Mike Scott
The Waterboys skipper on the records that forever float his boat: “I wanted to live in music”
INTERVIEW:SAMRICHARDS
BOB DYLAN
Blonde On Blonde COLUMBIA, 1966
The first song I ever remember being moved by was “Blowin’ In The Wind”. But it wasn’t Bob Dylan’s version, it was Val Doonican’s – Iwas about five or six years old and it was on the TV. I don’t know why it moved me, but I suppose that’s the power of poetry. I came to Bob a few years later when a student of my mother’s played me Blonde On Blonde. My favourite song was “Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands” – the sway of the rhythm, the romance of the organ, the buttoned-down emotion of the players that was so strong in Nashville music in the ’60s. As an 11-year-old I didn’t understand any of that, I just recognised something that touched me.
MARVIN GAYE
“I Heard It Through The Grapevine”
MOTOWN, 1968
The other thing that really affected me as a kid was American soul music. On winter mornings I’d go to school on the bus with my transistor radio and I’d hear the Four Tops, The Temptations, Otis, Aretha… or Marvin doing “I Heard It Through The Grapevine”. I didn’t understand about sex or romantic love and emotion, but I got it from those voices. Before I fell in love with girls, I fell in love with records. I’d be trying to recapture the melody of the song in my mind, and I wouldn’t be able to breathe freely until I could hear it again. I wanted to live in music; I wanted to feel the feelings of the people who made those records.