In a Special Place

Anyone who knows me can tell you I have a thing about "epic" music. It's not a matter of size so much, more ambition and scope of vision. After all, No Bleeding by the Wild Swans has only been released as a Peel Session track, yet is one of the most glorious bits of music I've ever heard.

Head Swan Paul Simpson is someone who went in for writing epic paeans to the cosmos and I've recently got into the music of someone else who had similar goals - Mike Scott, leader of the Waterboys, whose desire to make "The Big Music" eventually brought the exceptional 1985 album This Is The Sea.

Raised in Edinburgh and Ayrshire, Scott turfed up in London and eventually got a deal with the Enigma label, who were expecting to release solo albums. Instead, he created the Waterboys name, saxophonist Anthony Thistlethwaite also signed up, bringing drummer Kevin Wilkinson to play on the sessions for the debut self-titled album.

However, it was the follow-up A Pagan Place that Scott began hitting his pace. Half recorded in 1982, half in 1984, the latter saw new recruit Karl Wallinger join to play piano. Completing the core line-up were Wilkinson back on drums and Roddy Lorimer helping out on trumpet. Naming a song The Big Music, Scott was setting the template of what he was looking at.

On the next album, This Is The Sea, he realised his ambitions. A gloriously "huge" album, it took all the best aspects of the previous albums and amped them up. In the lead single, The Whole of the Moon, there's a real "throw in everything" vibe that matches the lyrics, where Mike Scott tries to fit in as many words as possible at the climax - and yet it works incredibly well in the same way early Springsteen does. Allusions to the Boss are helped along by Thistlethwaite being able to bang out a huge sax solo in true Clarence Clemons fashion.

In a time where huge rock sounds made by Celtic lads seemed in vogue (Big Country and Simple Minds were having hits, U2 had broke into the big time), the Waterboys fit to a degree and This Is The Sea was their first album to make the top 40. It may have done better if not for Scott's insistence on not miming on Top of the Pops and a general reluctance to embrace "fame" the way Bono or Jim Kerr did.

Shortly after the album was released, Wallinger left. Full of his own music, he took the name World Party and did his own thing. Steve Wickham took his part as full-time Waterboy and encouraged Scott to move over to Ireland, where the local music would flavour his subsequent Fisherman's Blues album. Perhaps after realising what the Big Music could be so perfectly, it was natural to go back to the roots, as had been hinted at by the title tracks of the two previous albums.

A coda to the Big Music period came in 1991, when a compilation of the band's work was released - The Whole of the Moon was also re-issued and hit #3. More recently, Scott released the album An Appointment with Mr Yeats in 2011 under the Waterboys banner, putting his music to the prose of top Irish poet, W.B. Yeats - a man whose work ended up having a big impact on my own life. This Is The Sea, however, acts as a high water mark of just how bloody huge British rock music could sound.