Why a Waterboy put music on the words of WB

Mike Scott refuses to tread softly when distilling the work of W B Yeats for a new 14-track album, says Richard Fitzpatrick.

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.”