Roots manoeuvre
Five-CD exploration of Mike Scott’s Irish Adventure, Part Two. By Tom Doyle.
The Waterboys
★★★★
The Magnificent Seven
CHRYSALIS. CD/DL/LP
WILFULLY OUT of step with the times, Mike Scott spent the late 1980s digging deeper and deeper to get to the roots.
Fisherman’s Blues, released in ’88 at the height of acid house, was the first phase of his Irish sojourn and journey into the folk traditions. Despite that LP involving a pool of over 100 songs and 374 reels of usedup tape, Scott’s instinct was to go further.
As a companion to 2013’s similarly expansive Fisherman’s Box, the next chapter in his story is told here in 102 tracks (plus a book featuring a 50,000word Scott essay, available standalone or with the super deluxe edition), through live recordings, demos, pub lock-in sessions and rough mixes. The resulting album, 1990’s smoothly-produced Room
To Roam, also included here, originally paled in comparison to its predecessor and still seems a touch wan. But the many steps that Scott and the band took leading up to its making tell a fascinating tale.
The Magnificent Seven of the title are the expanded Waterboys line-up that by this point featured masterful accordion/ fiddle-player Sharon Shannon alongside time-served multi-instrumentalists Anto Thistlethwaite and Steve Wickham. Shannon first appears here fronting a series of reels recorded at the Winkles Hotel in Kinvara, accompanied by impressively nifty bodhranplaying from Scott. Given these trad roots, though, 12 tracks later on the first disc the assembled septet are exploring hypnotic drone in the shape of the 10-minute-long Three Ships.
Redolent of the era, the Thatcherdirected Maggie (It’s Time For You To Go), from the Majestic Ballroom in Mallow, June 1989, is more pointedly playful (“Now lately you’ve been sounding kinda crazy”) than Elvis Costello’s similarly-focused Tramp The Dirt Down. It’s one of many live offerings selected from the pile of mixer board DATs pictured in the sleevenotes. Some show their age, such as the Celtic reggae cover of The Saw Doctors’ The Streets Of Galway, which conjures up visions of new age travellers peddling “black ’ash” at festivals. Elsewhere, though, there are real gems, such as the band throwing themselves at Dylan’s New Morning at the Orpheum Theatre in Boston. Scott sounds utterly exhilarated.
It’s interesting to track the development of some of the songs here. Something That Is Gone moves from a Walkman-recorded a cappella idea sung in the shower at the Hyatt on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, through a delicate band demo, to the dreamy, almost ’75 Bowie-ish version on the album. Others benefit from the lo-fi treatment – the tape-wobbly, degraded demo of Bigger Picture is way more atmospheric than the master.
And so, even if it culminated in a middling album, The
Magnificent Seven now exists as a vivid portrait of the
Room To Roam era, illuminating the 1989-90 Waterboys from new and revealing angles.
★★★★
Back In Nashville
RCA/LEGACY. CD/DL/LP
The King’s final Nashville studio recordings, undubbed and cut loose.
SAM PHILLIPS, Elvis’s first producer, once said, “Generally I didn’t go for overdubbing. Still don’t, even if they get 94 tracks. I understand all the techniques and all the bullshit but I just don’t see the spontaneity.” What you have here are the 82 prime recordings from Presley’s March, May and June 1971 sessions at RCA Studio B in Nashville, stripped of the musical embellishments added prior to their ’70s release, leaving just the man himself singing a mixture of a gospel, folk, pop and Christmas songs, live in the room with the band. In every instance, the unvarnished original beats the familiar overdubbed version hollow. Early Mornin’ Rain loses the unnecessary cloying backing singers; I’ll Take You Home Again Kathleen is a hushed solo tour-deforce; the unedited and impromptu Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right an absolute joy.