Happy Anniversary: The Waterboys, This Is The Sea
29 years ago today, The Waterboys released the album that their leader, Mike Scott, has called “the record on which I achieved all my youthful musical ambitions,” but we’d sum it up thusly: on the band’s first two albums, you saw the crescent, but with This Is The Sea, you saw the whole of the moon.
Mick Fitzsimmons of the BBC once wrote that This Is The Sea “may well be listed in the dictionary under the word epic,” and it’s a fair cop: The Waterboys’ self-titled debut was good, their sophomore effort, A Pagan Place, definitely didn’t see the band suffering any sort of slump, but it’s this, their third album, that’s the first true classic of their early career…and, if we’re to be honest, it wouldn’t be so terribly improper to say that it’s still one of the best albums they’ve ever released. Maybe it’s not as front-to-back brilliant as the follow-up, Fisherman’s Blues, but you wouldn’t likely have many fans disagreeing with the premise that it features one of the best Waterboys songs of all time…even if they’d probably concede that Mr. Scott didn’t exactly do everything he could to promote it.
“The Whole of the Moon” was a top-20 hit in both Australia (#12) and New Zealand (#19), and its chart ascent in the UK likely wouldn’t have stopped at #26 in the single’s initial release if Scott had been willing to turn up on Top of the Pops, but by refusing to lip-sync the song, a longstanding requirement of the show, he put an abrupt halt to that particular promotional appearance. Scott had the last laugh, though: in 1991, “The Whole of the Moon” was reissued as a single in conjunction with the release of The Best of The Waterboys 1981-1990, at which point it hit #3 in the UK and #2 in Ireland.
Even as it heads toward its 30th anniversary, This Is The Sea continues to find new fans, including some who were barely born when it was first released. Mandy Moore, for instance, who hadn’t yet turned two years old when the album hit record store shelves, covered “The Whole of the Moon” for her 2003 album, Coverage. There are also a handful of folks who were introduced to the album after discovering World Party, the band started by former Waterboys keyboardist Karl Wallinger. (He co-wrote the album opener, “Don’t Bang the Drum,” with Scott, in case you didn’t know.) If you’ve someone managed to go your whole life without familiarizing yourself with This Is The Sea, however, you should take care of that problem right now: it wasn’t a huge commercial success in the States, but it’s a great slice of Irish-inspired rock, and if you’ve got a taste for that sort of thing, then you’ll soon be wondering why you’ve taken so long to give it a listen.
