Strange POLL: The Waterboys FISHERMAN'S BLUES

the record that launched a thousand raggle-taggle jokes.

still holds up, imo. it was ballsy to cover "sweet thing" but it's a great cover. and even the conceptually-very-dubious yeats adaptation works, i think -- stays mysterious and even a little menacing, instead of precious. which i think is true of the album as a whole.

that said, i can't imagine not voting for the title track. supposedly this was its first public performance anywhere (well before the album was released):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIil8k5QnFU

The singing on the title track is so exuberant, so smilingly heartfelt, that it carries me away time and again. There are other good songs and performances on here (it's quite a solid album) but nothing else hits me in the same way.

We Will Not Be Lovers. Love the way that riff bounces around between instruments.

Love the so-simple "When Ye Go Away" and "The Stolen Child," but, yeah, probably will vote for the title track. A great, single piece of work, this record.

title track, still sounds as great as the first time i heard it on a tape a schoolfriend had.

bumping, with audio

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXoX7vbyGfc

^^^

love the intro to that song, the first 30 seconds or so, with the piano and the fiddle squeals and all.

^^ hell yeah

boring, but hard for me not to vote "fisherman's blues" here

fucking love this album. no idea.

title song made me go out and buy their greatest hits
greatest hits sucked except for this song and whole of the moon

dude, GIRL CALLED JOHNNY FFS

and "bang the drum".. well, nevermind

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

yup. well.

i'm outing myself as a waterboys fan.

discus

The singing on the title track is so exuberant, so smilingly heartfelt,

the first time i heard this song there were a few moments in which i thought it was a lost dexys track. i love all that celtic soulful bullshit is i guess what i'm saying. got the blue-green dna eyes to match it, and so...

so basically if you are melantonically impaired and sing about destiny then i will stan for ya. heck there are surely worse crimes in life??

Red Army Blues

x-ie to me
or melanin-so. i am only one man. still acquainting myself the roman alphabet even after all these yrs

Red Army Blues

Not one of my favourites, but I definitely prefer the album A Pagan Place to Fisherman's Blues.

^^^yes!

i heard girl called johnny on 6 music not long ago (lol dadrock) and it sounded great - such a good singer

Those are their two best records, and sort of hard for me to compare. They're really by two different bands. I go back to Fisherman's Blues more, but I'd like to hear Pagan Place again. (I don't think I actually own it in any form I can listen to anymore.)

Love the exuberant nature-worship stuff on that album (at least I've always read Church Not Made With Hands, All The Things and The Big Music that way), but also The Thrill Is Gone is one of the most perfect and heartbreaking things they ever did.

Mike Scott of The Waterboys revealed on Twitter this week that he’s at work compiling a 7-disc box set of material — “114 tracks and counting,” featuring multiple takes of about 88 different songs — recorded during the sessions for the band’s classic 1988 album Fisherman’s Blues that’s due for release later in this year.

Full details of the project aren’t yet known, but Scott kicked off a series of Tweets about the set late Sunday by writing, “Great editing day on Waterboys FISHERMAN’S BOX. I worked on Saints & Angels, On My Way To Tara and BP’s Bathtub Boogie. Release later 2013.” In response to fans’ questions , Scott offered up more detail, explaining that he has, so far, dug up 114 tracks representing 88 different songs (“Some are different arrangements of the same song, recorded months apart… You’ll understand why I got burned out making it”), and that he is only editing material, not adding to or doing overdubs on the old songs. When asked by another fan how many studio tracks were recorded overall for the Fisherman’s Blues album, Scott quipped: “That is like asking how many fractals there are in a fractal. The material from the Fisherman’s Blues sessions is infinite.”

What happened to the 7th disc?

Just discovered this outtake this morning and am listening to it nonstop.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBUsj47gAWI

Whoa, thanks for posting. How did that not make the album?

"we will not be lovers" was robbed

Their recent triple album Out Of All This Blue is absolutely fantastic. It should become a cult classic.

re-listened to the album for first time in many years. still sounds great. can't remember if i voted in the poll but it would have been hard not to pick the title song. "we will not be lovers" a close second though

"we will not be lovers" was robbed

― reggie (qualmsley), Wednesday, January 9, 2019 4:10 PM

otm maybe my fav waterboys tune.

"bang on the ear" b-side is a really fun rendition of "raggle raggle gypsy"—

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUG8AW8bkYE