Interview: Mike Scott, musician

Published on Sunday 23 January 2011 16:13

MIKE Scott is a busy man. With a book due out later this year, another half-written and an album's worth of new songs ready to record, it's a wonder the leader of the Waterboys has time for an appointment with anyone, let alone a long-dead poet.

Scott has not only made space in his diary for WB Yeats, but he has let the poet inhabit his life to the extent that he has been drawn back, along with wife Janette, to Dublin, the city where he lived in the mid-1980s and early 1990s.

It was hardly under sufferance but, as he once observed in song, the place has since become populated by ghosts: the ghosts of relationships gone sour, the ghost of the time, he sang, when "I still had the power".

But another presence could be felt as he applied the finishing touches to An Appointment With Mr Yeats, the stage show which receives its premiere on mainland Britain in Glasgow next Sunday.

When he was last in Dublin, Scott and Bono would perform early versions of songs to each other. His musical collaborator this time around is another legendary Irish figure, though one less given to wearing wraparound shades.

Wire-rimmed spectacles were more his style. While the ghost of Yeats peering over his shoulder as he crossed out the revered poet's lines and replaced them with his own would seem terrifying to most, Scott felt comfortable in the partnership.

"I am aware I am working with the best of the best," he says, as we sit in a lively Italian restaurant/cafe in Dublin, a stone's throw from Trinity College.

"It is very inspiring. But at the same time I am not going to be overwhelmed by it, 'cos I am the guy who is writing the music. I have a say in it too. I am in awe of Yeats' genius, but not his reputation." And as Scott points out, crucially Yeats "is not around to disagree with me".

He has been granted a little more room to roam, the copyright for those artists and thinkers who died throughout 1939 having helpfully expired just last year.

"If I had played the show before 1 January 2010 I would have needed permission for my lyrical changes," explains Scott, who re-arranged the original text for some of the adaptations.

The Yeats estate has treated the Edinburgh-born Scott favourably before. He was given permission to record The Stolen Child, the poem he rather masterfully set to music on the Waterboys' seminal Fisherman's Blues album from 1988.

Scott decided to bide his time until now to perform this ambitious project, since it meant not having to enter into any negotiations. "I don't need to compromise on my own vision," he says.

Not that he has ever been guilty of that. Scott made his name as a wilful operator, one who knew his own mind from an early age.

He didn't kowtow to anyone; not record company bosses, not teachers. For a one-year period at Edinburgh University, even lecturers of English literature fought a losing battle to keep Scott in line, before he dropped out.

"I liked poetry but I was not interested in studying at university," he says.

"I was only into punk rock. I wasn't made for curriculums. My path was already mapped out."

The year was 1977. Scott was more interested in what Joe Strummer was saying than William Shakespeare – or William Butler Yeats for that matter.

However, one university lecturer who did have a major say in his life – his mother Anne – had taken the 11-year-old Scott to Sligo for the annual Yeats summer school, to which he returned to perform, aged 51, last year. "Irish literature is one of her specialities," says Scott.

"She lectures part-time at Glasgow University and takes a class in West Kilbride."

Scott's mother loves the Yeats show and, in what promises to be a vintage year for the Scott family, she is also preparing for the publication of her own first book – on bookshops.

Her son's music memoirs will appear later this year, written in the breezy style of Bob Dylan's Chronicles and equally as eloquently covering such subjects as how he came to write The Whole Of The Moon, Scott's biggest hit and the song which he dedicates to Yeats at the end of the new show.

If not quite to the extent of Gerry Rafferty's Baker Street – estimated to have been worth an annual dividend of 80,000 to the late singer – the song has been one of Scott's meal tickets.

However, leading a ten-piece band, the largest Waterboys ensemble to date, can be an expensive business. Scott had to put his hand in his pocket to realise his dream of premiering the show at the Yeats-founded Abbey Theatre in Dublin, which the Waterboys did last March.

Requests for help with funding to both the Scottish and Irish arts councils were turned down, possibly, Scott figures, because the Waterboys were just too well known, and also perhaps because he is perceived to be Irish by many in Scotland, having decamped to the country in the mid-1980s when seeking to escape the promotional treadmill of the music business.

Yet much of the Yeats show was written in Findhorn, where Scott based himself for years after a brief stint in New York. He met Janette, a Glaswegian, there and together they made the move across the Irish Sea.

"She just doesn't take to Ireland quite like I do," he says, although he himself admits to feeling slightly alien at first on his return to the city where he got up to such musical mischief in the 1980s. "For the first three months I was almost overwhelmed by the old memories and a sense of loneliness."

Ireland has changed, for the better according to Scott. "There are fewer priests and nuns on the street," he says.

The country, he believes, has been strangled by its two most powerful influences: religion and Guinness, both instantly identifiable by their black cloak and white collar.

"I don't interact with either of them," he shrugs.

Scott has been teetotal now for 20 years and looks as fit as one of long-time musical foil Steve Wickham's fiddles.

The talented singer-songwriter is also on the verge of completing a book entitled Para Handy's Christmas, set in the present day but in the style of the classic Neil Munro stories about an old steam puffer heading up the west coast of Scotland.

He has clearly retained a strong identity with his homeland, and it's easy to imagine the Irish literati being suspicious of this Scottish rocker's radical treatment of the cultural icon that is Yeats.

"Oh no, there's been absolutely nothing of that," counters Scott. "Maybe if I was English there might have been. But the Irish think of the Scots as brethren, and I have been here so long I am part of the furniture. I am accepted. I am an honorary Irishman."

The Waterboys perform An Appointment With Mr Yeats at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on 30 January, as part of Celtic Connections www.celticconnections.com

This article was first published in Scotland On Sunday, 23 January, 2011