Sporting a frazzled mop that wouldn't look out of place on Jon Bon Jovi, Waterboys frontman Mike Scott bears scant resemblance to the salty wanderer who washed up at Spiddal 15 years ago and recorded Fisherman's Blues, a raggle-taggle masterpiece that inadvertently spawned a generation of lusty folk rock abominations.
Scott has travelled some distance since the Waterboys's last album, A Rock in the Weary Land, was an engaging hunk of windswept psychedelia. But his fans remain figuratively mired in the Connemara murk; many couldn't give a tinker's cuss for Scott's post-Fisherman's forays.
Does it get him down? Perhaps, but not tonight. Scott was in combative mood, heckling security guards, wrenching coruscating riffs from his gold lacquered guitar, delivering lyrics in a disdainful leer.
Recent material dominated a set notably bereft of oldies. Dumbing Down welded vocal samples to a towering feedback caterwaul. Charlatan's Lament underscored Scott's flair for diamond-sharp pop hooks. The surging, Zepplin-esque We Are Jonah affirmed his faith in the big music, bombast-laden balladry inhabiting a nebulous territory between prime U2 and early Simple Minds. A trashy, muscled-up, Fisherman's Blues glinted in the dying sun.
Rejoining the group after more than a decade wiry fiddle virtuoso Steve Wickham was a peripheral figure, his frenetic playing submerged beneath Scott's relentless power-chords and Richard Neiff's florid keyboards.
Encoring with a perfunctory Bang on the Ear and a joyous, piano-soaked Whole of the Moon, the Waterboys belatedly gave the audience what it craved: lovelorn nostalgia dispensed in glutinous dollops.
But this was throwaway cabaret: a cursory afterthought. Mike Scott has left his past behind. Maybe its time his fans did likewise.
By Edward Power