The Waterboys
1985
★★★★
CHRYSALIS
A SEARCH FOR information about an old New York shop called Magickal Childe, closed since 1999, can take you to some interesting places on the inter net. One site suggests John Lennon was a regular visitor to the occult and esoteric store on West 19th Street, though whether he participated in the “over-the-top rituals in the back”, or was scolded by the intemperate co-owner, Horrible Her man, remains unknown.
Mike Scott, questing head of The Waterboys, visited Magickal Childe in January 1985, noting the “shrunken skulls”, “warlocks’ cloaks” and “some seriously out-there books, beyond even the usual outer limits of what I’d read myself ”. The hardback volume he bought that day for $9.60 had nothing at all written in it: the pages were bare, awaiting spells. Over the next few months, Scott would fill this Book Of Shadows with his own particular incantations, fervid lyrics that became the songs of his third Waterboys album, This Is The Sea. There were tiny, spider y declarations of intent, too, many reproduced in this hefty and compelling box set, 1985. “Resurrect the narrative in Poetic/Wild/Impressionistic form,” instructed one. “The non-linear ballad cometh. Create new acoustic electric, cold-country rock/folk music – jagged and rollingly pure as the land.”
As a mystical imperative for the project, it remains an appealing one: a musical mission to channel the elements and the landscape into a sound that went beyond previous Waterboys epics like Savage Earth Heart and A Pagan Place; to achieve transcendence “Too high! Too far! Too soon!” But one of the many pleasures of these six CDs, and the 30,000-word Scott essay that accompanies them, is how rigorously 1985 exposes the creative process. These songs don’t materialise, fully-for med, out of a highland mist. Their origins can be traced back through abandoned fragments and half-ideas, influences dutifully catalogued.
Scott begins trying out songs in Parkgate Studios, Battle, on February 28, 1985, and one of them is a brief, upbeat piano sketch called The Mercenary And The Samaritan. That tune in turn has been salvaged from an older song, A Boy In Black Leather, written in 1979 for Scott’s first band, Another Pretty Face. The next day, however, the same piano groove has migrated somewhere else, settling in behind a lyric started by Scott in New York a month earlier. Over nine minutes, you can hear him working towards an epiphany until, around seven minutes in, the graft pays off and the song evolves into its recognisable form – The Whole Of The Moon.
READ MORE: "Bob Dylan heard The Whole Of The Moon and he liked it..." Mike Scott interviewed
This sort of forensic study of an album’s genesis, even an album as good as This Is The Sea, obviously isn’t for everyone, and if you just want to hear many of the terrific songs that didn’t make the final cut – Then You Hold Me, The Waves, the gently New Order-ish Even The Trees Are Dancing – the 2-CD edition that came out in 2004 might suffice. But the diligence and candour of Scott is striking, from the point he begins his notes, perhaps unnecessarily, “My memory is good.” Mapping out the record’s gestation through various sessions, demos and live tracks, he is careful to acknowledge his sources.
Sleek White Schooner, for instance, is left off the album because Scott feels it’s too derivative of Echo & The Bunnymen, and there’s certainly something of an overdriven Killing Moon to it, though regular Waterboys touchstones the E Street Band (Anto Thistlethwaite’s Clemons-esque sax prominent) and the Patti Smith Group feel more noteworthy. Glassy, chiming textures lear ned from Steve Reich give many tracks, including This Is The Sea itself, an other worldly air. If This Is The Sea has long been seen as the album that could’ve made The Waterboys the next U2, Scott has spent four decades deconstructing that idea, and here his efforts become even more precise. The Cale’s work on I Wanna Be Your Dog.
That piano line is played by Karl Wallinger, soon to leave The Waterboys and form World Party, and it’s the volatile relationship between him and Scott that forms another key narrative on 1985. Long, stoned sessions at Seaview, Wallinger’s home studio in central London, prove inventive. A first instrumental take on The Pan Within is a gorgeous meeting of aesthetics, with Scott – organic, gestural – on piano and guitar, and Wallinger providing rubbery, funky synth bass and drumbox. Both are besotted with Prince, sampling a live bootleg of his cheering crowd on Theme, singing Paisley Park together to test microphone levels in the studio.
One of four versions of Beverly Penn here departs from its usually Springsteenish brawn to become arch synth-pop, while Towers Open Fire features programmed voluntaries weirdly reminiscent of Van Halen’s Jump. Wallinger wants to add synthesizers galore; Scott likes the ethereal potential of electronics but wants to avoid sounding too much a product of the 1980s. For all of Wallinger’s technological genius, it’s his vintage musicality that impresses Scott most: the version of Medicine Jack that ends up on the B-side of The Whole Of The Moon is a Britbeat R&B stomp propelled by Wallinger going the full Stevie Winwood on organ.
As Wallinger disengages, however, a new foil for Scott arrives while This Is The Sea is being completed in July 1985: an Irish fiddler called Steve Wickham adds pizzicato to The Pan Within, and soon becomes integral to The Waterboys. By November, Wickham is steering an ecstatic new version of This Is The Sea, retitled Behold The Sea, for a Radio 1 session. “I may decide – and probably will – to head off into faraway places, other lifetimes, to seek the lands of other creatures, other ways of thinking,” Scott has already written in his book of spells. “I may jump out of this boat, swim awhile, and set out upon a new destination.” This Is The Sea has been out for two months, but already the course for the next Waterboys phase is being set: a jour ney into the world of traditional Irish music that will result in 1988’s remarkable Fisherman’s Blues.
What’s inside…
CD 1. Towers Open Fire:
Trumpets (Session)
Be My Enemy (Prototype 3)
The Ways Of Men (Session)
The Waves #1
Old England (Demo)
Towers Open Fire
Down Through The Town
Ribbon Of Steel (Live)
Bury My Heart (Live)
The Three Day Man (Live)
Medicine Bow (Session)
This Is The Sea (Live)
A Door For My Soul Home (Demo)
Son Of Rags
In My Bed
The Pan Within (Inst Demo)
Even The Trees Are Dancing (Full Length)
Theme
Fuzz Guitar Vamp
Death Is Not The End
CD 2. The Black Book:
Beverly Penn (Piano Demo)
Don’t Bang The Drum (Piano Demo)
Be My Enemy (Piano Demo)
The Day I Ran Out Of People
Winter Blows
The Mercenary And The Samaritan
Looking For Dickon
Spirit (Piano Demo)
All The Bright Horses
Custer’s Blues (Piano Demo) / The Woman In Me
Paris In The Rain
The Song Of Sitting Bull
Talk About Wings
The Whole of The Moon (Writing of)
The Pan Within (Piano Demo)
No Sun In The Sky
Winter In The Blood
We Belong To The World
The Whole of The Moon (Piano Demo)
CD 3. A Sky Full Of Crows:
Medicine Jack
Medicine Jack Boogie-Woogie
The Sound Of Snow
The Pan Within (Inst)
It Should Have Been You, Guitar Play
Old England (Early Take)
Old Macmichael Had A Band / Sweet Thing
Ruby Don’t Take Your Love To Town
Spirit (Full Length)
Then You Hold Me
Trumpets (Instr #1)
Rain Come Down
Son of Dirt
This Is The Sea (Drumatix Version)
CD 4. The Ladder:
Medicine Bow (Elemental Rough Mix)
Trumpets (Inst #2)
Be My Enemy (Rough Mix)
Sleek White Schooner
Sweetheart Like You
This Is The Sea (Fast with Mike Lead Guitar Demo)
Adrian And The Piano Storm
Beverly Penn (Synth Version)
This Is The Sea (Fast with Tom Verlaine Lead Guitar Version)
The Waves #2
The Ladder (Demo)
Beverly Penn
Don’t Bang The Drum (Livingston Mix)
Ribbon of Steel Slide Guitar
Paisley Park
CD 5. Mountaintop:
The Whole of The Moon (Livingston Mix)
High Far Soon
This Is The Sea (Livingston Mix)
Medicine Bow (Full Length)
The Pan Within (Wickham’s First Play)
Miracle / World Party (Demo)
I Am Not Here
Born To Be Together (Session)
Higher In Time (Session)
The Whole of The Moon (Video Version)
Meridian West
Don’t Bang The Drum (Session)
Medicine Bow (Session)
Behold The Sea
Beverly Penn 2023
CD 6. This Is The Sea (The Album):
Don’t Bang The Drum
The Whole of The Moon
Spirit
The Pan Within
Medicine Bow
Old England
Be My Enemy
Trumpets
This Is The Sea
CHRYSALIS. Out February 23