"Fisherman's Blues" is the title track of the Waterboys' 1988 album, and it marks one of the great changes of direction in modern folk-rock: a Scottish band that went to Ireland, fell in with Irish musicians, and came out the other side playing like a session band. Mike Scott, the band's frontman, has summed the story up himself: "Some cynics claim that Scotsman Mike Scott gave Irish music back to the Irish… it was the Irish tradition that influenced him."
That is the Irish story in this song. Ireland was not the Waterboys' home, but it was the place the music was — and Scott went to find it, the same pull that keeps traditional sessions alive wherever Irish music is played.
How the Waterboys Went Irish: Dublin, Wickham, and Spiddal House
The turn began with a fiddle player. Steve Wickham joined the Waterboys in 1985 and brought Scott into Dublin music circles. Scott moved to Ireland in 1986, and the recording that followed was not a single set of sessions but a two-year trawl: sessions at Windmill Lane Studios in Dublin from January to March 1986 and again from March to August 1987, a December 1986 session in San Francisco, and finally the Spiddal House sessions in 1988, in the Galway village of Spiddal, where Scott was living. The Spiddal sessions produced the whole second side of the album.
Scott's own count of it is the best summary: "We started recording our fourth album in early '86 and completed it 100 songs and 2 years later." One hundred songs went into the making of Fisherman's Blues, and the album that came out in October 1988 wore its making openly — Irish traditional musicians in the room, tunes between the songs, and a band playing like a session that happened to be recorded.
The title song led the change rather than following it: the Waterboys performed "Fisherman's Blues" on the television show The Tube in 1986, two years before the album, as the first public showing of the new direction. And the folk turn was no retreat from the audience — Fisherman's Blues became the Waterboys' best-selling album, reaching No. 13 in the UK.
What "Fisherman's Blues" Is About: Out of Dry Land
The song itself is plain in its longing. The singer wants out — out of dry land and, as the opening puts it, its bitter memories; out of the city and the working life he has, and into a fisherman's life on the water. There is a love in it too — he wants the woman with him, working and travelling beside him, "travelling on" together. But the engine of the song is the trade itself: exchange the shore for the sea, and a cramped life for an open one.
It is the oldest bargain in the sea songs. Our other post in that world, Fiddler's Green, is sung by an old fisherman looking back at the same choice from the far end of it. And the traditional world the Waterboys stepped into in those sessions is the world of songs like Raggle Taggle Gypsy, which sits in our set too.
The 100-songs fact is our favourite part of the story, and we tell the short version in our 60-second Short on the Spiddal sessions.
To read more: Wikipedia's Fisherman's Blues page lays out the full session history — Windmill Lane, San Francisco, Spiddal House — and the album's chart performance.
— hear us play it live (video above).