The Waterboys in Dublin review: Preshow nerves, then Mike Scott’s dewy-eyed stomper lights up the night

The Waterboys

Iveagh Gardens, Dublin

★★★★☆

The Waterboys’ sell-out concert at Iveagh Gardens coincides with the 34th anniversary of the wistful And a Bang on the Ear topping the Irish charts. Mike Scott, the band’s singer, imparts this fact towards the end of a show that captures the mossy multitudes of the group’s sound, which sprints from Celtic prog to mystical postpunk via a sort of folk-horror garage rock.

The concert also, of course, includes And a Bang on the Ear. (How could it not?) It is one of several hits sprinkled through a set that elsewhere billows with squalling blues guitars and playful interplay between Scott and his band. Yet something is also missing: the violin player Steve Wickham, Scott’s spiritual foil, who departed the fold in 2021.

Wickham has been in and out of The Waterboys across the decades. So it isn’t as if Scott doesn’t know what it’s like to play without him. His absence is truly noticeable just once. That’s on the briny anthem Fisherman’s Blues, where his keening violin line is replaced by James Hallawell’s honky-tonk piano. It’s a perfectly acceptable stand-in, the tune gaining a magisterial funkiness. What’s lacking is the mournfulness that coursed from Wickham’s violin.

The Waterboys: there’s just a bit of man hugging and jumping on the spot at Iveagh Gardens on Thursday. Photograph: Tom Honan

Otherwise, the evening – the first of two sell-outs – is a triumph. Scott and his four-piece ensemble open with Where the Action Is. The title track from their rambunctious 2019 album, it puts clear water between The Waterboys and their 1980s incarnation as folk-rockers hewn from the soil of Connemara (to where the Edinburgh-born Scott had gone in search of inspiration).

But salvation is soon at hand for those searching for the more transcendent Waterboys. Playfulness is replaced by a widescreen wistfulness on Glastonbury Song, where Scott blends top pop chops with Wicker Man eeriness. “I don’t usually get nervous before a show, but today I did,” the Dublin-based musician says further in. “It’s Dublin, it’s a home show.”

Dark clouds loom, and a few raindrops swirl. The hits fall with greater frequency, first in the Wickhamless Fisherman’s Blues, then in the lilting And a Bang on the Ear, with Scott wistfully recalling the ups and downs of a love life lived sometimes in the fast lane, occasionally on the grass verge.

Third in the trinity of Waterboys smashes is The Whole of the Moon, a dewy-eyed stomper from 1985 that was for years carved into the national consciousness in the way Mr Brightside by The Killers is today. Weddings, 21sts, small-town discos – you name it, The Whole of the Moon was second to none in its ability to spark spontaneous man hugs on the dance floor.

There’s less man hugging or jumping on the spot at Iveagh Gardens – though there is a bit – but, rolled out for the encore, its bittersweet majesty endures, lighting up the night as darkness descends.

The Waterboys play Iveagh Gardens, Dublin 2, again tonight