Fisherman’s Blues, the fourth and best-known album by the UK’s Waterboys, signaled a quantum leap for an already excellent band. The result of three years of studio work, this 1988 LP found the group expanding its focus from alt-rock to embrace country, folk, gospel, and soul as well as traditional Irish, Scottish, and Celtic music. Its 13-song set includes numbers written or co-written by group founder and leader Mike Scott, as well as an old Irish folk song, a snippet from Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” and an intense cover of Van Morrison’s “Sweet Thing” that arguably outshines the classic original.
Twenty-five years after the release of Fisherman’s Blues, fans got a great surprise when the Waterboys issued Fisherman’s Box: The Complete Fisherman’s Blues Sessions 1986–88. A massive 121-track compendium, it underscores the creative and musical strengths of the group, which at the time of these recordings featured Scott (vocals, guitars, keyboards), Steve Wickham (fiddle), Trevor Hutchinson (bass), and multi-instrumentalist Anto Thistlehwaite, plus assorted other players. The collection contains nearly eight hours of largely superlative music on six CDs, including demos, alternate takes, outtakes, and more—everything from the sessions, or so its title suggested.
It now turns out that the word “Complete” in the box’s moniker is a misnomer. The group has just issued Atlantic Rain: The Lost Fisherman’s Blues Recordings, which delivers another two hours of music from these sessions on three CDs (or three vinyl LPs). The set comes with an illustrated 54-page softcover book that includes lyrics, discographic information, an essay by Scott about the sessions, and his notes about each song. Also featured are details about every event from this key Waterboys era, including concerts, rehearsals, and studio sessions, with info about personnel and released and unreleased songs from each session.
You might suspect that the Waterboys would be scraping the bottom of the barrel at this point to cash in on the reputation of their most commercially successful LP. If so, you would be wrong because Atlantic Rain is yet another must-hear collection. In fact, it’s so good that it’s hard to believe its contents stayed in the can for nearly four decades.
How did that happen? Scott says in his essay that the group “often recorded hours of new music” in a single day, that he was “writing songs almost as fast I could sing ’em,” and that the sessions produced nearly 400 reels of multitrack tape, many of which were simply marked “untitled,” “instrumental,” “unknown,” or “jam” before being stored away. Many of these reels were never catalogued, mixed, or even listened to until 2024 and 2025, when Scott dug them out, discovered just how much buried treasure they contained, and picked the best of them for Atlantic Rain. He apparently had a lot to choose from, as the set’s book lists more than a hundred songs from the sessions that are still unreleased, though many of these are apparently incomplete performances.
Of the 24 numbers that wound up on Atlantic Rain, 17 have never been issued before, while the remainder have been previously available only in fragmentary form. Not every one of them is a head-turner. Still, it would be difficult to overstate how good the program generally is, and it would be just as tough to pick highlights.
The collection includes inventive, often radically different versions of songs that appeared on the original album or the earlier box, such as a soulful rendition of “Too Close to Heaven” that finds an electrifying Scott vocal sharing center stage with syncopated sax by Thistlehwaite. Among several sensational numbers that have not previously been released in any version are the majestic, sax- and fiddle-spiced “Come Back to Galway,” whose lyric provided the set’s title; the passionate “Endless Store,” which namechecks Prince, E.T., and Huckleberry Finn; and the gospel-infused “Light Shine on Me.”
The box’s more than half a dozen covers underscore the band’s versatility and the breadth of its influences. These include excellent renditions of “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door,” by Bob Dylan (five of whose other songs appear on Fisherman’s Box), Willie Nelson’s “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground,” Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” Mick Jagger and Keith Richards’s “No Expectations,” and Hank Williams’s “Honky Tonkin’” and “Lost Highway” (the latter written by Leon Payne). There’s even a moody and effective reading of Prince’s “When Doves Cry” that features just Scott’s vocals and piano and Wickham’s fiddle.
The box ends with a more than 20-minute, two-part take on “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” It opens sounding vaguely reminiscent of the Beatles’ original version before transitioning into an ecstatic, strings- and sax-based jam that incorporates a long section of “Hey Jude.” Scott calls the last three minutes of part one of this recording “the wildest, most fabulous music the Waterboys ever made.” Perhaps, but in this box and its two predecessors, you’ll find quite a few other numbers that might fit that description.
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Jeff Burger’s website, byjeffburger.com, contains more than four decades’ worth of music reviews and commentary. His books include Dylan on Dylan: Interviews and Encounters, Lennon on Lennon: Conversations with John Lennon, Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen: Interviews and Encounters, and Springsteen on Springsteen: Interviews, Speeches, and Encounters.