Prior to this homecoming gig, much had been made about the release of Atlantic Rain: The Lost Fisherman’s Blues Recordings, the latest offering on Fantasy Records; a collection of lost material from the 86-88 sessions. Tonight, only one new track from that collection is included, a world debut of the haunting Come Back to Galway. Previously an instrumental, now with Mike Scott’s poignant, reflective lyric and near-spiritual organ work by Brother John Paul, it closes out the second set.
This was a crowd-friendly revue that kept the Saturday night revellers locked in throughout. Just five songs in, and How Long Will I Love You, A Girl Called Johnny, and The Whole of the Moon had been offered up, the latter enthusiastically kicked off by Scott perched on a piano stool despite a humorous key mishap in the intro.
At AUK, most of the last live reviews this summer have mentioned the weather in the opening sentences, so I’m going to copy them: we don’t have the baked Lincolnshire fields or the Suffolk dustbowl that other correspondents have remarked on. Here, in the last weekend of the rainy summer of 2026, Glasgow is still lush and green. But that’s apt for The Waterboys’ rootsy, folky material where rain is heavily featured. The opening lines of Glastonbury Song perhaps sum this up: “I dreamed myself from the sultry plains/to the old green square back in old Maybole”, sings Scott; the reference to Maybole, in Ayrshire, is not lost to this crowd. He spent his high school years in Ayr and often travelled the 35 miles to Glasgow and its famed Apollo Theatre.
When there is a lot of material to be played, it has become the norm, Springsteen style, to run for three hours without a break. The intermission here was old-school, and I think welcomed by most fans. It allowed for some shuffling of positions near the front, where some reported that bass and drums were slightly muddy. And of course, to queue for more alcohol.
In the second set, the Waterboys were joined on stage by Steve Earle. “I only ever wanted to be in three bands and The Waterboys is one of them”, he hollers (I read in these pages that the other two are Rolling Stones and NRBQ). The band immediately launches into a quartet of his songs: Copperhead Road, Guitar Town, My Old Friend the Blues and his latest single Volver e Celaya. Just to prove we haven’t suddenly switched into a Steve Earle gig, he slinks (if a man of Earle’s renown and stature can slink!) into the background as mandolin session player, perhaps evoking his 2nd bucket list band, in a boisterous cover of Dead Flowers, and he’s there for the remainder of the Fisherman’s Blues Revue.
There’s a version of And a Bang on the Ear; some may call it a duet, but personally I think the arrangement was a nod to the shared vocal of Prince’s 1999 with Earle and Scott each taking a line at the start of individual verses.
The sheer exuberance of the band has to be mentioned, the return of Steve Wickham on fiddle, Famous James Hallawell on piano, Aongus Ralston on bass, Eamon Ferris on drums, Brother Paul on Hammond and “weird white thing“, Roar Øien on pedal steel (“get a pedal steel son!” was unwanted advice given to Scott by a working men’s club musician in 1977 – thankfully ignored during punk days but finally adopted in the 1986 raggle-taggle fisherman’s years adding much wanted Americana authenticity). Scott spends quite a bit of time on piano, meaning now and then there are whole songs without guitar, but such is the richness of the sound; the guitar is not missed.
It’s been 50 years since young Mike Scott, a shoot-from-the-hip teenage Scottish gunslinger, accompanied by his mother, went to London to record a self-funded demo. When he returned to Ayr, budget blown many times over, and played it back, he was unimpressed by the dog-rough results but encouraged enough to form bands to eventually manage to replicate the sound in his head.
Tonight the vocal performances of both Scott and Earle were superb. In their maturity, the great vocalists in Americana are all about roots, whether that’s hammering nails in San Antonio, Texas or gazing out as a sixteen-year-old to the western seas from Scotland with the notion that across the water, there’s New York (or maybe the very top of Newfoundland!); and that somewhere out there was Lou Reed and Patti Smith.
The encore sees unruly and raucous performances of The Galway Girl, Fisherman’s Blues and I Ain’t Ever Satisfied, with the crowd really going for it in the standing area, and to bring it all nicely back to Americana, there’s even a rendition of Will the Circle Be Unbroken, and then, all nine Waterboys stand in line and take a deserved bow.
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