Music review: The Waterboys, Barrowland, Glasgow

Mike Scott PIC: Ryan Byrne/INPHO/Shutterstock

The Waterboys, Barrowland, Glasgow *****

For all their fecund flow of albums, The Waterboys are never more in their element than on a stage, and The Waterboys at the Barrowland ballroom is, in frontman Mike Scott’s testifying words, “the toppermost of the rockermost."

The first of two Evening With the Waterboys’ performances in their spiritual home was an opportunity to glug on the elixir of live performance with Scott and his four travelling companions on freewheeling form, ranging widely around a catalogue which stretches back to 1983.

The oldest song in the set, A Girl Called Johnny, was still as potent and striking as its inspiration, Patti Smith, while their second album, This is The Sea, was widely represented, not least by a tender take on the title track, which was teased out into an elegant soul epic, with undulating play from resident long-haired professor of piano Brother Paul.

Scott also cherry-picked confidently from the last ten years of material, from throwaway rhyming ode Dennis Hopper via the glam rock'n'roll stomp of Still A Freak to the real roots power of My Wanderings in the Weary Land, a fine latterday example of the Waterboys’ patented Big Music.

The second half was equally dynamic with bluesy rockers Medicine Bow and Nashville, Tennessee (from one music city to another) contrasting with the holistic pledge of In My Time on Earth, a suitable covenant on the eve of COP26.

An utterly joyous Fisherman’s Blues was casually thrown in mid-set to general ecstasy with fiddler Steve Wickham on mellifluous form, while an extended jam on The Whole of the Moon was saved for the encore, along with a bonus carefree frolic through the endearing And A Bang on the Ear.

“Thanks for coming out at the arse end of a pandemic,” Scott said to the crowd. Who could resist such good medicine?

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