The Waterboys

The album was followed by a tour of the U.K. and then Europe. Jeff Beck reunites with his former bandmates on one track. The band changed direction once again in 2003 and released Universal Hall a mostly acoustic album with a return of some celtic influences from the Fisherman's Blues era. In 2003, a new album, Birdland, was released under the Yardbirds name by a lineup including Chris Dreja, Jim McCarty, and new members Gypie Mayo (lead guitar, backing vocals), John Idan (bass, lead vocals) and Alan Glen (harmonica, backing vocals). By 2001 the core of the new Waterboys included Mike Scott on vocals and guitar, Richard Naiff on pianos and organs and Steve Wickham on violin who returned to the band. "I suppose," Jeff Beck cracked at the ceremony, "I should say thank you, but they fired me—so fuck 'em!". A number of old Waterboys guested on the album including Anthony Thistlethwaite and Kevin Wilkinson. All six living musicians who had been part of the group's heyday—including Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page, who had never (contrary to numerous misidentifications over the years) played in the group together (the confusion may have stemmed from a 1971 Epic Records anthology, Yardbirds Featuring Performances By: Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, a set which fell out of print and became a very expensive collectors' item for many years)—appeared at the ceremony.

To the surprise of many Mike Scott resurrected the Waterboys name for the album A Rock In The Weary Land with a new experimental rock sound Scott called "Sonic Rock". The Yardbirds were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990. In his frustration at not being able to get a new touring Waterboys band together, Scott left New York, abandoning the Waterboys name and embarking on a solo career. Meanwhile, Jim McCarty, Paul Samwell-Smith (who had remained Cat Stevens' producer to the day Stevens converted to Islam and withdrew from pop music entirely), and Chris Dreja offered a nucleus in the 1980s for a short-enough lived but fun-enough kind of Yardbirds semi-reunion called Box of Frogs, which occasionally included Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page plus various friends with whom they'd all recorded over the years. In December Anthony Thistlethwaite left the band leaving Mike Scott as The Waterboys' only member. The next album was completed with session musicians and was released in 1993 as Dream Harder with a new hard rock-influenced sound. They recorded one promising album before Relf was killed in an electrocution accident in his home. Scott spent the rest of the year writing new material and moved to New York. Keith Relf resurfaced in the late 1970s with a new quartet, Armageddon, a hybrid of hard, thrusting rock and folk that included former Renaissance mate Louis Cenammo.

1991 began with Trevor Hutchinson leaving the band and a re-release of the single The Whole of the Moon from This Is The Sea becoming a success in the UK charts. Paul Samwell-Smith, who had gone on to fame as Cat Stevens' producer in 1970, helped vocalist Relf and drummer McCarty organise a new group devoted to experimentation between rock, folk, and classical forms—Renaissance. Scott, Thistlethwaite and Hutchinson recruited Ken Bevins on drums to fulfil the tour dates. The remaining Yardbirds didn't exactly go gently into that good grey night. Just before the album was released Steve Wickham left the band in an argument over a new drummer and the band started to fall apart. Billed as the New Yardbirds, they made the tour, found themselves clicking together decently enough, and then repaired home to England to produce, in a very short time, a very new album by a somewhat different group, although much of the sound derived from Page's sonic experiments (and a baby brother composition to his earlier "White Summer" called "Black Mountain Side"—not to mention a polished rewrite of "I'm Confused," called "Dazed and Confused") with the last edition of the Yardbirds: Led Zeppelin. The Waterboys' fourth album, Room to Roam was released in September 1990. But Jimmy Page, left with both the rights to the band's name and a touring commitment yet fulfilled in Europe, was compelled to put a new lineup together to make that commitment.

The Waterboys at this point consisted of Mike Scott, Steve Wickham, Anthony Thistlethwaite, Colin Blakey on whistle, flute and piano, Sharon Shannon on accordion, Trevor Hutchinson on bass and Noel Bridgeman on drums. Or were they? After the failure of their final album (the badly-produced Little Games) and their reduction to small venues for touring, the group agreed to split in early 1968. After further touring the band returned to Spiddal to record a new album. Increasing chart indifference, record company pressure (their British home label pressed hitmaking producer Mickie Most upon them in a failed bid to re-ignite their commercial success), and drug-related problems meant that by 1967 the Yardbirds' days were numbered. Due to the number of tracks recorded in the three years between This Is The Sea and Fisherman's Blues Scott released a second album of tracks from this period in 2001 titled Too Close To Heaven or Fisherman's Blues Part 2 in North America. He also proved an adept fingerstyle guitarist, the shimmering "White Summer," an Indian-influence instrumental composition, joining his full-out hard rock grinder, "I'm Confused" as curlicues to the Yardbirds' unexpectedly forthcoming transmutation. Critics and fans were spilt, with some embracing the new folk influenced sound and others disappointed and had hoped for a continuation of This Is The Sea. (Almost the only pronounced examples of what the Beck-Page tandem could have been came on a single, "Happenings Ten Years Time Ago," and their half-crazed version of "The Train Kept A-Rollin'," an even crazier rendition of which turned up in the Antonioni film Blow-Up as "Stroll On".) Page was just as bent toward experimentation as Beck, particularly his striking technique of scraping a violin or cello bow across his guitar strings to induce a round of odd and surreal sounds, and his dextrous use of a wah-wah pedal.

Fisherman's Blues was released in October 1988 and showcased a host of guest musicians that had played with the band in Dublin and Spiddal. Jimmy Page re-entered the picture here, playing bass until rhythm guitarist Chris Dreja could become comfortable with that instrument, and then teaming with Beck for tantalising twin-guitar attacks that proved short-enough lived: Beck either quit or was fired from the group in mid-1966, and the Yardbirds continued as a quartet for the remainder of their career. In 1988 Scott took the band to Spiddal in the west of Ireland where they set up a recording studio in Spiddal House to finish recording their new album. It was prior to the sessions that produced Yardbirds that Paul Samwell-Smith decided to quit the group for touring purposes and move behind the boards to co-produce them with new manager, Simon Napier-Bell. Some of these performances were released in 1998 on The Live Adventures Of The Waterboys including a famous Glastonbury performance in '86. In addition, the Yardbirds began serious experiments with things like adapting Gregorian chant ("Still I'm Sad," "Turn Into Earth," Hot House of Omagarashid," "Farewell," "Ever Since The World Began") and various European folk styles into their blues and rock rooted music, and this gained them a new reputation among the hipster underground even as their commercial appeal had begun already to wane. The new band spent 1986 and 1987 recording in Dublin and touring the U.K., Ireland, Europe and Israel. in a bowdlerised version called Over Under Sideways Down), and established him as a top-rank guitarist whose experiments with fuzz tone, feedback, and distortion jolted British rock forward with a bold drop kick.

The band's lineup changed once again with Scott, Wickham and Thistlethwaite now joined by Trevor Hutchinson on bass and Peter McKinney on drums. Beck's tenure in the group, meanwhile, produced a number of memorable recordings, from single hits like "Heart Full of Soul," "I'm A Man," and "Shapes of Things" to the Yardbirds album (known more popularly as Roger the Engineer, and first issued in the U.S. At the request of new member Steve Wickham, Mike Scott moved to Dublin and becomes influenced by the traditional Irish music there as well as country and gospel. The Yardbirds in 1965 and 1966 issued a pair of albums in the U.S., slapped together somewhat haphazardly from their British recordings, For Your Love (which included a delightful early take of "Hang On, Sloopy"—they'd gotten hold of a demo of the song before the McCoys had their chartbusting crack at it a year later, and their patented doubletime "rave up" version is a treat) and Havin' A Rave Up With The Yardbirds, half of which came from Five Live Yardbirds. At the end of the tour Karl Wallinger left to form his own band World Party. Clapton recommended Jimmy Page, a studio guitarist he had known (and with whom he would soon cut a series of stirring blues guitar duets, including "Tribute to Elmore" and "Draggin' My Tail"), as his replacement, but Page—uncertain at the time about giving up his lucrative studio work—recommended in turn one Jeff Beck, whose fleet-fingered style and bent for experimentation pushed the Yardbirds to the direction from which they became widely credited for opening the door to "psychedelic" rock. and North America with Macro Sin replacing Martyn Swain on bass. The loss could have been devastating to the Yardbirds; Clapton had already shown the striking, stabbingly virtuosic style he would later expand and deepen with Mayall and unfurl as a full-fledged virtuoso statement with the improvisational Cream.

The album release was followed by successful tours of the U.K. It also prompted Eric Clapton—at the time a no-holds-barred blues purist—to leave the group and join with John Mayall's Blues Breakers. charts hampered by Scott's refusal to perform on Top of the Pops and mime. The quintet went from there to cut several singles, including "I Wish You Would," but it was "For Your Love," a Graham Gouldman composition that was anything but the blues, which put the band to their highest chart position yet in England—and their first major hit in the United States, when it was released there in 1965. The Waterboys released their third album This Is The Sea in October 1985, their most successful up to this point it managed to get into the top 40 and the single The Whole of the Moon reached number 28 in the U.K. ("Those English kids," Williamson said famously of the Yardbirds and other British blues groups like the Animals and the Stones, "want to play the blues so bad—and they play the blues so bad," though he had a personal affection for the Yardbirds' members and even thought of moving to England permanently, until the illness that resulted in his early 1965 death.). Late in the sessions Steve Wickham joined and added his violin to the track The Pan Within after Scott had heard him on a Sinéad O'Connor demo recorded at Karl Wallinger's house. The group was well enough reputed that none other than blues legend Sonny Boy Williamson himself invited the group to tour England and Germany with him, a union that survives to this day on a live album memorable for Williamson's trouper-like adaptation of his deep troubador style of blues to the Yardbirds' raw, unpolished rock and roll version.

The band began to record new material in spring 1985 for a new album. Under Gomelsky's guidance, the Yardbirds got themselves signed to EMI's Columbia label in early 1964; they set a precedent of a sort when their first album turned out to be a live album, Five Live Yardbirds, recorded at the legendary Marquee Club in London. The release of the album was followed by further touring including support slots for The Pretenders and U2 and a show at the Glastonbury festival. And, of critical importance, Crawdaddy Club impresario Giorgio Gomelsky—who had all but discovered the Rolling Stones but thought it beyond his range to become their manager—learned enough from his previous miss to become the Yardbirds' manager and, as it turned out, first producer. A Pagan Place was released in June 1984 preceded by the single The Big Music whose title was used by some commentators as a description of The Waterboys sound. Between his sleek guitar playing and Keith Relf's improving harmonica style, the group could at least boast two attractive players that made listeners overlook their still-incomplete rhythmic attack. The band also made some new recording and over dubbed old material in late '83 and spring '84 to be released as The Waterboys second album. They made their first significant lineup addition when singer/harmonica player Keith Relf, rhythm guitarist Chris Dreja, bassist Paul Samwell-Smith, and drummer Jim McCarty, replaced original lead guitarist Anthony (Top) Topham with a very boyish-looking art student named Eric Clapton in late 1963. Clapton already knew what he was doing with his instrument; his solo turns, while far enough from the gripping little gems for which he became famous enough soon enough, already set him apart from most of his peers among the British blues clubbers.

The band at this point consisted of Mike Scott on vocals and guitar, Anthony Thistlethwaite on saxophone and mandolin, Karl Wallinger on keyboards, Roddy Lorimer on trumpets, Martyn Swain on bass and Kevin Wilkinson on drums. Their inexperience and their less-than-stellar musicianship was obvious but their commitment was just as powerful, as they hammered away at versions of such blues classics as "Smokestack Lightning," "Got Love If You Want It," "Here 'Tis," "Baby What's Wrong," "Good Morning Little School Girl," "Boom Boom," "I Wish You Would," "Done Somebody Wrong," and "Rollin' and Tumblin'.". After the release of their debut The Waterboys began touring, their first show being at The Batschkapp Club in Frankfurt in February 1984. With a repertoire drawn more from the Delta-soaked Chicago blues titans Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson II, and Elmore James than the more commercially-minded Chuck Berry and Jimmy Reed influences of the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds began to build a following of their own in London before very long. Their music, influenced by Patti Smith, Bob Dylan and David Bowie, was (inevitably) compared by critics to U2 in its cinematic sweep. Formed originally as the Metropolitan Blues Quartet in 1962–63 in London, the Yardbirds first achieved notice on the burgeoning British blues scene (or "rhythm and blues," as the British music press alluded to it) when they took over as the house band at the Crawdaddy Club in London—succeeding the Rolling Stones. The Waterboys then released their self-titled debut, The Waterboys, in July 1983. The Yardbirds were an early British rock band, noted for spawning the careers of several of rock music's most famous guitarists, including Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page.

The Waterboys performed as a five piece, including Anthony Thistlethwaite on sax and a new member, keyboard player Karl Wallinger. This was shortly followed by The Waterboys' first performance on the BBC's Old Grey Whistle Test. In March 1983, Ensign released the first recording under the name The Waterboys, a single titled A Girl Called Johnny. The name was taken from the Lou Reed song The Kids, from his album Berlin.

In 1983, Scott's label Ensign Records wanted Scott to release an album of these recordings as a solo artist, but Scott decided to start a band he named The Waterboys. These would become divided between the Waterboys' first and second albums. During 1982, Scott made a number of recordings, both solo and with Thistlethwaite and Wilkinson. During the same period, Scott formed the short lived band The Red and The Black, with saxophone player Anthony Thistlethwaite, after hearing him play on a Nikki Sudden record. Thistlethwaite introduced Scott to drummer Kevin Wilkinson, who would drum for the nine shows The Red and The Black would perform.

These would form the basis of the first Waterboys album. Mike Scott, founder and the only permanent member of The Waterboys, made a number of solo recordings while in the band named Another Pretty Face (who changed their name to Funhouse on later releases) in late 1981 and early 1982. folk rock. They are known to play in a number of different styles, but most often their music can be described as a mix of Irish folk music with rock and roll, i.e.

The Waterboys is a band formed 1983 by Mike Scott. The Live Adventures Of The Waterboys (1998). The Secret Life Of The Waterboys 81-85 (1994). The Best Of The Waterboys 81-90 (1991).

Universal Hall (2003). Too Close To Heaven (2001). A Rock In The Weary Land (2000). Dream Harder (1993).

Room To Roam (1990). Fisherman's Blues (1988). This Is The Sea (1985). A Pagan Place (1984).

The Waterboys (1983).