When the Waterboys founder Mike Scott was a teenager living in Edinburgh, he published a fanzine called Jungleland. The sixth issue, which came out at the end of 1977, had Richard Hell on the cover and teased articles about the Sex Pistols and Graham Parker. That Scott named his zine after the final song on Bruce Springsteen’s album Born to Run suggested that the angry energy of punk—a force that exerts an outsized pull on the young—was tempered by a yearning spirituality. For Scott, music offered a portal into a new way of seeing the world, one charged with romance, something you could get swept up in, where life seems so full of excitement and possibility it’s like a swelling container just about to burst.
Another coverline for “Jungleland” No. 6 is Patti Smith. When the Patti Smith Group came to London while touring Easter in 1978, Scott, on a hunch, called the hotel where he thought the singer might be staying and asked to speak with her, and the front desk patched him through. He asked if she’d received a package of zines he’d sent (she hadn’t), and after a brief chat she invited him down to London to cover the show. He took the train down, met his hero, hung out with her band, befriended her guitarist, Lenny Kaye, and stayed in a room in the fancy hotel she had arranged. Five years later, when Scott placed an advertisement in the NME classifieds seeking bandmates, he described what he was looking for:
THE WATERBOYS REQUIRE LEAD/RHYTHM GUITAR PLAYER. 18-24. Ability, own style, and appreciation of Patti Smith essential.
A few additional data points to help us understand Scott: When on holiday with his mother to London at age 16, he popped into a studio advertised in Melody Maker and recorded a version of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” playing most of the instruments himself. He wanted to see how records were made. Scott’s first band was called White Heat, named after Lou Reed’s song, and the name of the Waterboys was taken from a line in Reed’s “The Kids,” from Berlin. Other fixations during his youth were David Bowie and Van Morrison.
So that’s Dylan, Patti, Bruce, Van, Lou, Bowie, and punk rock—inspirations that all seemed in conversation with one another. Springsteen was once the New Dylan, and Patti was taking rock’n’roll poetics into strange places; Bruce and Patti had met each other in song on “Because the Night”; Springsteen’s second LP was deeply indebted to Van Morrison, and Patti had of course transformed “Gloria,” the signature tune of Van’s early days, on her album Horses; Bowie had covered Reed and Springsteen both, and was, like the latter, punk rock royalty; Springsteen had shown up on Reed’s “Street Hassle.”
Borrow from Born to Run, Horses, “Like a Rolling Stone,” Astral Weeks, throw in the repetition and dirty grandeur of “Heroin” and the piss and vinegar of punk. What would you get? Perhaps “Big Music,” which was the title of a track on the Waterboys’ second album, 1984’s A Pagan Place. It was the rare case of a band inadvertently naming its own approach while describing the small scene springing up around them. Scott’s song, an appropriately widescreen epic with horns and crashing drums, describes a sound-fueled epiphany: “I have heard the big music/And I’ll never be the same/Something so pure/Just called my name.”
Big music is the chill down your spine and the sudden eruption of gooseflesh. It’s a feeling one usually encounters when young, describing that moment when you hear a song for the first time and it’s so overwhelming you feel like a changed person after it ends. For many musicians, an early experience with such an epiphany meant they could no longer imagine a future in the straight world—going to school, getting a job, settling down were out the window. All that mattered now was making a life in a band. Those who have had the experience but don’t perform themselves might subsequently spend their lives building a social scene around shows, collecting records, or reading and writing long essays about the power of music.
For a time, journalists looking for a hook used Big Music to describe a clutch of earnest young bands from Ireland and the UK who borrowed from the murky rumble and artful dissonance of post-punk while writing spiritually minded and cathartic songs about hope, endurance, and redemption. U2, Big Country, Simple Minds, the Alarm, and the Waterboys themselves were ambitious acts that emerged during the first half of the ’80s, groups that grappled with the period’s grim economy and frightened turn to conservatism by searching for spiritual transcendence. George Orwell’s nightmare vision seemed as if it might come true. “It was 1984, after all,” Scott wrote in the notes for the band’s recently released box set, 1985. “Fifteen years after a golden age, Kev and I were underground-literate post-punk adventurers, lingering in gray 1980s London, hanging on to the last vestiges of the counterculture.”
The music of the Waterboys and their cohorts was anguished, but it never veered toward nihilism—these acts never gave up on the ’60s ideal that music could usher in a better world. The bleak street-level reality was an essential part of their work, but they also had their eyes trained on the stars. “Because I was young and the world stood open before me,” he writes, setting the scene in the opening notes for the 1985 box, “it seems to me now to have taken place in an endless springtime.”
By the time Scott gathered the Waterboys to cut their third album, This Is the Sea, in early 1985, he was ready, alongside co-producer Mick Glossop, to take his already enormous aesthetic someplace even more grand. Other members at the time included multi-instrumentalists Anthony Thistlethwaite, whose piercing sax playing sounds something like his last name, and Karl Wallinger, who would soon depart to form the psych-pop band World Party.
While visiting New York City in January, Scott had purchased a large black book from an occult shop—the owner had said it was intended for witches to record their spells—and, brimming with confidence, filled its blank pages with lyrics for his next record. The Black Book, a volume designed to aid in channeling forces from beyond, became an important totem of the Waterboys’ mythology. It’s almost too perfect: At this point in his young life, Scott’s lyrics and music were hell-bent on capturing the hidden magic that seemed to exist all around him, the stuff that was so clear to him but so elusive to everyone else.
The opening “Don’t Bang the Drum” is our first experience of Scott’s dark magic. It’s a song about the animalistic side of human nature, about reverting to primal impulses. Streaks of Thistlethwaite’s sax give the track its color. It’s not a jazz saxophone, nor is it directly connected to the R&B sax that took root in the United States in the ’40s and led to rock bands of a certain bearing—like those that played on the Jersey Shore—to include the instruments alongside guitar and organ. The sax on This Is the Sea doesn’t carry or embellish the melody—it intensifies it. When you deploy a saxophone like this, any notion of “cool” is out of the question.
An artist growing in confidence wants to know just how good they are, whether this surge of ideas and new way of seeing things carries as much power as they suspect. A songwriter in the throes of such a moment might indulge composer’s version of a heat-check, to challenge themselves to do something great. Around the time This Is the Sea was coming together, Johnny Marr of the Smiths engaged in such a test. He had been reading praise in the music press of his and Morrissey’s songwriting genius and he thought to himself, “Right, if you’re so great, first thing in the morning, sit down and write a great song.” And so he did—the next day, the music for “Cemetry Gates” was complete. It’s a perfect song.
Scott’s challenge to write something great came from a girlfriend as the pair were walking in Manhattan. She asked him if writing songs was easy. To impress his new partner, he pulled a pen and a scrap of paper from his pocket and instantly scribbled the title and the chorus—“I saw the crescent, you saw the whole of the moon.” Back in London, he returned to the fragment and fleshed it out, eventually laying it down on a demo at the piano. It’s another perfect song.
Everything about the finished version of “The Whole of the Moon,” from lyric to melody to harmonic structure to arrangement, reinforces its essential expression. It’s a bright production, the track closest to the sound of mainstream British pop from the time, with a synthesizer sparkle from Wallinger that would have fit on a Thompson Twins or Eurythmics record. And as the dozens of the song’s covers show, Scott’s tune invites a stadium singalong while being flexible enough to support a melancholic reading or one pocked with the rage that follows loss.
As often happens with an evocative song written about a character with sensitivity and specificity, people have long wondered who “The Whole of the Moon” might be about. Scott’s friend Nikki Sudden of Swell Maps wondered if he might be the subject, and others speculated it was written about C.S. Lewis, whom Scott had read voraciously since childhood. But the beauty of “The Whole of the Moon” is in how it maps so easily onto all our lives. It’s about an archetypical person so many of us encounter when young, the figure a few steps ahead of where we are now, who seems unafraid and inspires us to overcome our fears and take in life’s full measure, all the beauty and the horror. And in a characteristically romantic turn, the song suggests that access to such insights comes with a price.
“The Whole of the Moon” zeroes in on a single person, but the canvas for much of This Is the Sea is considerably larger. These are songs about mystical revelation powered by fire and wind, set on mountaintops. The brief fragment “Spirit” is a perfectly lovely coda to “The Whole of the Moon,” with couplets like “Man is tethered/Spirit is free” (we’ll hear more about this duality later). “The Pan Within” is about sex, but Scott frames the act in holy terms, positing the pleasure of the body as a path to a parallel universe. And the crashing “Medicine Bow” is about leaving the mundane behind to take in the mad world in one huge gulp: “I’m gonna burn all the words and letters and cards that I ever wrote/And you can sail with me where the current flows.”
When Scott turns a clear eye to life outside in sober moments, he doesn’t always like what he sees. “Old England” has a circular progression on piano that frames Scott’s rumination on the sorry state of the political landscape he inhabits, imagining the country as a broken-down old man whose best days are behind him. The melody and arrangement are gorgeous, but the view is ugly, filled with imperial hubris and forgotten children. Thistlethwaite’s sax cuts through the song like an alarm, or a whistle blown after a long day of brutal work. The winds that carried the life force on “Medicine Bow” now cut right through you.
The world-outside blues continue with “Be My Enemy,” a direct homage to a mid-’60s Dylan with a rollicking 12-bar blues progression that’s about being hated by God and hating Him right back. “I keep on findin’ hate mail/In the pockets of my coat,” goes one of many choice lines, suggesting no escape from these malevolent forces. But “Trumpets,” a love song that unfolds in front of a backdrop of churches and the ocean during high summer, puts us back in the album’s special place.
By this point in This Is the Sea, we have to ask what’s real—is it the electric romance of Scott’s dreams or the dreary bad vibes of “Old England” and “Be My Enemy”? The closing title track takes it all in and suggests a third path. It’s a simple song, just two chords, the first two, in fact, that you learned the day you first picked up a guitar. But in the early Waterboys, Scott made those two simple chords sound massive, layering multiple 12-string instruments into a symphony of wood and steel.
