FOLLOWING ON from exhaustive explorations of Fisherman’s Blues (2013’s Fisherman’s Box) and Room To Roam (The Magnificent Seven, 2021), next year will see the release of 1985, a 95-track box set chronologically tracing the creation of The Waterboys’ towering third album, This Is The Sea. Among the bounty included is an unreleased
Bob Dylan-written instrumental, Meridian West, first played by The Waterboys when Dylan invited them to a 1985 session at The Church Studios in north London.
“He’d heard The Whole Of The Moon and he liked it,” the band’s founder and ringleader Mike Scott tells MOJO. “Bob wasn’t working in his usual way, which is he’s got a song, and everybody tries to guess what the chords are. He was playing instrumentals that he’d written with Dave [Stewart] and the idea was that later he would put lyrics on them. So, we played there for two or three hours and there was one particular lovely instrumental.”
The next day, while auditioning keyboard players, Scott and the band jammed a slower, slinkier version of the tune. “Just by good fortune, I’d pressed record on my cassette machine. And so we contacted Bob’s management to see if he would allow us to include it. They came back and said, ‘Oh, yeah, no problem. Bob remembers that instrumental… it’s called Meridian West.’”
Speaking in the latest issue of MOJO, Scott says he takes a lot of pleasure in rooting around in the attic of his musical past. “It’s a good rummage,” he grins. “There’d be instrumentals I’d completely forgotten about, jam sessions that I didn’t remember. I still have all my old cassettes, and they ’re in great condition and I transfer red them digitally.”
This Is The Sea was the full realisation of the sweeping, passionate rock that Scott had been striving to achieve since the inception of The Waterboys in 1981. On 1985, over six discs – beginning with a radio session version of Trumpets from ’83, and moving through piano demos, work-inprogress mixes and on to the completed and remastered LP – Scott’s creative process during the era is to be fully detailed.
Highlights will include a nine-minute piano sketch in which we hear Scott, in real time, conjuring up The Whole Of The Moon. “About five minutes in,” he says, “suddenly everything clicks, and I’m in the groove. My imagination cops onto it and… I’ve got the song.” Elsewhere, there’s a stomping version of the album’s title track featuring a gnarly guitar part by Tom Verlaine.
Along with the vastly-expanded track list, 1985 will be accompanied by a 220-page book featuring a new 30,000-word essay by Scott, alongside reproduced handwritten lyrics from the pages of his Book Of Shadows, a blank tome – typically used to write spells in – bought from an esoteric book shop in New York named Magickal Childe.
“I thought, Well, it’s ideal for writing songs in,” Scott remembers. “Songs are just another kind of spell. It became a sort of energy container. I would only have to open it to enter the flow of my writing.”
But as to why 1985 is to be released a year short of the 40th anniversary of This Is The Sea, there’s a far less mystical reason. “I can’t be bothered waiting,” Scott laughs.
Read what else next year has in store in MOJO's bumper 2024 preview, featuring Nick Cave, The Faces, Kamasi Washington, The MC5 and more. Only in THE LATEST ISSUE OF MOJO on sale now! More information and to order a copy HERE.
