Fisherman’s Blues    by The Waterboys

In 1988, after a three-year absence from recording, the Waterboys returned. This time, Karl Wallinger would not be with the other two, Mike Scott and Anthony Thistlethwaite, who collaborated with a plethora of other traditional instrument musicians and recorded Fisherman's Blues from 1986 to 1988. The only reference made to the departing Karl Wallinger is in the composers of the song World Party, whose title Wallinger has used since 1986 as the name of his new band.

The sound of the album marks a huge shift in the career of the Waterboys as they dive headfirst into the folk rock music of Ireland and Great Britain. The thirteen songs that make up Fisherman's Blues are new compositions, covers of other songs, such as Van Morrison's Sweet Thing or Woody Guthrie's This Land Is Your Land, traditional songs like When Will We Be Married? or even set to music lyrics of the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, as done in The Stolen Child. The singles from the album were the title track and And A Bang On The Ear.

Fisherman's Blues is an album that stands proudly among the best works of the Waterboys, as well as of the entire British music scene of the 1980s and beyond. Rightfully, it reached and exceeded 100,000 copies sold in the United Kingdom and another 20,000 in Ireland.