Fisherman’s Blues is the bestselling and most known album by The Waterboys, released in October 1988. The fact that it was so successful may make it easy to forget what a bold move the album was at the time.
The album marked a drastic change in the band’s sound, as they abandoned their earlier grandiose rock sound for a mixture of Irish music, traditional Scottish music, country music, and – for good measure – a slight dash of rock’n’roll.
Critics were divided on its release. Some were disappointed at the change of direction. Others were quick to rank it as one of the most interesting albums to have appeared for years. Fans were probably similarly divided, but they certainly gained many more new listeners than they lost old ones.
Why the change, though?
To set the scene: The third Waterboys album This Is The Sea was released in September 1985. The album was highly acclaimed and a big success. It was the culmination of Mike Scott’s “Big Music” vision, positioning him on the cusp of mainstream success. It had however also left him frustrated with the demands placed upon him. Not willing to ‘play the game’ he instead opened himself up to a new set of musical possibilities.
The seed for the new direction was sown with Steve Wickham’s contribution on The Pan Within on the This Is the Sea album. The fiddle part struck a chord in Scott, and Wickham was invited to join the band full-time after the release of the album. That was the start of a band reshuffle. Scott would spend a lot of time in Dublin with Wickham, and felt so strongly about what he found there that he moved from London to Dublin in 1986.
On 23 January 1986, the band find themselves at Windmill Lane Studios, Dublin. They had not yet completed touring for This Is the Sea, but Mike Scott was in a hurry to explore a new direction of the band.
Scott gathered around him his closest musical comrades, Steve Wickham (violin, fiddle) and Anthony Thistlethwaite (saxophone, mandolin, harmonica, organ), and hired a rhythm section consisting of Trevor Hutchinson (bass) and Peter McKinney (drums). They set off on what Thistlethwaite recalled as “a thing between Mike, Steve and myself – a three-way band of gypsies… a funny little adventure”.
Mike Scott: “I’d arrived in Dublin at the start of the year and was hanging out with my bandmates Steve and Anto, writing and playing acoustic songs, many of them with a country or gospel flavour. I wanted to get these on tape without any external pressure to keep sounding like our old music, so I didn’t tell the record company that I’d booked a day in Dublin’s best studio, Windmill Lane. And for different reasons I didn’t tell Steve and Anto either. I wanted to catch them by surprise so they’d play as naturally as they did when we were just hanging out. So I had their instruments secretly delivered to Windmill by a roadie, and hired a rhythm section – two Ulster boys, Trevor and Pete, with whom we’d rehearsed a few days earlier. Then I got Steve and Anto there on the pretext of checking out the place for possible future use. When they walked in and saw their instruments miked up and ready, plus a handy rhythm section, they were first confused, then amused, then raring to go. In the best of all possible moods we set up in a circle and started playing live.”
That first tentative session delivered, fully formed, on day one. Nestling among Dylan, Hank Williams and Van Morrison covers, and Scott’s embryonic take on country, was the thrillingly evocative Fisherman’s Blues. Nailed in just two run-throughs, it’s perfect, definitive and timeless. More than any other song, that became the song that defined the new direction.
Later that year, The Waterboys performed Fisherman’s Blues on The Tube, which was the first time the new musical direction the band was taking was demonstrated.
Having proved to themselves that the new direction worked and was what they wanted to explore, what followed was a complex, twisting, elusive set of sessions over the next few years that eventually yielded the Fisherman’s Blues album. Those sessions, running intermittently through to June 1988, were for a long time the stuff of myth. Rumours of hundreds of songs from those sessions would circulate – and they were true. Some of the session tracks would be portioned out as bonus tracks here and there, some outtake CDs would be released, and deluxe editions of the album yielded even more.
Finally, fans got to wet themselves with joy when the (more or less) full sessions were finally released on the 6CD Fisherman’s Box set in 2013.
A lot of songs would be written within the new set-up, but one song that was carried over from earlier was the ominous and enigmatic When Will We Be Lovers. It would be one of the stand-out tracks on the Fisherman’s Blues album, and it found its form within the new direction.
According to the official Waterboys lyric collection, the lyrics were written in North London in July 1985. There would be some music there to go along with them as well, although the song did not at that point sound anything like it would wound up doing. The song was musically reconstructed and arranged during the Fisherman’s Blues rehearsals.
Still, this means that the song existed even before the release of the This Is the Sea album – the album prior to the one that it ended up on. As sessions for that album were held as late as August 1985, it could theoretically have been included on that one at the last minute, but they likely had the final song selection in their sights by then. It certainly would not have sounded like it eventually did.
While We Will Not Be Lovers was not attempted during that first day at Windmill Lane in January 1986, it was close to the top of Scott’s pile of songs to attempt in the following period. The following studio sessions of 1986 would be made up of stolen moments while on tour between March and September.
Mike Scott: “During this period we were mostly on tour and scheduled recording sessions when we could. We stuck with our system of playing live in the studio, and never gave a hoot about whether the music we were making was what anyone expected of us. We played what we wanted, how we wanted, for as long as we wanted.”
Scott usually acted as master of proceedings/producer during these sessions, with the notable exception of when Bob Johnston took the reins for a few days on 22-25 March 1986.
Mike Scott: “Bob Johnston, veteran 1960s producer of Dylan, Johnny Cash, Leonard Cohen and many others, had called me at Christmas to say he wanted to work with us. Six weeks later he flew into Dublin, a larger-than-life Texan with a roaring voice and hearty guffaw. First he mixed several songs from our January day, then we set up for a day of new recording. We Will Not Be Lovers was the first result. I already had most of the lyric, written nine months earlier. Steve and Anto, as usual, made up their own riffs live. My organ and electric guitar parts were overdubbed straight after. I mixed the song the next day while Bob stood behind me, whooping and yelling encouragement.”
The song pretty much found its final form that day. A further four tracks were completed during those Bob Johnston sessions, but We Will Not Be Lovers was the only one ending up on the album, giving Johnston the producer credit for a sole song only (but what a song!). The other songs were eventually released on the Fisherman’s Box in 2013.
The band must have felt early on that the song was special, as it would be debuted live well before it was released. It was recorded late March 1986, and they started performing it pretty much straight away – the earliest documented occurrence being on 2 April 1986 at Riverside in Newcastle.
They also played it later that month at Radio Clyde in Glasgow on 27 April, and that version is included on the live album The Live Adventures of the Waterboys, which is a collection of live recordings from 1986. That makes this the earliest publicly available version of the song, over two years before the album version came out.
Album sessions would continue for a long time yet, eventually wrapping up in June 1988. In early 1987, they tried to revisit We Will Not Be Lovers with the idea of adding a saxophone overdub. The saxophone was ultimately not used on the album track, but you can hear what it sounds like on the Fisherman’s Box.
Mike Scott: “One evening Anto overdubbed sax on the previous year’s We Will Not Be Lovers, and it seemed a good idea to have him play on the roof. You can hear him warming up [in the outtake], exactly as passers-by must have heard him, the roar of his horn seasoning the air over the Dublin docks. The voice that says ‘coming up’ just before the track plays is our engineer Pearse Dunne. I loved the solo, but when the album was compiled a year later we used the 1986 mix.”
The song itself is immediately striking as it starts playing. Right as it kicks in, the ominous fiddle part is there, loudly announcing its presence. It drives the song onward, assisted by a mandolin which frequently doubles down on the same riff. The mandolin is hard pressed to scream like the fiddle does, but it is still very effective. The insistence of the rhythm section, with the drums playing with some power and the bass providing an effective bedding, also contributes to a sound that makes this the hardest rocking song on the album.
The lyrics follow the mood set in the music. The guy in the song is giving a flat out refusal – given with some spite and aggression – to a girl, denying that there is any chance that they could be together.
You just stepped into the main track
Climbed down off the fence
Words are your weapon
Lies are your defence
I know what you want and I see what you see
You’re looking for somebody but he isn’t me
Find yourself another
Find yourself another
Because we will not be lovers
Despite the guy’s insistence, his stance is contradicted. Looking at the next verses, it is clear that the passion that exists between these people are so intense that they could get the better of him. So strong is the reaction that she inspires in him.
Your eyes are like torches, your presence is bliss
I never knew time could speed and zip like this
The touch of your flesh is hard to resist
Planets collide at the smack of your kiss
But you can kiss your brother
Kiss your brother
Because we will not be lovers
Who wouldn’t want to experience such intensities at least once in their life? Preferably without the passionate rage and tortured aspects of yearning, though.
The complex intensity is operatic, like the torrential feelings of a lead character in a tragic opera. It is the eternal conundrum, to be so drawn to a fellow human and at the same time be so frustrated. It reaffirms just how limited human understanding can be of the mechanisms of attraction.
What we are getting here is obviously one side of the story. Who knows what a similar song from the other party would tell us. She may be screaming back to the guy that he has no chance in heck with him either. It seems there is a lot of passion between these people, but it has misfired and is fuelling negativity rather than being used as it presumably was in the beginning.
The fourth verse does tap into this, and that section gets a bit of emphasis as the fiddle stops playing and the song enters a slightly quieter section while the lyrics to this verse are sung. This is particularly effective and gives the words extra emphasis.
This is where the guy admits – somewhat – that they are both having a negative effect on each other. Perhaps it’s not a one way street after all. By the same token, they may both presumably be feeling the exact same pull-push of the situation. Nobody wants to be in a bad situation, but if they both know that the other one is still able to make “planets collide” for them.
The world’s full of trouble
Everybody’s scared
Landlords are frowning
Cupboards are bare
People are scrambling like dogs for a share
It’s cruel and it’s hard
But it’s nothing compared to what we do to each other
To each other
We will not be lovers
After the verse, the fiddle returns and the song goes back to what it was before.
While we have been privy to this somewhat private exchange between two people for the duration of the song, the music more or less continues as manically as it started out. It is the same droning from start to finish, which gives an almost hypnotic effect.
The intensity of the performance makes it easy to forget that the song really does not even have a chorus. Mike Scott simply concludes “we will not be lovers” at the end of each verse, at which point we get a short instrumental passage. The music is however exactly as it has been previously. The same playing as ever continues, but it can feel like the song draws breath and steels itself for the next repose. The chorus is simply the end of a verse. It is not a dedicated section of its own, but in this context, it almost feels like it.
The track would be one of the longer ones on the album with a total length of 7:03 (still over two minutes shorter than the album longest track A Bang On the Ear at 9:14). This means the track has plenty of time to establish its manic feeling and droning effect. It also speaks to the track’s emotional heft and overall quality that the music never starts grinding or wearing out, which is easy for any song with such a repetitive musical pattern to do. Especially considering the songs length.
That manic feeling may be why We Will Not Be Lovers was never deemed suitable as a single, and for all the song’s obvious and striking qualities it is understandable. As an album track it stands incredibly tall, adding to the 1-2 punch (after the emotionally powerful title track) that really can take a lot out of an invested listener. It was wise of the band to give the listener some solace after that with the considerably quieter Strange Boat.
The album was launched into the world on 17 October 1988. It went on to become the Waterboys’ best selling album, reaching #13 in the UK charts and #76 on the Billboard 200. Sales in the States were helped by the band’s Fisherman’s Blues Tour during the fall of 1989. Scott said it “was our third North American tour and it was really successful. We did 22 shows that were all sold out.”
This album and tour was the closest the band came to the big time, but in the spirit of changing their style to begin with, they opted not to chase it. They were happy to simply play for the people who came to see them and left it at that. This helped establish a reasonably sizeable and faithful audience that has largely stayed with them and more than sustained the band ever since.
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