Poetry in Motion

Mike Scott’s interest in WB Yeats developed early, while he was growing up in Edinburgh. “My mother was an English lecturer,” he recalls, “and she had Yeats’s books in the house. I remember reading ‘News from the Delphic Oracle’ when I was 10 or 11; not understanding it, but loving it. Then later, in my early 20s – it might even have been on The Waterboys’ first trip to Ireland – I bought a book of Yeats’ poetry. So I remember reading him as a boy, not thinking about it for a long time, and then coming back to it when I was in Ireland.”

Written in the main by Scott and arranged with Waterboy colleague, Steve Wickham, the Yeats’ poems-to-music project spans the poet’s career, ranging from famous pieces like ‘September 1913’ to lesser-known pieces.
“I like going deep into Yeats’ work, to find the little fragments of songs that were in his plays,” says Scott. “I put together two fragmentary lyrics from two different plays to make one. I take liberties with them.”
So you don’t stick religiously to what Yeats wrote?
“Absolutely not. I couldn’t do my job properly if I did. I have to treat them like I treat my own lyrics, so I’ll be ruthless if I need to be to make it work.”
How will he recreate the album in a live setting?
“Funding permitting,” he says, “we’ll have four strings, trombone, oboe, guitar, backing vocals and the usual five Waterboys, which is myself, fiddle, bass, drums and keyboards. There’s a terrific female singer from Waterford involved called Katie Kim. She sounds like she’s singing in a Japanese dream world – she’s deliciously witchy. So there’s a lot of different colours. Some of it’s proper rock ‘n’ roll; a lot of it’s quite psychedelic. Very little of it is folky; some of it’s poppy. I had no interest in making it stuffy, or like a museum piece. I just wanted to use the poems as lyrics, and use whatever kind of music I felt suited the lyric – however radical a Yeats purist might find that.”
Abbey audiences will be in for a treat visually, too, with the theatrical lighting and set design. Scott elaborates:
“There’s a big influence from Harry Clarke, the stained glass artist and illustrator, in the quality of colour, and an otherworldliness and sense of texture. “The band should also look like they’re out of a Harry Clarke painting, as a rock ’n’ roll band should look – like The Stones in their ‘Jumping Jack Flash’ video – with those just post-flower power, bit more edge, velvet-patterned costumes that popstars used to wear when they knew how to dress properly.”
I ask Scott whether anything comparable has been done with Yeats’ work before.
“There have been a few Yeats albums by relatively unknown musicians,” he says. “But they’re highly traditional and respectful to Yeats, and there’s no rock content. So it’s not fucking with Yeats, which is what we’re doing.”
Besides their mutual delight in poetic beauty, Yeats and Scott share another major interest: a fascination with magic and the esoteric.
“Yeats was a very serious occult scholar,” says Scott, “and I’ve studied that world myself, so I know to respect it. But I think his occult studies were of their time; I’m not sure how relevant they’d be to today’s mind. A lot of what used to be secret knowledge is now public knowledge. The power of the mind to influence events; the power of meditation, yoga, the science of breath – these were things that were unknown and that have come into popular culture in the 20th century. And at the time that Yeats was studying the occult, I think so much was unknown and so much was little known, that they often were fumbling around in the dark. Sometimes they were onto things, and sometimes they weren’t, and they couldn’t always tell which was which. And so the area of Yeats’ occult studies is quite a fertile ground for debunkers or skeptics, or people who don’t understand the world that the occult points to. At the same time, I think Yeats was a very serious student and sometimes he was really onto things.”
Known for his mysticism, Scott spent many years living on the Scottish island of Findhorn, home to a well-established spiritual community. At this stage of the game, has he given up defending his spiritual outlook from the sceptics?
“I have a lot of sympathy for sceptics and cynics,” he replies. “They inhabit this very narrow waveband of experience, and they criticise anyone who experiences anything outside that waveband. It’s a difficult job, but someone’s got to do it. There’s a wonderful C.S. Lewis book called That Hideous Strength. One of the heroes is a professor called Ransome. He lives in a big house with a number of people. One of them is an Ulsterman, and he’s the sceptic. Ransome, who’s a very spiritually advanced evolved character, likes to have the sceptic around, kind of like a sparking post. Sceptics really have a purpose. I’ve just finished my memoir, and while I was writing it, I often thought of jaundiced sceptical journalists that I’ve met, and I think, How can I express this in a way that would convince – or at least undercut – them or him? Especially if I’m writing about something subtle or unseen, and I’m seeking language that will convey it to someone who hasn’t had the same experiences as me. I’ll use my sceptical rock journalist examples from the past, and they’re very useful.
“Of course scepticism can be done very humorously and artfully. I really enjoy a lot of sceptical writers, and sceptical rock writers. If it can’t stand having the piss taken out of it, it ain’t worth a fuck. One of the reasons I knew Findhorn was the real thing when I first went there was that every Friday there was a community concert, and they used to rip the piss out of the place.”
Devoid of earnestness, and ready to appreciate the artful mockery of his own beliefs, Mike Scott couldn’t be in a better place for the re-introduction of W.B. Yeats into contemporary popular culture – Waterboys-style.