Melody Maker - October 1985

THE WATERBOYS
THIS IS THE SEA
Ensign

The third LP. The one that has to count. The one that has to justify all that good faith, realise that potential and pay back that cash. Otherwise... pop being pop, record companies being record companies, big business being big business... But forget all that. Moments like these are so rare, let’s not defile them with money talk. The thrill of something like this is priceless.

Mike Scott has been writing minor classics since his earliest Edinburgh days with DNV, Another Pretty Face and Funhouse - the short lived precursor to The Waterboys. But never before has their iridescent finery been so warmly lit with such sensuality, imagination and, above all, love. It’s the little things that make ‘This Is The Sea’ so satisfying. The joy of discovering the intimate whisper, “I want to be with you” during ‘Trumpets’ as Scott ecstatically proclaims, “Your life is like a mountain and your heart is like a church with wide open doors.” Or the hushed, half-mocking hum of ‘There’ll always be an England’ amidst the lyrical despair of the real ‘Old England’ where “criminals are televised, politicians fraternise and children stare through heroin eyes.”

Scott’s music echoes and embodies the collective spirit of his heroes to an uncanny degree - from the subtle and softly-shaped intonation of Van Morrison to the weariest or most defiant cry of Dylan via the fuck-it-all recklessness of Johnny Thunders. Three gods for the price of one.

But though he’s the acknowledged shaman on this sea of myth, mysticism and mystery, it’s the contributions from saxophonist Anthony Thistlewaite and pianist Karl Wallinger that at last reveal this incarnation of The Waterboys as first and foremost a band. The pair’s astonishing musical intuition wrings every hidden nuance from Scott’s rich language - punctuating and illustrating it and somehow evoking a potent vision of their own. Thus ‘The Pan Within’, originally conceived as the close to “Savage Earth Heart” from the first LP, undergoes a gradual and considered reformation, its fragile regrain recaptured and held in a spiralling piano run before soaring upward on a flurry of violins. Likewise ‘Medicine Bow’ takes on a lightning urgency, bucking and spitting along.

As a modern-day electric William Blake, Scott succeeds where others fail because his love for life is intuitive, never forced, Who else could so nonchalantly throw both caution and inhibition to the winds with such colourful couplets as “Unicorns and cannonballs, palaces and piers, trumpets, towers and tenements, wide oceans full of tears.” But temper the whimsical with the world weary - again from ‘Old England’: “Man looks up on a yellow sky and the rain turns to rust in his eye.” Scott has gathered together the unrelated and unrecognised strands of past glories and weaved them into a definitive whole, creating, at will, calming panoramas of tranquillity or stormy crescendos of nightmare.

This is the sea and this is the one.

MAT SMITH