Mike Scott will lead the Waterboys in a special free show in Prospect Park on July 19
Prospect Park Bandshell
Prospect Park West & Ninth St.
Friday, July 19, free (suggested donation $3), 7:30
www.bricartsmedia.org
www.mikescottwaterboys.com
“As for me, I figured music wasn’t worth the air it occupied if it didn’t change both its makers and its listeners, but I was altered by my adventures to a degree beyond my comprehension,” writes Waterboys founder Mike Scott about recording the band’s classic 1988 album, Fisherman’s Blues, in his 2012 memoir, Adventures of a Waterboy. “I stood looking back over the three years, wondering what the hell had happened. Unable to articulate the contents of my mind I decided to give no interviews, and did the one sensible thing I could and took the Waterboys back on the road.” Twenty-five years later, the extremely articulate Scott is taking the Scottish group back out on the road again, on the longest U.S. tour of its thirty-year career. Combining a poetic grace and narrative storytelling with an epic Celtic-rock sound, the Waterboys have recorded such memorable tracks as “Fisherman’s Blues,” “Whole of the Moon,” “And a Bang on the Ear,” “This Is the Sea,” “The Big Music,” and the antiwar paean “Red Army Blues.” Scott has also shown a deep affinity for the work of William Butler Yeats; he included a version of the Irish writer’s “The Stolen Child” on Fisherman’s Blues, and in 2011 he released An Appointment with Mr Yeats, consisting of fourteen Yeats poems set to music, including “News for the Delphic Oracle,” “Sweet Dancer,” “Mad as the Mist and Snow,” and “The Faery’s Last Song.” This fall Scott will be leading two different Waterboys lineups, both featuring fiddler Steve Wickham, as the band embarks on “A Night of Musickal Fireworks and Improvisations” in America, followed by “Fisherman’s Blues Revisited” in Europe. We first saw the Waterboys opening up for U2 at the Tower Theater in Philly on December 1, 1984, and were instantly blown away by Scott’s powerful stage presence and wide-ranging scope, and we’ll be there on July 19 when the band plays a free Celebrate Brooklyn! show in Prospect Park, with Scottish folk musician Alasdair Roberts also on the bill. “I have heard / the big music / and I’ll never be the same / Something so pure / just called my name,” Scott sang on “The Big Music,” from 1984’s A Pagan Place, a feeling that many experience after seeing the Waterboys for the first time.