Release date: 1 June
Was I listening to this in the 1980s? Very much so.
The Waterboys were my favourite band from 1985–8, and the most exciting concert I’ve ever been to was their gig at Liverpool University Student Union on 2 May 1986. As the previous post suggests, I only became aware of them after This Is the Sea was released in 1985, but I quickly bought everything I could find – and nowadays I consider 1984’s A Pagan Place to be the superior album. Its successor is a little too pompous, the cavernous reverb on the wall-of-sound production a little too much.
It’s worth noting that the version of A Pagan Place now available on digital download and CD after a remaster in 2002 is not quite the album I bought on vinyl in 1985. There's an inferior outtake ('Some of My Best Friends Are Trains') inserted in the middle, and two of the songs included on the original release have been altered: the outro for the second track ‘All the Things She Said’ is pointlessly extended, adding an extra minute or so to the running time to no good effect, while the third track ‘The Thrill Is Gone’ substitutes a different take with a much looser vocal than the original release – one might argue it’s more emotional; alternatively one might describe it as more amateur. I have no idea why these alternate versions weren’t just included as extra tracks – fiddling around with the contents of an album many years after its release (beyond remastering) makes no sense to me. But this is a great album in whatever iteration one encounters it.
The Waterboys are really a vehicle for songwriter, vocalist and guitarist Mike Scott. The group’s composition changed from album to album, and this was part of Scott’s design, to keep things fluid (hence the name). Indeed, the first album released by the ‘group’ was really a collection of solo demos with occasional contributions from other musicians, notably saxophonist (and later mandolinist) Anthony Thistlethwaite. A Pagan Place was therefore the group’s first proper release, and notably features keyboard virtuoso Karl Wallinger (later of World Party), though he was not present for the earliest sessions in 1982.
This fluidity creates a sense of musicians newly excited by the possibilities of working together, and reconfiguring regularly to recapture that excitement. It's there in the immediate burst of energy in the album’s opening seconds, when a fastly strummed acoustic guitar charges forward into ‘A Church Not Made With Hands’, and is then joined by Wallinger’s rolling piano, drums – and trumpet from Roddy Lorimer. This song is one of the great album openers of all time, and the first lyrics we hear are a quotation or paraphrase from CS Lewis’s The Last Battle:
Bye bye shadowlands
The term is over
And all the holidays have begun
At the time, Scott was also a fan of Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, and was interviewed in Strait, the Christian music paper I mentioned in my post on the Violent Femmes. However, as the album’s title of A Pagan Place suggests, he did not define his beliefs as narrowly as Lewis did, and has subsequently I think disassociated himself from this connection entirely. He was for many years (perhaps still is) a resident in the Findhorn community in Scotland, which doesn’t seem to have any doctrinal commitments beyond a belief in holistic ‘spirituality’ and a commitment to ecology. More of a hippie than a Christian then – he even looks a little like Donovan. But in 1984 the lyrical allusions on the album and the sense of yearning for transcendence the music shares with U2 were more than enough for me to identify a kindred spirit.
The childlike frame of reference borrowed from Lewis is important I think – part of the album’s Romantic openness to innocence and wonder. At the climax of ‘A Church Not Made With Hands’ a chiming, soaring electric guitar solo follows the similarly childlike declaration ‘Isn’t that a pretty sun? Sitting in a pretty sky. Ooh, will we stay and watch it darken?’
Interestingly though, the album’s ‘relationship’ songs are all clouded by adult emotions and regrets (‘All the Things She Gave Me’, ‘The Thrill Is Gone’ and ‘Rags’) – my distant memories of reading Scott’s memoir suggest that these songs may have been inspired by the same person.
One of my favourite songs on the album is ‘Red Army Blues’, about a Soviet soldier condemned to the gulag in 1945 for fraternizing with Americans. It has revealing lyrical weaknesses: ‘I prayed for Mother Russia, In the summer of 43, And as we drove the Germans back, I really believed that God was listening to me’ doesn’t really sound like the sentiment of a loyal Soviet atheist, and ‘Bit my lip against the snow’ hardly does justice to the savagery of the Russian winter. But the song ultimately works because it has a very clear dramatic structure: in other words, it works as a story. And the music serves that Doctor Zhivago conception of individuals caught up in larger turmoil, with fake Russian choirs and pseudo- balalaikas, and epic saxophone solos. It all requires a certain suspension of disbelief, but it takes you places.
The album’s closer, ‘A Pagan Place’ takes us back to the state of mind of its opener, and its ‘Church Not Made With Hands’ – significantly, Roddy Lorimer’s trumpet reappears here. And we are definitely back in the world of Romanticism, where nature is the gateway to the world of the spirit, not its antagonist, and where some some sacrificial, Christ-like hero – or perhaps just a fellow seeker – serves as our point of identification:
How did he come here?
Who gave him the key?
It slipped into his hand
So secretly
Who put the colour
Like lines on his face?
And brought him here
To a pagan place
Like the subject of ‘A Church Not Made With Hands’ the figure invoked here is mysterious, elusive. It’s important that the lyrics are phrased as a series of questions. For Scott, unlike CS Lewis, it’s being open to the questions that matters – not pretending to have the answers. And if this figure is a ‘god’, then perhaps it is Pan, who is named in ‘The Pan Within’ on This Is the Sea and ‘The Return of Pan’ on Dream Harder. I’m also reminded a little of Herne the Hunter in the fictionalised pantheism of Robin of Sherwood, a television series first broadcast in 1984, though this is certainly a coincidence rather than an influence, since it wasn’t broadcast until most of A Pagan Place had been recorded.
I haven’t mentioned the album’s most famous track. ‘The Big Music’, which gave its name to the sound of all the groups who shared Scott’s wide-eyed wonder – it’s not one of my favourites.
For the music weeklies in mid-1984, Scott was a person of interest, but not a star. Someone to keep an eye on for the future perhaps, but not yet entirely convincing. For the NME, the album’s release seems to have fallen into the gap created by the strike I mentioned in my post on the Violent Femmes, but David Quantick reviewed one of the group’s first concerts at Strathclyde University on 5 May:
The Waterboys are one of those bands who get played on David “Kid” “Jensen”’s show without actually manifesting any signs of existence outside that world; I contend that nobody owns a Waterboys record. At all. This is a pity, since Mike Scott and his Garçons D’Eau are the purveyors of what we forest folk call a rocking sound. …
Mike resembles Chris Jagger, which fact of course instantly reminds the funky young reviewer of the rough-edged and smelly-men-in-food-stained-coats aspect of the Waterboys’ music; you could say the boys play a kind of r’n’b, but you’d need a very supportive family to get away with that simple a remark, because The Waterboys have a sense of pop as well, one which occasionally gets too grandiose, granted, but a sense of pop that knows a good tune and goes out with it for years until people wonder when the wedding is. …
I like The Waterboys: although occasionally harking back to a ‘70s idea of rocky pop and songwriterly posing, they stay on the right side of contemporary. Their main problem is that they’ll always be a serious-minded and intelligent group lacking the power actually to move you. …
In Melody Maker, Jeremy Lewis wrote a short review of the album for the 2 June issue:
The Waterboys have gone halfway to making a great record, filled with bright and brassy pop. Roddy Lorimer’s incisive trumpet breaks the surface of the music with a flourish as bright as gleaming chrome, and although their little portrait of the world contains more grey than that of the Pale Fountains, the same reliance is placed upon enticing melodies and synth-less sound.
Yet there is an outmoded element within the album that revolves around the persona of Mike Scott himself, a sort of pre-punk early Seventies folksiness that occasionally spills out all over the sound and mars the enterprise.. If Scott falls short of excellence, then it is because he pulls himself down into the more of some rather tacky past influences.
Occasionally, though, it works. “Rags” unrolls with an almost organic elasticity towards a series of great, gushing climaxes. “The Big Music” is filled with booming echoes, vitality and tension balanced in a dramatic equilibrium. “Red Army” has a powerful, pained saxophone replete with tragedy. …
An odd record, wearing a mask of commerciality, but with something a little more elusive at its core. I don’t think Mike Scott wants to be pinned down and his record is rather like a blurred snapshot of a slippery spirit. … A record marked by too much cant and not enough candour: “I have seen the big mountain/And I swear I’m halfway there”. Perhaps next time, he’ll give us the view from the peak.
Some of this doesn’t feel like it’s engaging with the music at all – the accusations of unfashionable influence just seem silly now. And r’n’b – even ‘pop’ for that matter? Surely this is music positioned interestingly between folk and rock (something increasingly obvious on subsequent albums)? Its ‘elusive’ qualities are correctly identified – but this is a feature, not a bug. Just when you think you’ve got Scott pinned down, he’s on to something else.
The NME also ran an earlier interview with Scott on 21 April, in the run-up to the album’s release. Paul Du Noyer’s framing remarks here are notably more positive: ‘[advance single ‘The Big Music’ is] his strongest effort yet, the record’s a blessed match of power and grace. It’s definitely rock, and proudly so; an avalanche of acoustic guitars, real drums, impassioned vocals, trumpet and sax as bold as brass can be’. They later ran another interview on 11 August, in which Scott explained:
“I am really interested in life. What it is, where it comes from, what is behind physical being … and I think all that is religious. It’s hard for me to give you an answer. I care about what I say.
“I went to church as a little boy. I was always quite pissed off with church. It was really miserable, all these miserable people in their best clothes with flash cars outside, inside these four walls, singing dirgey hymns. It didn’t seem like a celebration of life, and there’s no better way to pay tribute to the thing that gives you life than by celebrating life. Bob Marley said, I don’t go to church – I am a church. That was how he celebrated life.” …
In the thoughtless modern way of categorisers, The Waterboys will be simply indexed with U2/Bunnymen/Big C and their garrisons of hero-rock. Almost any sector of ‘A Pagan Place’, with Scott’s overwhelmed voice at its heart and the music swelling and swirling all around him, keeps that promise: of warrior legions galloping to the crest of a hill …
“… Over which lies the new world!” Scott offers a sharp giggle. “I don’t see that really …”
No comments:
Post a Comment