STILL RUNNING... STILL DEEP

Danny McElhinney talks to Mike Scott about his life in Ireland, Van the Man and why the Waterboys are...

As a band whose driving force is one of popular music’s great adventurers, the title of The Waterboys latest album Good Luck, Seeker is apt. Ayr man Mike Scott’s relocated to Ireland in 1985 after the success of The Whole Of The Moon and the album This Is The Sea from which it came. In Galway, his mind was opened to Irish traditional music. His love deepened for the work of WB Yeats and with a gaggle of Irish musicians, the proud Scotsman was inaccurately portrayed as having become ‘one of our own’.

However, the subsequent album Fisherman’s Blues fashioned a kind of Irish folk-alt rock hybrid that though disparaged as ‘raggle-taggle’ music also influenced a raft of musicians from David Gray through Razorlight up to current chart-topper Declan McKenna.

Good Luck, Seeker, whose title is taken from a passage in a 1930s book by Dion Fortune pushes the envelope still further to reflect his appreciation of rap and hip hop. Half of the words of the songs on the album are spoken including My Wanderings In The Weary Land and Dennis Hopper, his homage to the late Hollywood actor.

The album’s opener, The Soul Singer, is a brassy banger that has gained loads of radio airplay and much attention as many think it is about a certain Belfast singer who

celebrates his 75th birthday this year.

‘I will never say who it is about. I want to leave an element of mystery for people to work out,’ Scott says.

‘The reviewer in The Scotsman newspaper thought it was about James Brown. I will not confirm or deny that either.’

Even though one of the lyrics is ‘he