Emotional anaesthesia

[first published 28th March 2012]

Last night I went to a concert at the Brighton Dome. It was the Waterboys, ostensibly flogging the new album, An Appointment with Mr Yeats. Now, the album is pretty good, and Mike Scott’s free interpretation of Yeats’ poetry creates something a little more than the sum of all its parts. His cherry-picking of lines from various poems may offend the purist, but in many ways is close to the spirit of Yeats’ own work, as he played wild and loose with Ireland’s mythic past. Continue reading