The Waterboys – Postcard From The Celtic Dreamtime
2020 · Directed by Steve Wickham & Tom Wickham
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Best comments
1.“I just turned 40, and up until a month ago the only Waterboys song I knew was 'This Is the Sea.' I started listening to their other songs and can't get enough. Feels like I've been missing out my whole life.”
More comments
- 2.“As ever, the Waterboys never disappoint. This is in a similar vein to Van Morrison's 'Coney Island.'”
The story
No band on screen, no story, no actors. Just Ireland from the air. Waterboys fiddler Steve Wickham shot aerial footage of the wild coastline around the Aran Islands and cut it together with his son Tom, while Mike Scott reads a poem over drifting keyboards and distant drums.
The poem has a past. Scott found it in a box of old writings. He wrote it about thirty years earlier, when he'd run off to the west of Ireland to get away from the music business and finish Fisherman's Blues. It's a postcard from that place: the Clare coast after a storm, the islands sitting out on the horizon, huge Atlantic skies, and a writer letting the whole place soak into him.
It landed on Good Luck, Seeker in August 2020, which went to number 14 in the UK and number 4 in Scotland. Most of the world was stuck indoors that summer. Four minutes of cliffs, surf and sky was the cheapest plane ticket going.
