You only need to glance at the strange and slightly disturbing pagan scarecrow/burr-man/whatever-it-is on the cover of The Waterboy’s new album, Modern Blues, to realise Mike Scott would be totally at home at the Wickerman Festival. They burn something like this for entertainment every year on the festival site, after all.
This isn’t, however, a Waterboys line-up like the old days, as the band contains a few Muscle Shoals veterans – David Hood on bass, Brother Paul Brown on keyboards – and the dominant sound is southern rock. But with Steve Wickham on fuzzed-up fiddle, facing off in a two-man stance with Scott on guitar, any sound that’s created will still be Waterboys at its core.
As if to test this out, they began their Friday-night headline set with Fisherman’s Blues. This was as close to the folk heroes of the 1980s as they got. Medicine Bow rocked and induced some (medium) high-kicking from Scott but, from then on, tracks from Modern Blues were the main dish on the menu. And if the crowd weren’t familiar with individual songs, the overarching style – rock solid boogie, heart-stopping instrumental jams powered by Wickham’s fiddle and Brother Paul’s Hammond organ, Scott’s mystic guru leading the charge – laid down a soundtrack that spilled past midnight.
“This is autobiographical but I’m sure it applies to 99.9% of you,” said Scott, his attempt to flatter the audience before Still A Freak. “This is a song about the king of rock’n’roll, and I’m not talking about Kanye West,” he added as intro to I Can See Elvis. In a sharing mood, he also blew his nose noisily into a hankie slap bang against the mic to let us know he had a summer cold.
They closed with The Whole Of The Moon and, after the thick, grinding boogie of the rest of the set, it actually sounded a little thin, with an inappropriate Niles Rodgers-style wah-wah guitar part from new recruit Zach Ernst. For the encore, they picked out a cover of Prince’s Purple Rain.
The new southern rock direction necessitated by Modern Blues has turned The Waterboys into a real musical force again. A bit more thought in using that style to revitalise the back catalogue would make them a truly formidable live experience.
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