With much of Scandinavia going on musical hiatus for the summer holidays for the next six weeks I thought that this might be a good time to resurrect the Greatest Ever Songs series, which was a surprisingly short one in 2022, encompassing Simon and Garfunkel (‘Bridge over troubled water’); Mason Williams (‘Classical Gas’); Lynyrd Skynyrd (‘Free Bird)’); Emerson, Lake and Palmer (‘Karn Evil 9’); and Nightwish (‘Ghost Love Score’).
Quite a line up I think you’ll agree and you don’t just pull comparable ones out of a hat. But this one, and the next (possibly next weekend, possibly before then) are right up there with their predecessors.
So let’s kick off with The Waterboys, with ‘The Whole of the Moon’, which was released as a single from the album ‘This is the Sea’ in October 1985 and which is played at almost every gig as the high point of their repertoire.
Like so many of these songs it got off to a tough start, not making much of an impact in the charts, but it went on to be one of The Waterboys’ best-known songs and their most commercially successful, winning the band the Ivor Novello Award ‘Best Song Musically and Lyrically’ in 1992.
Believe me, that is some achievement. It is in a different league to The Brits, and even the Mercury Prize.
It was written and produced by Mike Scott, the founding member of the band and someone that has been on the music scene since the 1970s. Scott was a University drop out whose initial interest was in punk music.
For all the personnel changes over the decades Mike Scott still regards The Waterboys, which he started off as a solo project, as his own.
Scott is fundamentally a guitarist/vocalist although he is also credited as a pianist. I recall watching a TV show about ‘The Whole of the Moon’ within the last year or so in which he self deprecatingly dismissed his piano skills as weak, thereby explaining how the main theme appears to be played on one finger and consists of notes rather than chords – because it was!
The subject of the song has inspired considerable speculation over time, almost as much as that attached to Carly Simon’s ‘You’re so vain’ and Don McLean’s ‘American Pie’.
The subject has inspired speculation, some of which has been rebutted by the writer himself, having begun life scribbled on the back of an envelope in New York following a challenge from his girlfriend, initially describing it as “about what he saw up in the sky.”
It could be, like The Waterboys’ first single ‘A Girl Called Johnny’, a tribute to an inspirational figure or figures; in that case Patti Smith.
In each line, the singer describes his own perspective and immediately contrasts it negatively with that of the song’s subject (i.e. ’you’), culminating with the line “I saw the crescent / You saw the whole of the moon”.
Other suggestions are that it concerns various people who inspired Scott, especially the writer C. S. Lewis and the musician Prince. Indeed on the band’s own website he has said that the song’s subject is “a composite of many people”, including C. S. Lewis, but explicitly states that it is not about Prince.
There had to be someone claiming it was written about them, although Carly Simon is not known to have commented on it.
In this case it is Nikki Sudden, with whom Scott had collaborated before forming The Waterboys, but again that was denied by Scott.
The consensus today is that it is about no particular person but rather possibly about those that are ahead of their time but are taken too soon, hence the lines,
“You climbed on the ladder/With the wind in your sails/You came like a comet/Blazing your trail/ Too high too far too soon…”
And that could mean any of the ’27 Club’ that have died in that age year, like Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janice Joplin, and Brian Jones, all of whom were long deceased prior to the song being released although others were later added to it like Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse.
Most of those early deaths were all in the period 1969-1971 but there is nothing in the lyrics that relates to that period.
That said it might merely have been about his girlfriend, whom he admitted he wanted to impress with his songwriting skills, but he didn’t want to flatter her.
Another angle might be that while he only saw a “rain dirty valley” she “saw Brigadoon”; the idyllic Scottish village that only appears, like the Loch Ness Monster, every 100 years, placing the person in Scotland.
Latterly, within the last year, in an interview, Scott has said that it is about consciousness and the positivity that comes with knowing there is still so much to learn about humanity and the universe, a position that equates with that of, say, Nightwish’s Tuomas Holopainen in ‘Last Ride of the Day’ – “It’s hard to light a candle, easy to curse the dark instead; this moment, the dawn of humanity, last ride of the day”.
Lyrically it is exceptional but even then why would a person(s) of such import stay in their room, while he (the narrator) wandered the world? There’s a disconnect there.
And “a torch in your pocket” while climbing a ladder seems to hint at someone that had been incarcerated, perhaps for their beliefs; which leads one to suspect a possible religious meaning.
You could go up your own backside trying to work it all out.
The bridge is utter perfection lyrically as well as being the most confusing, in the ‘American Pie’ class, as the singer ranges over fictional icons like unicorns, palaces, and wide oceans, but also more mundanely piers (as in those at British holiday resorts?) and tenement blocks, of which Scott would be highly familiar in his native Edinburgh.
He also, intriguingly, drops in what could be two football allusions (turnstiles and scarves), which again are suggestive of the common man and how he can rise above the mundane to excel and to experience “every precious dream and vision underneath the stars”.
In summary, a fantastic, inspiring song that transcends decades and centuries.
And one that has been covered innumerable times.
My favourite is the Fiona Apple version, which was recorded in 2019, live and in one take, for the finale of the Showtime TV series The Affair, and not only because I consider Apple to be one of the pre-eminent female artists of the last 30 years, probably more.
There is an entire NMC article about Apple’s take on this song so I’ll restrict my comments here to the observation that she looks like she’s just crawled out of bed after a night on the tiles, pulled on the nearest knickers, top, slacks and boots on the floor and decided to cycle to the studio to record the song without having learned the words properly, just knowing she could wing it.
That’s just so Fiona. It is reported that Mike Scott loves this version and perhaps one of the reasons he does it that he knows that Apple is one of those people who can see the whole of the moon.
Next up in the revived series: Genesis – ‘Supper’s Ready’
