This October it will be 25 years since the release of the classic Waterboys album Fisherman’s Blues. To celebrate this anniversary, on 14th October EMI Records will release a 7-CD boxset titled Fisherman’s Box, containing 121 tracks from the album sessions including all those on the original record and subsequent editions, plus an incredible 85 unreleased tracks.
The famous Fisherman’s Blues sessions ran from early 1986 to mid-1988 and marked a watershed in the musical evolution of The Waterboys. Rumours and bootlegs have circulated over the years telling of the huge amount of high quality music the band produced during this period, but the full story will be told on Fisherman’s Box.
The contents have been selected and annotated by Mike Scott, and additional sleevenotes are by Decemberists’ singer and long-time Fisherman’s Blues aficionado, Colin Meloy. Full tracklist to be announced.
As a further celebration, The Waterboys will tour Britain and Ireland in December 2013, with a special line-up reuniting Mike Scott and Steve Wickham with Fisherman’s-era members Anto Thistlethwaite and Trevor Hutchinsion. The four will be joined by current Waterboys drummer Ralph Salmins and the repertoire will be a re-exploration of the Fisherman’s Blues period. Said Mike Scott: “We won’t be playing the original Fisherman’s Blues album in order or anything tame like that. That’s not the Waterboys’ style. Instead we’ll be roaming the band’s old repertoire in a new expression of the freewheeling, improvised spirit of The Waterboys in those days. We want to get that old fire burning again, and I wanna hear Steve and Anto wailing like the two-man orchestra I remember.”
Expect souped-up, full power versions of lots of 1985-88 Waterboys numbers, plus hits, innovations and surprises.