Waterboys - Roundhouse, London, 1/6/2025

  by Steev Burgess

published: 8 / 7 / 2025

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The ticket that came my way for this concert was at the last minute, and with an 8.30 p.m. start, I missed two of the opening numbers. What was to unfold was a 25-strong set of songs, spanning The Waterboys’ career to date. It lent heavily on the classics from the ‘This is the Sea’ album and new tracks from their latest album, ‘Life, Death and Dennis Hopper’. The Waterboys had opened the night with ‘Glastonbury Song’ about finding God where he'd always been, in this case, high up on Glastonbury Tor. Frontman Mike Scott has long been on a spiritual quest and it was no doubt a good song on which to begin tonight's journey. .I remember first meeting Mike Scott, who is originally from Edinburgh, many years ago when we were young, and he was intrigued that no one in London seemed to care if you were Catholic or Protestant. He was also interested in my paperback about the Findhorn community, that he eventually joined. When talking of music he told me that his top ten songs were all by Bob Dylan. I notice all those things echo on a little now. He, Anthony Thistlethwaite and I had all been requisitioned to be in Nikki Sudden's backing band for a few gigs, ranging from the Speakeasy to the Victoria venue. In spite of our punk aesthetics, we all admired the early albums of the Rolling Stones too and tonight, hearing Scott's song ‘Be My Enemy’ live, I realised that it wouldn't have been out of place on Dylan's ‘Highway 61’ and it was as if homage was being paid to the influences of the early days, as the song had an outro that echoed the Stones song ‘Bitch’. The overall sound of the Waterboys tonight was very ‘Blonde on Blonde’ in fact, with Mike Scott switching between acoustic and electric guitar. There were also two keyboard players - Brother Paul Brown from Memphis and James Hallawell from the West Country, the former clad in a white Nudie suit with all the sequined trimmings and the latter in a fine cowboy hat and striped blazer also played a pedal steel guitar at times. while Hallawell came out from behind the keys and cavorted around the stage with a white Keytar. The rhythm section consisted of talented Irish players, Aongus Ralston on bass and Eamon Ferris on drums, but with front man Scott dressed in a black and white flecked shirt, black trousers with a glittering diamond design and a hat, all in all, it created a vibe more Western than Celtic for tonight's show. Two members of the Norwegian support band joined in on male backing vocals along with Barny Fletcher, who sang backing on the new album in his unique top line tones. ‘This is the Sea’ was another highlight of the first quarter, with Scott's voice as powerful as ever and James Hallawell performing a show-stopping piano piece at the extended outro of this transcendental song. Mike Scott has been doing more concept writing of late and he introduced the middle section of the show dedicated to the new album with songs about the late film star, director and artist Dennis Hopper. Hopper, it seems, was a prism with which you could view the rock and roll age, as he'd been in at the beginning of so many key moments and associated with its iconic figures. These included acting in two films alongside James Dean, ‘Rebel Without a Cause’ and ‘Giant’ and in the director’s chair making the ‘Easy Rider; road movie. He returned to acting later, often playing a deranged maverick figure, including that of the frightening Frank Booth in David Lynch's ‘Blue Velvet’. Relevant footage and photographs were projected behind the band for each song while easels and canvasses decorated the stage. In Scott's introduction he said that the group was not going to play the whole album, but enough to tell Hopper's life story. This still amounted to twelve songs and not having yet heard the album, I was sceptical about whether it cold hold my interest. I couldn't have been more wrong, as each song, most notably ‘Live in the Moment Baby’, was performed with psychotropic aplomb and intriguing lyrics. Scott gave us introductions to guide us through the ups and considerable life-threatening downs of Hopper's life, one of which seemed to have him somewhat in awe. ‘Andy (A Guy Like You)’ was about Hopper meeting a young Andy Warhol (apocryphally he bought the first piece of soup can art from him). The simple but memorable lines "...The skies were kind of cloudy/Now they're turnin' blue/First one Mona Lisa/Yeah, but now there's two...." captured Warhol's two-are better-than-one aesthetic perfectly. In ‘The Passing of Hopper’ we saw footage of Scott visiting the grave to pay homage at the Jesús Nazareno Cemetery, Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico. The whole idea for the project apparently occurred to him in a dream. With props removed, we were whisked back to the first half of the 1980s with ‘Don't Bang the Drum’, ‘A Girl Called Johnny’ (in which Mike recounted his formative years of underage drinking and the like in Scotland), ‘Spirit’ and an old favourite of mine and many, ’The Pan Within’ which has the inviting lyric "....Come with me/On a journey under the ski/We will look together for the Pan within/Close your eyes, Breathe slow, we'll begin.... ." It is a song which could have opened the show but the Waterboys tonight used it as their closing number The inevitable encore of the classic ‘The Whole of the Moon’ was delivered perfectly with Scott moving to piano but for me was enhanced further by the return of Anthony Thistlethwaite, whose soaring, expressionistic saxophone solos once gilded those early songs in a unique and irreplaceable way. I know that Mike Scott is not a man to look back over his shoulder, but another time, who knows, perhaps? Backing singer Barney Fletcher then moved centre stage to sing a truly emotional song to his late mother, literally moving some to tears in the audience, before a grand finale of ‘Fisherman's Blues’ sent everyone home in good cheer, and which had the whole of support band Sugarfoot filling the stage for the sing-a-long with the crowd. All in all, the gig was euphoric and a total triumph and if anyone had said I'd heard and liked a song about golf, I would have laughed them out of my house, but I did!!

Band Links:-

https://www.mikescottwaterboys.com/
https://www.facebook.com/WaterboysMusic/#
https://www.instagram.com/waterboysmusic/?hl=en

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