Mike Scott of the Waterboys has a number readings from his recently published autobiography Adventures of a Waterboy (Lilliput) coming up in Kilkenny, Cork, Glasgow and London.

With occasional asides into his personal life, the book is mostly about Scott’s musical life, from his early longings to be a rock star while growing up in Scotland, through his Celtic folk-American rootsy period while living in Ireland in the late 1980s and his more reflective solo years in Findhorn, to his return to rock and the Waterboys collective in the late 1990s when he moved back to London.

There is quite a lot in the book about Irish traditional music and musicians, including an encounter with the band Patrick Street:

‘Patrick Street looked like the archetype of a folk band… And when they started playing their nimble jigs and reels it sounded pretty much like all the other traditional music I’d heard, sweet on the ear but likely to leave me as it found me … As I observed my lovely Irish girlfriend responding to the sound … I began to understand and to feel the energy myself… receiving its pulse and force in the same way as a rock audience, except this transmission was a different, finer wavelength.

… Here was a wild, articulate music that expressed the soul of Ireland and evoked its landscape, played with power but without machismo, with mastery but without ego… The charms of traditional music emerged from the mist as eternal verities to be envied and achieved, emanations from a world far removed from the manipulative, distorted ghetto of the rock business. 

Soon this education was expanding my musical consciousness and changing the way I listened: trad tunes flew by so fast I to sharpen my wits just to follow what was happening, and as I drew closer to the music I discovered sophistication at work – nuance, ornamentation, interplay, the personality of individual players, all of which my ears had to learn to grasp and my mind to process.’

At the events, readings from the book are interspersed with chat, and followed by a short musical set by Scott and Steve Wickham.

The details are as follows:

Wednesday, 15 August at Kilkenny Arts Festival, The Ormonde Hotel, Kilkenny, at 7.30pm. Interview by journalist and author Peter Murphy. Tickets priced €16 or €14 available from +353 567 752 175 or here

Thursday, 16 August at The Pavilion, Carey’s Lane, Cork, at 8pm. Interview by broadcaster Mick Mulcahy. Tickets priced €12 available here

Friday, 24 August at Oran Mor, Glasgow, at 8pm. Tickets are on sale now from +44 844 844 04444 or online here

Monday, 27 August at the Boogaloo, Archway Road, London N6 at 8pm. ticketweb.co.uk.

lilliputpress.ie.