute to Patti Smith and climbed to Number 80 on the UK Singles Chart. Their second album A Pagan Place (1984) heralded a style known as The Big Music, helped by supporting tours with The Pretenders and U2. In 1985 they achieved their biggest hit with the classic single “Whole of the Moon,” which was featured on their third album, This Is the Sea (1985), and peaked at Number 26 on the UK Singles Chart. A meeting with fiddle player Steve Wickham led Scott in a different direction and, moving to Ireland, he firmly embraced Irish traditional music on the albums Fisherman's Blues (1988) and Room to Roam (1990), which also featured the great Irish accordion player Sharon Shannon. The departure of Wickham provoked another new direction towards hard rock, with Scott moving to New York. He subsequently embarked on a solo career but relaunched The Waterboys in 2000 with the album A Rock in the Weary Land, playing music which he described as "sonic rock", partly inspired by artists like Radiohead and Beck. They went acoustic on Universal Hall (2003) and re-engaged with Wickham on Book of Lightning (2007). In 2010 Scott launched An Appointment With Mr Yeats, a touring stage show in which he set the poetry of W.B. Yeats to music. Spearheaded by the singles “November Tale” and “Beautiful Now,” Modern Blues (2015) was hailed by critics as a return to form and reached Number 2 on the UK Independent Albums Chart. Scott pushed the limits of the band’s sound even further with Out of All This Blue (2017) and Where the Action Is (2019), incorporating elements from funk, dance music, and hip-hop into The Waterboys’ repertoire. Both albums received generally positive reviews and made it to the Top 5 of the UK Independent Albums Chart, paving the way for Good Luck, Seeker (2020), almost 37 years into their genre-defying career.