Waterboy Mike all fired up for Seapoint show

It’s been 32 years since the Waterboys first stepped onstage, but they remain as vital a live force as ever. Led by Mike Scott, the band will play Seapoint Ballroom on Thursday, October 29.

Earlier this year, they released the superb Modern Blues. The album begins with the swaggering, brassy Destinies Entwined. Did Mike have the track earmarked as an opener when he wrote it?

“Not when I wrote it, no,” he says. “I don’t remember when that decision got made, but it might’ve been after I recorded a demo at home, and maybe the song suggested itself as an opening number. It might’ve been something as simple as that, but I don’t remember now.”

The album was recorded in Nashville, Tennessee, home to the hallowed ground of the Ryman Auditorium, where Hank Williams made his debut and Johnny Cash shot his iconic TV series during the 1960s and 1970s. Was Mike tempted to visit it?

“Steve Wickham (the Waterboys fiddle player) went and did his tourist bit at the Ryman, but I have no interest in walking into the Ryman until I’m walking out on that stage to play a concert,” he says. “I’m a competitive type. I don’t want to go and visit the Ryman, and be told about all the great people who’ve played there. I want to play there myself. So I’m damned if I’m going to walk around and do the guided tour!”

While promoting their WB Yeats show, An Appointment With Mr Yeats, in America, an insistent radio producer in Kentucky set up a meeting that was to have a big effect on The Waterboys.

“He said ‘I’ve got this great keyboard player from Memphis who I’d like to have playing with you’,” Mike says. “I wrote back saying ‘no, you don’t understand, Wickham and myself don’t want to play with anyone else, especially someone we don’t know’. He wrote back and said ‘this guy’s really great and he’ll do it for free, you’ll never regret it’. Really, just to get rid of the guy, I said OK.”

And so it was that Mike Scott met Memphis native Brother Paul, whose keyboards skills add so much to this iteration of The Waterboys.