Bring Me Water

Mike Scott has a happy dilemma. He has to pick songs for his band The Waterboys' upcoming Australian tour, and he has 30 years of material to scour through. Normally when a band tours they load the set with songs from the latest album and then pick some fan favourites to represent the back catalogue, making sure to focus on any albums that may have been missed since the band last toured. Except Mike Scott is in a fairly unique position. Since his band started in Scotland in the early years of the 1980s, The Waterboys have never been to Australia. Scott says the closest they ever came was early in the band's existence in about 1986.

“I think we had a tour booked or just about ready to go on sale, but we didn't have a drummer so we didn't do it,” Scott says. “Ever since then I've been wanting to come to Australia and wondering when it's going to happen and everybody's always been asking, 'When are you going to come to Australia?' and it's just taken this long for a promoter to make an offer and for my agent to be happy with it.” So despite a shared love of Celtic traditions, Australian audiences will be coming to the band's January shows completely fresh. It means that for the first time in a long time Scott is preparing a setlist from scratch.

“When I've been going through the songs wondering which ones to play on this tour it's quite a novelty knowing that for 90% of the audience it will be the first time they've heard us play these songs. So yes that is very, very intriguing as a prospect,” Scott says. While some bandleaders could agonise over the decision, over the years Scott has found a fairly easy way to make musical decisions like this.“I do what the music tells me. What I'll do before the tour is I'll get out my guitar and I'll do all the songs that are possible and I'll strum them and see how they go and the songs, in a way, let me know themselves if they want to be included.”

When the band started, The Waterboys took the Celtic folk and spiritual traditions of their home and fused them onto a cinematic type of rock'n'roll that the critics dubbed 'Big Music'. Big Music would share characteristics with the music of another young Celtic band from across the way, U2. Normally artists bristle at the idea of being labelled anything but Scott isn't entirely put out at The Waterboys' tag. “I think it's kind of an honour or an accolade to have your form of music described like a genre. That's the upside of it. The downside of it, is genres having a habit of sticking and music isn't sticky. And The Waterboys music isn't sticky at all. It keeps changing. It keeps moving.

“For me when The Waterboys' music went beyond the 'Big Music' sound of those early records the fact that there was a tag meant there was more resistance to the change on the part of the critics and perhaps parts of the audience. And the next form of music we made, the music on Fisherman's Blues and Room To Roam was tagged, and I love this phrase, 'Raggle-Taggle' but that too became a little sticking point when the music changed in yet other directions. So what pleases me as a bandleader is when a band can play all these kinds of music and not be contained by any of them and that's what I want to do.”

After the release of Dream Harder, an album recorded with predominantly session musicians in 1993, band departures meant Scott was the only Waterboy left. The band had released six albums in ten years to varying success, and had in essence created their very own genre. It was time for Scott to go solo. In 2000 Scott put a new version of The Waterboys together and has since released four albums. The most recent is last year's An Appointment With Mr Yeats – a musical ode to the great Irish poet, William Butler Yeats. On the album the most recent incarnation of the The Waterboys puts some of Yeats' most popular and more obscure poems to their sprawling folk rock. While they're in Australia the band will be including some of these songs in their set but in Sydney they're performing a Sydney Festival show dedicated to the album with the setlist made up almost entirely from this album.

When the topic of Yeats comes up, Scott is eager to point out that he didn't learn about Yeats at school. “My mother is an English lecturer and in the late '60s I can remember her talking about this poet Yeats in a voice-tone of awe. In the '70s she took me with her when she went to the Yeats summer school in the west of Ireland. She took me to some of the lectures and readings, which I don't remember, but I felt the idea of having Yeats as the great master poet strongly impressed on me. I've always liked his poetry. I like the subjects he wrote about and I like what he says and I like the way he uses language. I like the combination of vowel and consonant sounds he uses. I like the flavour. Lots of his poems rhyme and turn very sweetly.”

Like choosing the setlist for a show, Scott let the poetry dictate the way the album took shape. “I opened a book of poetry going through every single poem from the first to the 600th and if a poem suggested a melody in my mind I would continue with it and if it didn't I would continue to the next poem so in that way it wasn't about what was my favourite. I did a diligent job of going through the entire canon of Yeats' poems. “I've got a particularly good volume of Yeats' poetry that somebody gave me many years ago. It's WB Yeats – Complete Poems edited by a chap called Richard Finneran, who must be an Irish academic, and it includes poems that were featured only in his plays, but weren't in his books, and also that were featured in journals and magazines. It's the equivalent of a Bruce Springsteen box set that includes all of his bootlegs and out-takes and b-sides.”

Born of an English lecturer mother and a poet father, Scott was always destined to have a strong appreciation for language. And 30 years after recording his first Waterboys album, Scott is still letting the music guide him. “It can start with a chord sequence or a riff or it can start with a title,” Scott explains. “But pretty soon in the creation of any song I will merge the two and I will use the music to get more words. The fact of being able to sing a line means I'll get more lyrics to fall into the mind once I'm singing. And then the lyrics will suggest the next piece of music. They're building blocks for each other. “I know when I like it. When I feel right about it. I don't really get bothered about whether I think it's really good or what critics or public are going to say about it. If it doesn't have that right feeling and yet the whole world said they loved it that wouldn't make me happy.”

The Waterboys will be playing the following dates:

Wednesday 23 January - Sydney Festival, State Theatre, Sydney NSW
Friday 25 January - Canberra Theatre, Canberra ACT
Saturday 26 January - Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House, Sydney NSW
Wednesday 30 January - Hamer Hall, Melbourne VIC
Thursday 31 January - Thebarton Theatre, Adelaide SA
Saturday 2 February - Perth Concert Hall, Perth WA