Day 269. That was the river. (26/9/13)

I'm a simple man. I have simple tastes. I expect very little of the musicians that I follow other than this;

I demand that they be seers, visionaries, poets, mystics, seekers after universal truth, dreamers desperate to articulate the inarticulable, that they know their place in the holy evolution of the muse.

I've banged on about Mike Scott and his magnificent Waterboys before and I'll undoubtedly do it again but this seems a particularly apposite time to revisit the theme as we stand on the cusp of the release of  'Fisherman's Box', a set that documents the creation of the band's maverick masterpiece 'Fisherman's Blues'

I say documents, the 7 CDs don't even begin to scratch the surface of the material recorded across the three years that followed Scott's flirtation with and retreat from U2 sized stadium success into an embrace of traditional music in a way that no band other than 'The Band' themselves has ever managed.

Scott left London for Dublin in 1986 for a fortnight's break in the wake of the 'This Is The Sea' campaign, a period that saw chart and critical success and provided the now standard 'The whole of The Moon'. He never quite managed to come back. The three years that followed saw endless recording, endless playing, working with anybody that happened to take his fancy whether unknown or legendary and at the end of it was an album.

'Fisherman's Blues' wasn't the album that the record company expected. They were looking for an extension of 'The Big Music' of the first three albums, something that they could sell to eighties stadia crowds. What they got was one side (back when we still had two 'sides' to our music) of vaguely countrified rock and another that was heavily influenced by the folk tradition of the parts of Ireland that the band had adopted as home, dressed in mandolin and fiddle and culminating in an ethereal take on a W.B.Yeats poem.

It was majestic, there was no way that the band could ever be global with this music. It was far too good.

Scott's only regret in music is, apparently, that he didn't fulfil his vision at the time with a double or triple album. The single album that he finally released is only a hint at what he could have accomplished, fans knew that there were songs still in the vaults that were far more glorious than most bands could ever aspire to producing; 'A Golden Age', 'Higher in Time', 'Higherbound' - beautiful transporting sounds that were never to be released.

Some turned up over time; extra tracks on re releases, bootlegs, live performances. Now though, most are about to surface publicly for the first time.

So how good will it be? Well this is the standard that we're looking at; disc one's track listing is 16 songs of ridiculous perfection that would crown most artists' careers. That was the first day in the studio. It grew from there.

Do yourself a favour, invest in something beautiful.