Mike Scott is anxious to dismiss any suggestion of bad blood at the departure of fiddle player Steve Wickham in 1990, a move which signalled another change of direction for The Waterboys.

Steve could give you a fuller version, he says, but my understanding is that he d been considering leaving for a while, for his own reasons, nothing to do with the rest of us. But when Anthony and I wanted to swing back to rock n roll, and we wanted more of a blasting drummer than a subtle drummer like Noel (Bridgeman), Steve didn t want to go that way.
Had Steve formed a personal alliance with Noel, and was then upset at his being replaced?
Oh no, absolutely not, no, Scott insists. There s no intrigue at all. None at all. None whatsoever. No, Steve just disagreed with us, and I think he d been thinking of leaving for a while. I think he just wanted something different in his life, maybe he wanted to go to the west and live a quiet life, I don t know. But I feel that me and Anthony wanting to change the sound of the band was the last straw for him. I don t mean that that could be misinterpreted there wasn t any friction between us up til then, but I just think this gave him an excuse.
Wickham had served as the glue holding the trad and rock elements of the band together. When The Waterboys hit the road again, it was as a stripped down four-piece: Scott, Anto, Trevor and American drummer Ken Blevins. Early gigs, held in tents around the west of Ireland and on the isle of Lewis, were nervy, raw and loud. The set featured a rocking new song, Once Upon A Time (since retitled Kiss The Wind ), a rocked up This Is The Sea and a mere handful of Room To Roam tunes. However, by the time the band got back to Ireland for a Christmas tour after forays across Britain and the US, they were sporting weighty arrangements of many of the new songs. The Point show on Stephen s Night 1990 gave the first hint in years of an arena-scaled Waterboys, replete with light show, back projections and the Kick Horns.
That was about 80 gigs later, Scott observes. That s what 80 gigs does for ye! There was a brass section as well; they were like the reinforcements, the cavalry. I remember they joined us in Cardiff on the British tour on the 15th show or something, and boy, to hear that sound on stage. Whew! It was a relief.
New Year s Eve in Galway 1990 was the last Waterboys show until last summer. Then, in the midst of Gulf War madness, Mike began writing new material, soon to leave Dublin for New York. Trevor went on to play with Sharon Shannon, Anto made a brace of solo albums, and Wickham kept a very low profile. Scott set to work on a new album, a new era, signing a new deal with Geffen, reputedly worth $2 million.
Dream Harder, produced by Clash/Pistols/Guns N Roses helmsman Bill Price, was released in May of 1993. It was a patchy record, queerly out of sync with the times in terms of tone and tonality. While all around were approaching the prospect of the new millennium stealthily, riddled with future shock phobias, on the opening tune New Life Scott steamed into the new age with an almost vainglorious positivism. Musically, the album hinged around the rather generic playing of musicians like former Wendy & Lisa drummer Carla Azar and guitarist Chris Bruce, lending Scott s songs a conservative Big Rock sound at odds with the angsty venom of contemporary acts like Smashing Pumpkins, or the smoky disquiet of Bristol s trip-hop lot.
It was a record made in a vacuum, Scott admits. I wasn t listening to any other rock records apart from Nirvana s Nevermind. I thought it (Nevermind) was a bit nihilistic but I thought it was a great record. I didn t pay any attention whatsoever to what was going on in rock.
For all its flaws, Dream Harder contained some of Scott s most remarkable songs in years: The Return Of Jimi Hendrix was a star-spangled Freud n Jung/Patti Smith-style stream of consciousness rap; Love And Death , an adaptation of an obscure Yeats lyric, was nothing less than majestic, while Glastonbury Song represented his strongest slice of what Bill Graham termed Gnostic Rock in years.
Elsewhere though, The Return Of Pan dealt in the kind of otherworldly myth-taking that gnarled rock critics will only forgive in black mystics like Lee Scratch Perry or Sun Ra, while Corn Circles was just plain risible. More troubling, Scott found it difficult to recruit a new touring line-up to compare with the bravura of vintage Waterboys and give the new album the boost it needed. And, most telling of all, Mike ended up tossing his famous leather fisherman s cap into a New York dustbin.
Oh yes, that s absolutely true, he smiles. It wasn t deliberately symbolic but . . . there it went.
Soon after Dream Harder stiffed, Geffen dropped Scott. His marriage ended. He returned to Scotland, kissed the airport tarmac, and at his mother s recommendation, spent some time at the Findhorn Institute, where he licked his wounds and set about recording the extremely effective not to mention introspective solo album Bring Em All In. Released in 1995 and garnering a supportive response, the largely autobiographical collection contained some of his best work in years. One of that album s fans was Creation founder and Oasis mentor Alan McGee, who wanted to sign the singer but was outbid by Chrysalis. Nevertheless, he acted as musical advisor on Scott s 1997 second solo album Still Burning. Scott moved back to London for the first time in ten years, eager to get back in the game.
It was not to be. Although his songwriting chops were in order (particularly on the Cecil B De Mille-scale ballad Love Anyway ), Scott was adrift musically, out of touch with the sea changes that had been taking place in record production over the previous decade. A spiky lead guitarist in the Neil Young vein, he was still delegating electric guitar duties to Chris Bruce, retaining sessioneers like Pino Palladino and fighting over-orthodox arrangements which dated the songs. Still Burning burned its author badly, losing him a lot of money, even forcing him to sell his house.
After immersing himself in traditional and roots forms for so long, Scott now found that he had to subject himself to a similar learning process in order to facilitate a re-entry into millennial rock n roll. However, the Still Burning tour, with kinsman and former Icicle Work Ian McNabb on bass, found Scott in fighting form. Reports of his creative death had been greatly exaggerated.

Halfway through the title tune of the seventh Waterboys album A Rock In The Weary Land, Mike Scott seems to come to, as if regaining consciousness after a long, languorous sleep. Somehow, it s AD 2000. Home is South-West London. He s watching these meaningless movies/On the screen behind the band that s blowing, throwing shapes/Half of the music is on tape .
He s a man out of time, out of mind.
Over the last decade, Scott had been conspicuous by his presence. He was there in Richard Ashcroft s mad auguries of innocence, the belief in music as the holiest of holies. He was there in Oasis Beatles fixation (on stage at Dublin s Olympia in December 97, he half-joked that he d written Love Anyway for Liam Gallagher to sing). You could hear him in the gravelly, declamatory ballads of that newest of new Dylans, David Gray, in the breathtaking cinemascope of Mercury Rev s Deserter s Songs, and in the kinetic improvisational power of Spiritualized.
Perhaps he only thrives in the face of adversity. The last time Scott impacted on the common consciousness, the charts were saturated with plastic pop. Now it s that way again, maybe his hour has come round again, maybe it s time to build some new Jerusalems in England s green and peasant land.
Whatever way you cut it, The Waterboys are back in town. Bloodied but unbowed, Scott has acknowledged that the band name carries more currency than his own. He met the myth head on at Glastonbury this year, with a new band and a fire in his belly.
It appears to have paid off. The new album doesn t feature the holy trinity vintage line-up (although apparently that will happen) but it is, lyrically and sonically, his most evocative work since This Is the Sea. In many ways, it s the record Dream Harder should have been: Scott the producer is back, having immersed himself in new technology, new sounds, working with spacers like Thighpaulsandra (ex Spiritualized, Julian Cope), perhaps recognizing Tomorrow Never Knows in the Chemical Bros, Desolation Row in Beck, The Band in Mercury Rev, soaking up DJ Shadow s nu-jazz magick, the Flaming Lips astral projections, Radiohead s millencholia. Sounds unlikely? Remember, this is the man who made The Whole Of The Moon , a record that became a chill-out staple at rave clubs like Phuture and Chaos.
A Rock In The Weary Land opens up with Let It Happen , a kind of queasy, sleazy, nightmare voyage into midi-evil millennial London. A lot of rank water has passed under the bridge since Mike and Anto used to go down Portobello way, checking out the second hand books, clothes and bootlegs. This is a strange boat indeed, pitching back and forth, piloted by the kind of grotesques usually conjured by Blake, Bosch and Ballard. This is Mike Scott s White Album: gaze into its many surfaces for long enough and you might begin to discern the same crazy patterns Manson detected in Revolutions 1-9.
Back are the Rimbaud-ian fever dreams of All The Things She Gave Me , Gala and Rags . Indeed, the nightmare flight described in The Wind In The Wires ( Awake lady wake/The hell s are in flood/And the road we must take/Is a river of blood ) could be a relocation of the War Is Hell On Earth scenarios of Red Army Blues to Kosovo. Likewise, the single Is She Conscious? might be another Trumpets -style homage to a dark lady of the sonnets but for the killer closing couplet.
On this record I realised, I m ready to take it all on my own shoulders and develop, as you said, a whole palette of sounds, Scott declares, stirring sugar into his cappuccino. I was well aware that I needed to increase my repertoire of sounds, a whole constellation of sound, and for the first time since the This Is The Sea days I started listening to contemporary rock, and I picked up tons of ideas from that, and I heard all the clash of styles on Odelay and Mutations and I d check out the Wu Tang Clan with their beats with the little bits of fiddle, OK Computer where every sound is sculpted . . .
Wu Tang Clan and The Waterboys? It s not as odd a coupling as one might suppose. Much of A Rock In The Weary Land takes place in a similar Golem-hole in Gotham city.
Grotesque, Mike agrees. The way London looked to me when I came back it was like a madhouse, like a crazy place, a place full of illusion and distortion. I was on Iona recently, a beautiful sacred little island known as Scotland s holy island , and someone said to me, When are you going back to the real world? And I said to him, This is the real world, pal. When I go back to London I m going back to the world of delusion and distortion. I ve waited a long, long, long time to be able to articulate that.
Speaking of the phony real world, Dumbing Down The World is a demonic Jerry Springer schooled in CS Lewis Screwtape Letters. Many previous Waterboys records were about trying to get into heaven. This one has its feet in the hot coals.
It s the devil, Scott affirms. I ve ploughed bad vibe furrows before, Be My Enemy was one, but still with a bit of tongue in cheek, a bit of humour. I think a lot of the record is about me feeling like an alien in modern London. And the meaninglessness of a lot of what I see, and seeing it with these different eyes, the difference that 10 years makes.
And is he happy to live in the mouth of the madness?
Well, I have to live in London if I want to work at the top of my game, he reasons. It s where the studios, the musicians, the business, the competition is. And also I recognize that it s good for my edge. I ve plenty of life ahead of me, I can go off to the west of Ireland some other time.
Also I m stung by what happened with my last record, Still Burning. Y know, it didn t do well, it didn t get much notice taken of it, and I m not one of these guys who ll brag, I m not Noel Gallagher going out and saying, We re the best in the world and I m the best songwriter , but I do have self belief, and I m stung by that last record and definitely hungry to prove that I can do it.
On the subject of Still Burning: those lines in the title track of the new record, My mentor and champion/Is tilting at the windmills of his stately home/The demon he s grappling/Is his own are they a reference to Alan McGee?
There s a little swift tribute to him there, yeah. Heh-heh-heh.
Get back in yer box, Screwtape.

And so, to a question every Waterboys devotee must be asking. Given that Scott has played with Steve and Anto on numerous occasions over the last few years, why aren t they on the new record?
Well, that one s easily answered Scott just didn t figure sax and violins into the new music. However, a long mooted album of Fisherman s Blues out-takes, tentatively titled Too Close To Heaven, is pending. Once the Weary Land campaign concludes next summer, Scott plans on tending to overdubbing and mixing chores next autumn, with a provisional release date slated for February 2002.
Possibly earlier, he conjectures. It s about 12 tracks. I ve chosen what I think are the best ones, and most of them are original songs that no-one s ever heard.
And will Anthony and Steve rejoin the live band at any stage?
They will, yeah. When the Fisherman s Blues (outtakes) album comes out and we tour, they ll both be there. Perhaps the people who are gonna work in the Rock In The Weary Land band will stay and we ll just bring in Steve and Anto on top, as it were. I ve been working with both of them, Anthony s on the record a little bit and I ve been doing my gigs with Steve in Sligo and Galway. It s a great experience working with him again and he s playing really great. He s playing with the joy of those mid-eighties days but with the discipline that only an older man can have.
As we were saying:
Allons! The road is before us
May the circle be unbroken.

The Waterboys new album A Rock In The Weary Land is now available.