Why a Waterboy put music on the words of WB
MIKE SCOTT has pored over the W B Yeats canon — 600-plus poems and 26 plays — to distil 14 tracks for the band’s new album, An Appointment With Mr Yeats. Full-blooded as ever, he hasn’t treaded softly. The Lake Isle Of Innisfree, for example, is rendered as a delta blues song; September 1913 as a halting, bass-infused cry to the heavens at the folly of greed and corruption.
“I’m in awe of Yeats’s skill, but not of his reputation,” says Scott. “I’m a rock ’n’ roller. I’m supposed to rebel. I came up through the punk wars. I’m trained in irreverence.”
The result is impressive. Katie Kim, the Waterford indie singer who guests for lead vocals on a few tracks, is especially beguiling. There is a familiar ebb and flow to the sound which could only be the Waterboys, although it is the distinctiveness of the lyrics — “Those that I fight I do not hate/Those that I guard I do not love” — which make instant classics of many of the numbers, as if they’d always been around.
The project has been a while in gestation. The Waterboys set Yeats’s poem The Stolen Child to music back in the 1980s on their Fisherman’s Blues album. Shortly afterwards, Scott was asked along to the Abbey Theatre — along with Luka Bloom, the Saw Doctors and Paul Brady — for a Yeats celebratory night. He must, he says, have “misunderstood the brief”. He alone of the performers put music to some Yeats poems, four in total. A challenge had gone unmet, he felt. A door only had to be knocked on.
Countless musicians have raided the Yeats songbook or have referred overtly to his verse, from Sinead O’Connor to U2. Joni Mitchell famously reworked The Second Coming as Slouching Towards Bethlehem.
“Perhaps no one other than Robert Burns has been set to more music than Yeats,” says Scott. “Yeats often used the word ‘song’ or ‘ballad’ or ‘music’ in his poem titles. I know I should get out more but once I counted up the number of instances of this. There are over 70. Sometimes he would have gorgeous titles like Three Songs To The Same Tune or Words For Music Perhaps.”
And, of course, Down By The Salley Gardens, memorised in the schoolrooms of Ireland for generations, is one of the most iconic Irish ballads, a Yeats poem that was set to music over a century ago.
“Now what do you mean by iconic?” asks Scott, seeking clarification. “Recognisable maybe. Iconic means symbolic of something. Marilyn Monroe is iconic because she’s symbolic of femininity. It’s a pet peeve of mine — the overuse of this poor word,” he says, laughing.
Scott’s pedantic streak, his reverence for the written and spoken word, may owe something to his mother — an English literature lecturer who first introduced him to Yeats. She ferried him along to the Yeats Summer School in Sligo in 1970.
He was 11 at the time. Seamus Heaney was on the bill. Scott is assured by his mother that he saw the Northern poet giving a talk, but he doesn’t remember it.
“To be quite honest,” he says, “I spent most of my time thinking about pop music and model airplanes and stuff like that. Although I did write little poems at school, I wasn’t turned onto the great poets like Yeats at the age of 11. That came later. My mum, to her great credit, didn’t ram it down my throat.”
Scott was born and grew up in Edinburgh. These days, he lives in Dublin with his second wife. A memoir of his life in music will be published shortly. The book won’t delve too much into his private life, he says. He’s not that bothered with the personal life of Yeats either.
“I think he was a great thinker, a great mind and a great soul, but I’m not one of these people who need to know all the minutiae of his life,” he says. “It’s enough for me to know his poetry. I’m not a supreme Yeats scholar.
“I also think there’s a lot said about his life that’s not true; for example, the thing about monkey glands.”
Yeats reportedly had implants of monkey glands at age 69 that gave him a “second puberty”.
“He had a vasectomy,” counters Scott. “He didn’t take monkey glands to increase his sex drive. It’s a bit like Gulliver going to the Lilliputians. I think they like to belittle the great man. I think in Dublin they love telling these stories about Yeats.
“I’ve even got one band member who came to me gleefully to say, ‘Oh, you know they used to call him the Gland Old Man’. It’s a load of bollocks. He never took the things. Some people just enjoy bringing him down to a commonplace level — the fate of the greats unfortunately.”
* An Appointment With Mr Yeats is out now
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