My old flatmate, Colin "Elbows" Blakey, played with them in their heyday, on penny whistle and piano. Back row, 2nd left: I got a call from Mr. Scott one night as he was in town and hoping to get a bit of hash. I naturally insisted I knew of no such thing and had no known associates who retailed. So we got stoned and talked music. He said the Waterboys never made videos, because they fix a specific image from somebody else to a piece of music and when we were growing up we made the images in our heads. He has a point. I also bought one of his early singles way back, because my GF was called Carrie:
Our worries were unfounded back then: But now it's time Angus gave it up. One surviving member is not a band anymore.
Colin's previous band were We Free Kings, a raggle taggle bunch of veggies, who'd wanted to be The Clash but could only afford acoustic instruments. I did their live sound for a while. The band are credited with being the reason Mike Scott went to Ireland and turned acoustic, after We Free Kings supported The Waterboys at Hammersmith Odeon - Mike and WFK's singer, Joe, go way back. Mike also gave the band a night of Waterboys' time in Windmill Lane recording studio, without his record company's knowledge, so the band managed to record an entire album overnight during an Irish tour, which Mike then secretly mixed in the following weeks. This was filmed the day we drove back from an Irish tour. The band were knackered, so did a bunch of slower songs, including new ones, which was professional suicide, because the show was broadcast nationally. This was the only up-tempo one they played, much to the chagrin of all the fans who'd been bused from Edinburgh to Glasgow. In other name trivia, Kenny the drummer moved into Colin's room and was christened Half Man-Half Duvet after his habit of rising for the 1pm news with a pipe of hash. Also, the singer was Joe Kingman and guitarist was Seb Holbrook. The Waterboys told us there are two towns next to each other on Route 66 called Kingman and Holbrook. Rock and, indeed, roll.
The video of the whole concert seems to have disappeared but there are other clips worth checking out.
Physical Graffiti is their best album. Here's a Dailymotion clip of a mashup I made of Trampled Underfoot, Connected by Stereo MCs and Dirrty by Christina Aguilera. (It got blocked on Youtube.)
Had front row tickets for this show a few days after Fee fell offstage and cancelled. So bummed. Factoid: guitarist and songwriter Bill Spooner was related to William Archibald Spooner, who invented spoonerisms.
The band's band. It seemed back then that every gig I went to, the sound guys were playing Little Feat before the band came on. And they're still not in the Hall of Fame.