The Waterboys: Going With The Flow
Waterboy Mike Scott has always pursued his own musical course without commercial concessions. Despite that, the major labels are making a big deal over him. Everyone in Dublin, it seems, has a story about Mike Scott. Like the one about how the enigmatic leader of the Waterboys spent hundreds of thousands of dollars — some even say a million dollars — recording the group’s 1988 album Fisherman’s Blues. Or the one about how he left a guitar in Windmill Lane Studios for several weeks just so it could “soak up the atmosphere.” Or the one about how he couldn’t be bothered to appear on the influential British TV show Top of the Pops, because he was holed up in a studio with Bob Dylan.
As it turns out, these stories are more often fantasy than fact. But they have helped to underscore Scott’s reputation as a moody, unpredictable artist who refuses to play by pop-establishment rules and who is capable of mercurial shifts in musical direction.
Despite that reputation, Scott and the Waterboys — the group really amounts to a one-man show — are coveted by just about every major label. With the recent release of The Best of the Waterboys, ’81-’90, Scott has fulfilled his contract with the British-based Ensign Records (also home to Sinéad O’Connor and former Waterboy Karl Wallinger’s World Party) and is now a free agent. Label presidents have been flying in and out of Dublin to court him, and the offers are rumored to have reached more than $1 million per album — a staggering sum for an artist who thus far has failed to score a significant commercial triumph. But the record companies seem to realize what critics and Waterboys fans have known for years — that Scott is a rare talent, an extraordinarily gifted songwriter, and that with the right album he could break through in a big way.
None of this seems to faze Scott. And indeed, he has been in a similar situation before. Back in the mid-Eighties, after the release of his first three albums (The Waterboys, A Pagan Place and This Is the Sea), Scott seemed poised to follow U2 into the pop stratosphere. It looked as if he had it all: the songs, the sound, the looks. But Scott retreated, moving from London to Dublin and taking three years to make his next record, Fisherman’s Blues, a lovely though seemingly uncommercial album steeped in traditional Irish music. He also ceased doing interviews for a time. The word around the record industry was that Scott simply didn’t want, or couldn’t cope with, commercial success.
It’s a charge that galls him. “I think it’s complete nonsense,” Scott says. It’s an unusually warm, sunny Saturday afternoon in Dublin, but Scott is sequestered in a dark, dingy pub, sipping a glass of mineral water and making the best of one of a handful of interviews he has agreed to do to support the new Waterboys compilation. He’s extremely cautious, speaking slowly and punctuating his answers with periods of uncomfortable silence. “The only people who say that I’m afraid of success,” Scott continues, “are people who don’t understand why I haven’t done certain things that would have given me a shortcut to success. I’m not interested in shortcuts to success. Success, to me, is being happy in your life.”
And is Scott happy? “You betcha,” he says.
Scott attributes his current state of mental well-being to his move to Ireland. “You’ve got to understand where I was coming out of,” he says, referring to the situation he found himself in after This Is the Sea was issued in 1985. “I was young. I had a band that wasn’t stable. I had no home at the time. I had no kind of life other than my work. And there were loads of battles and all kinds of absolute nonsense going down. Then suddenly, I come to Dublin, and everybody’s really friendly. Nobody’s making demands on me. The music business is across the sea [in London]. I’m in love with fiddle music. I met Irene, who’s now my wife. I made loads of friends really fast. And I got enchanted by Ireland. All at once, it was really, really great.”
In Ireland, Scott — who spent his youth in Ayr, on the west coast of Scotland — took the time to rediscover his own roots. “The Scots originally were the Irish,” he explains. “A Scot was an Irishman who went and colonized the southwest part of Scotland. And the cultures of the two countries — they’re like brother and sister. And the music is very obviously related. The same tunes are common to both cultures. The same way of playing is common, the same instruments are common. When I came to Ireland, there was so much Scotland in Ireland, so much that seemed completely normal to me or friendly and homey to me.”
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