Review: The Waterboys, Colston Hall

Finesse is in the air tonight as the audience reach their seats in the subdued auditorium of Colston Hall. Starting off the evening is Sophie Morgan from Liverpool, with a guitarist and a fiddle player by her side. The whole set is made of intense melodies on which her gusty voice can reverberate her shimmering emotions.  Her softness lulls the audience and her cover of The Waterboys’ The Whole of The Moon, apparently so loved by Mike Scott himself that he invited her to tour with them, is an interesting experience, far from the original and very much her own.

It’s almost a full-house to welcome Mike Scott & Co tonight. The stage is very crowded and ornamented with colourful neon signs. More members have been added since I last saw them two years ago: an extra drummer and two young backing vocalists. The band has a different face and it is probably to match the new interesting direction that they’ve taken with his new album Out of All This Blue released in September.

Indeed, their vibe is a tad different than usual with hip-hop and funky sounds that hadn’t been previously heard on their records. What happened to Mike Scott in the last two years? Well, he got married to a Japanese woman and had a child: “Eighty percent of the songs on my new album are about love and the other twenty percent are about other shit”. The set is mostly composed of these new songs and if the audience wanted to hear The Waterboys’ classics then they picked the wrong night as out of a two hours set, only A Girl Called Johnny, The Whole of The Moon and Fisherman’s Blues are performed.

The set starts with Do We Choose Who We Love?, a little bomb of positive energy and the mood of the evening is settled. Most of the songs such as If I Was Your Boyfriend and If the Answer is Yeah have funky beats which make the crowd want to get up to the front row and dance, only to be stopped in their flight by security. Love Walks In is more familiar to the original sound of the band and is impressively powerful, especially when the last line is repeated on the loop by all the musicians aligned.

Scott distances himself from the rest of the new material with Nashville, Tennesse, on which the vibe suddenly turns to country and Brother Paul on the keyboards gets crazily enthusiastic with a frenzied solo. This man is the most entertaining musician I have ever seen live. Amid all the upbeats songs, one of the highlight moments of the show is Mike’s performance of the sorrowful ballad The Girl in the Window Chair, on which his intact voice can beautifully intensify.

The Waterboys perform a great show full of brand new material with which Mike Scott proves again that he isn’t afraid to innovate and experiment with new sounds. He thanks the audience for being patient with the new songs but the refreshed crowd seem to leave the auditorium satisfied and definitely craving some more.

Photos: Shona Cutt