MELODY MAKER 25 Feb, 1989

The Waterboys
Guildhall, Portsmouth

Net Prophets

The last time we saw The Waterboys they were magnificent, a fired shout of Jerusalem burning its way across the Somerset hills, a clarion call to Glastonbury's dejected hippy masses, rekindling stolen memories of what things must have been like. Two years ago, Mike Scott made open air festivals make sense, left us feeling that maybe Woodstock, Monterrey and the whole gargantuan legacy of the Sixties weren't such bad things after all. He was, in the best way, the most compelling way, messianic, a leader figure worth following him anywhere.

Tonight, tonight they were great. Great when they weren't over-reverent, great when they weren't just fun. At times, so help them, they behaved like students, bogged down in the lurid green logic of Celtic myth. Presumably with a newfound(?), but spurious conviction that age is tantamount to dignity and wisdom, they dragged on three ancient couples to waltz benignly about the stage. The audience dutifully cheered them on and clapped politely when they made their exit, but, for God's sake, this is the sort of trick we'd normally associate with the cross, boorish mind of a Kevin Rowland.

Other times they were just The Pogues, bouncing about like they were playing volleyball on a Benidorm beach tripping into the pitfalls they'd dug but thankfully never explored with the excellent "Fisherman's Blues".

There were enormous mistakes, unforgivable with anyone else but, remarkably and uniquely, dismissable. That in itself says so much about The Waterboys, and more particularly about Scott whose nasal lamentations could surely make the theme from "Neighbours" sound like a requiem for lost souls.

They were great. He, as always, was magnificent, a waifish balladeer in black, lending even their most unseemly moments a vast, incalculable significance. And he does it by not really doing anything, by just standing there strumming with his leg pumping or sitting at the piano with his leg pumping. Where Bono will clamber up mountainous PA stacks like a podgy chamois or turn Nuremburg-like spotlights on the crowd, Scott simply has to tilt his head sideways or step one pace forward.

"Old England" and "The Whole Of The Moon", two of maybe eight songs that've survived the cull necessitated by "Fisherman's Blues", rang out and sank in - gorgeous fish-hook melodies magicked from a tumble of words. The best of the rest owed more to the Stones than Van Morrison. For us at least, the fiddles and mandolins managed to twist some diabolic meaning out of a very urban acoustic blues. We're reminded of "Jumpin' Jack Flash" and "Gimme Shelter" rather than the land of the Little People.

Scott must know this too. The set ends with a cover of Louis Armstrong's "What A Wonderful World". In his hands, in his voice, the song becomes a mourning for lost innocence. It's as if, imprisoned by experience, he's looking on helplessly at a world he's now impossibly outdistanced. It was a moment of pure genius and a fitting end.

They were great, said a friend, but they could've been even better.

Unbelievably, we believe him.

THE STUD BROTHERS