THE WATERBOYS (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES RESUMED...)

De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill, Thurs 14th Oct

“Scotland my dreaming head” sings main main Mike Scott, during a rare live outing for ‘Islandman’. And this particular Scotsman has indeed been our dreaming head these past forty years. Partly because he’s just kept a-dreamin’ all that time.

For some reason, only when they play ‘Ladbroke Grove Symphony’ (note: not an actual symphony) it hits me that these past few years reflection has crept into his repertoire. Though even here the point of the song seems to lie in the ending, his failed attempt to move back and re-connect with the area. (“I was just in the way/ I was way out of time.”) Life has to be lived in forward gear.

Unusually for most longstanding bands, but usually for the Waterboys, the two-hour-plus set isn’t all your favourite songs from back in the day sprinkled with a few new numbers, but instead drawn from about every era of their long career. However, there’s surprisingly little of the hard funk that’s populated recent releases. And and the last album, ‘Good Luck, Seeker’ gets only two tracks by my counting. Perhaps because it’s now over a year old, and a whole new release is already planned for the Spring.

And, compared with the last time they trod the De La Warr stage, there’s a surprisingly high number of tracks from the classic ‘This is The Sea’. (Eulogised by some sycophant here.) Though the tracks have often been transformed over the intervening years of playing. The set opens with the now-established new version of ‘Don’t Bang The Drum’, played by a sparse but expansive trio, like looking over a mist-covered landscape visible via only a few peaks. But it’s the Big Music sound, the thing which for most he still embodies, which is consigned to the past. 'This Is the Sea' itself is closer to a singer-songwriter number. Though the state-of-the-nation ‘Old England’ only needs a few lyrical updates to stay pertinent.

Like Patti Smith, in many ways his musical mentor, Scott brought a more literary sensibility to rock ’n’ roll. But like Patti Smith… possibly more than Patti Smith, he’s stayed wedded to the primal power of rock ’n’ roll as a transformative force, in which songs have special healing powers. Which might seem harder to hold to in recent decades. Yet, against all the odds, he makes that work.

Brother Paul, by now a semi-permanent member, has his own on-stage tribute song which he gets to play along with - ‘Nashville Tennessee’. During which Scott goads and encourages him into more and more flamboyantly frenzied keyboard solos.

So the band will happily indulge the stage theatrics of rock ’n’ roll, but then switch in a second to the heady punch of something like ‘In My Time On Earth’. Which is the only way to play rock ’n’ roll, to realise that one side of the coin cannot exist without the other, that it must always be heartfelt cry and absurd showmanship soldered together.

As if further proof was needed there’s life in the old band yet, my favourite track of the night may well have been new number ‘My Wanderings In the Weary Land’. (In which Scott recites the prose sleeve notes he wrote for the earlier often-overlooked ‘A Rock In the Weary Land’, for those who like to know that sort of thing…)