Mike Scott on his love for Munster, how to write a hit song and becoming a Taylor Swift fan

From the childhood holiday to Kinsale that sparked a love affair with Ireland, to writing classics like The Whole of the Moon, Maeve Lee chats to Mike Scott as he returns to the Marquee with The Waterboys

Sun, 19 Mar, 2023 - 16:33

Maeve Lee

It’s a bright but breezy day in Cork City when I meet The Waterboys frontman, the legendary Mike Scott. Perched above a glistening River Lee, it seems as though the city is pulling out all the stops for its special guest.

The Scottish singer-songwriter is sitting across from me within the walls of Electric on Cork’s South Mall. He is wearing a dark blue suit, a polka dot shirt and a pair of tortoiseshell glasses. The outfit, of course, is complete with his signature cowboy hat which, upon closer inspection, I realise is decorated with small silver jewels.

Sunshine or not, a very relaxed Mike Scott is quick to tell me that he is always “thrilled” to be back in Munster.

“Munster is the seat of poetry and music in Ireland, so I love being in this atmosphere,” Scott says passionately. “When I play in Cork, I always feel there is something extra in the air that helps the performance.” The Scotsman first noticed that “something extra” when playing at The Everyman in 2004.

“It wasn’t like I had extra range in my voice,” he says. “There was an extra emotional expression available to me. I thought about it a lot afterwards and I thought: ‘I know what it is: it’s because I’m in the capital of Munster’.

“Ever since then, I’ve looked out for that happening when I’ve played in Cork. And it has happened.”

Later, he gets excited as he remembers a song he wrote with Sharon Shannon, called ‘The Munster Hop’, which is about “the craic in West Kerry” but has never been released.

I take a guess that he is looking forward to playing Live at the Marquee again this summer. “You bet,” he says. “I’ve played the Marquee before in 2015, and I remember that as one of the greatest-ever Waterboy shows.” It was a mixture of things that made that gig so memorable. “It’s partly that [energy] and then it was a great audience, a great venue, the atmosphere was fantastic. I think I even sang a few lines of ‘The Langer’, a comedic Cork song that someone had suggested I sing.

“There was a very funny verse in that song,” he says before singing the line: “Roy was dead right to call him a langer.”

DEEPER INTO THE ATMOSPHERE

Since establishing folk rock band The Waterboys in the 1980s, Scott has always been adamant he wanted to play every corner of Ireland, and while he adores Cork city, the 64-year-old has a real love for the smaller, more rural venues.

“When we first toured in Ireland, it was partly that I loved Ireland so much and I just loved going deeper into the atmosphere of the country but it’s also because of the great audiences in all of these towns.

“Irish people have music in their blood, so it’s a great place to play.”

Scott made the move to Dublin in 1986 and lived there until 1991, before returning again in 2008. But it was a holiday to Kinsale with his mother at the age of 12 that first sparked his love for this country.

“It was my first real experience of Ireland and I always remembered that holiday and Ireland,” he says of the trip.

“Then when I came back in 1984, it was the first time the Waterboys played in Ireland. We played as the opening act for The Pretenders, and I remember falling in love with Ireland on that trip.”

The love has, of course, continued, and Scott currently lives in Dublin. Both of his children, aged nine and six, respectively, were born in the capital and Scott even has an Irish passport. “You’re not getting rid of me,” he laughs.

Mike Scott in Cork City: "When I play in Cork, I always feel there is something extra in the air" Pic: Larry Cummins.

As a father, he is loving the opportunity to discover new music through his older daughter. When I ask who in the charts he likes at the moment, without missing a beat, he says: “Taylor Swift. She’s absolutely brilliant, especially those two Americana albums, Folklore and Evermore.

“My daughter is a big fan, but particularly for me, those two albums are masterful. I like Olivia Rodrigo as well, she’s brilliant. ‘Traitor’ — what a song,” he says.

“With Taylor, there’s a sort of dry way that she delivers really powerful emotional material. The dry way she delivers it is really masterful, and her melodies — just wow.”

The song ‘Marjorie’ from Swift’s Evermore album even moved him to tears on one occasion. “It’s about her grandmother who died, and the opening line [‘Never be so kind, you forget to be clever/Never be so clever, you forget to be kind’] — it’s the advice that her grandmother gave her, and man, that just knocked me out.”

Considering artists such as Prince, U2, and Tom Jones have covered The Waterboys’ songs over the years, how would he feel if Taylor Swift was to do a cover?

“Oh, I wish she would,” he says with excitement. “I love hearing what people do with the songs and I like when they change them and make them their own.”

'MUSIC FORMS SUCH A BIG PART OF LIFE HERE'

As for his children, the musical gene is definitely evident, and his daughter is a “fantastic singer”.

“She blows me away with her singing her expression and what she can do and the melodies that she comes up with are really sophisticated,” he says proudly.

She even writes her own lyrics while listening to Swift or Rodrigo, which Scott says is something even he cannot do.

“[My son] is too young. He’s interested in music ... he’s autistic and it might be a bit of a superpower because we bought him this cat-face keyboard where the teeth are the piano keys. You can programme in songs, and it has got about 15 different tunes and you get them by pressing a button. Now, it’s not 15 buttons, it’s one button and you have to just press it until you get the one you’re looking for. He can press it and he can tell by the first nanosecond it’s not the one he wants.”

“His favourite is ‘B-I-N-G-O’,” he adds. “And he knows exactly how to get it…how can he do that? I’ve been playing music professionally for 40 years and I can’t do that.”

When it comes to writing his own songs, Ireland has always been the most creative place for Scott. “I’ve always written more songs here than anywhere else,” he says. “I love how music forms such a big part of the life here.”

As the man behind many successful songs, I was keen to ask Scott where he gets his inspiration. He takes a long and thoughtful pause before answering.

“Well,” he starts, “A song can be sparked by lots of things. It could be a phrase you say during the interview and it will recur in my mind and I’ll think: ‘Oh, there’s a song in that phrase’, or I could be playing the guitar and stumble upon a chord sequence and think: ‘Hang on, that sounds like it’s going to be a good song’ and I’ll see what I can sing over it.

“Then just by the way these things work, my emotions will get involved and it will turn out to be something that means something to me and suddenly I’m looking at half a song and I just need an extra bit and then I’m almost all the way, and suddenly a song is done.”

He provides the example of one of his best-known songs, ‘This Is the Sea’, which was inspired by a piece of graffiti he saw while playing at a small club in Manchester in 1984. While some songs such as ‘The Whole of the Moon’ took “several months” to complete, others come to him in minutes.

“Some songs take almost as long as it takes to play them once. The real sudden lightning strikes. But then other songs, I might spend years on a song. I’ve got unfinished songs in my computer file back at home that I will turn to every now and again and every so often I finish one of them.”

How does it feel to finally finish a song, and know you’ve got a good one, I ask?

“It’s like walking on water.”