Product Description

On their early albums, the Waterboys became known as practitioners of "the Big Sound", an epic, wide-screen musical vision on a par with the contemporaneous offerings of U2 and Big Country, making them the musical equivalents of Cecil B. DeMille. For FISHERMAN'S BLUES, though, they decided to scalethings down considerably, departing for a little while fromtheir outsized pop/rock ambitions to embrace Celtic roots, folk, and heavily Dylan-influenced, BLOOD ON THE TRACKS-likefolk-rock. The gambit paid off better than anyone could have expected, resulting in one of the band's most memorable, moving albums.
Singer Mike Scott emerges here as a gifted troubadour, a mode he'd explore more fully years later in his solo work. Where he once spun grand statements framed by booming drums and echoing guitars, here he makes simple romantic observations backed by fiddles and acoustic guitars. A surprising nod to country roots pops up as well, with "Has Anybody Here Seen Hank?", but, in the end, FISHERMAN'S BLUES is closer to the Celtic soul of prime Van Morrison (whose "Sweet Thing" is covered here) than it is to either the band's rootsier influences or to any 1980s contemporaries.

Track Listing

1. Fisherman's Blues
2. We Will Not Be Lovers
3. Strange Boat
4. World Party
5. Sweet Thing/Blackbird
6. Jimmy Hickey's Waltz
7. And A Bang On The Ear
8. Has Anybody Here Seen Hank
9. When Will We Be Married
10. When Ye Go Away
11. Dunford's Fancy
12. Stolen Child
13. This Land Is Your Land

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3358 in Music
• Released on: 1990-07-01
• Number of discs: 1

Amazon.co.uk Review
When The Waterboys' Irish violinist Steve Wickham suggested to Mike Scott that Spiddal was a great place to get away from it all, no-one could have guessed how Scott would take his advice to heart. Within less than a year The Waterboys were transformed from stadium rock incumbents to adopted Irish folk-rockers. Fisherman's Blues is the entrancing outcome of that transition. If the family snapshot on the cover is to be taken at face value, one might imagine this to be an idyllic time in The Waterboys career. In truth, the sessions were painstaking, with Scott discarding over 50 songs over a two-year process. What remains though, is a classic of its time: from the yearning euphoria of the title track to otherworldly beauty of "When Ye Go Away", lent cohesion by the singularity of Scott's vision. For sheer inspiration and flow, precedents begin and end at Van Morrison's Astral Weeks--a doubly appropriate comparison, this, given Scott's superlative reading of Morrison's "Sweet Thing". --Peter Paphides

Customer Reviews

1st but not the last!
Heard a track from this album on the radio which stopped me in my tracks - it was the title Fisherman's Blues so bought it loved every track especially Jimmy Hickey's Waltz however it is hard to name only one - a super album buy it and enjoy.......

I Can't Say I'm An Expert On The Waterboys But...
...from a completely unbiased perspective, this alubm is fantastic. I was encouraged to listen to The Waterboys by my brother and so I opted for this album, "Fisherman's Blues". I was unsure of wht to expect, having only heard the song, "Whole Of The Moon" prior to recieving the album. I got the album, put the disc in the player, hit play and knew I'd found something special.

The opening, and title, track of the album is, to this day, one of my all-time favourites. You can hear that sincerity of the words and the music. It's upbeat with a strong folk sound. It is true to say the rest of the album did not have the immediate stunning effect which the song, "Fisherman's Blues" did, but songs like "Strange Boat" and "And A Bang On The Ear" stood out on early listens.

The more I listened to the album, the more fond of it got. At over 7 minutes, "We Will Not Be Lovers" manages to sustain entertaining music throughout. "World Party" and "Has Anybody Here Seen Hank?" provide some different sounds and make the album a thoroughly enjoyable album.

A real gem.

The quintessential Waterboys album
This isn't the best Waterboys album (I'm still in two minds about "Room to Roam" or "This is the Sea" for that accolade), but in many ways this is the quintessential snapshot of the musical pilgrimages of Mike Scott, Anto Thistlethwaite and the gang. It's the point where the musical direction turned, or possibly achieved a sharper focus; without keyboard maestro Karl Wallinger, whose instrumentation defined the grand sound of the early Waterboys, the band were free to travel in a more acoustic, folky direction, aided and abetted by fiddle player Steve Wickham who provides the distinctive sound of this album. That's not to say that the Waterboys have recorded a finger-in-the-ear, Aran-sweater-wearing folk album. The big, post-punk sound of earlier albums is still in evidence here (particularly on the title track and "We Will Not Be Lovers"), just given a new dimension through some perfectly judged fiddle-work. A softer, more whimsical note is provided by "Strange Boat" and the single "And a Bang on the Ear", both of which hint at territory later explored much more thoroughly in "Room to Roam"; a perfect mid-point between all these influences is found in the cover of Van Morrison's "Sweet Thing" (one of those rare things, a cover far better than the original!) which establishes the Waterboys firmly in the canon of folk-rock greats. The hidden gem of the album, though, is the breathtaking setting of the W.B. Yeats poem, "The Stolen Child" - a glimpse of the fairyland which Mike Scott seems to have spent most of his career seeking.