Meet the musicians turning poetry into pop
"If the first line of any poem suggested a tune in my head, I'd persevere with it, and if it didn't I'd pass on to something else," says Scott. "I started at page one and worked through to page 600-and-something, and then I started again in case I missed any. I must have done that nine or 10 times, to give the opportunity for each line to sing to me. At the end of the first two weeks I had about 10 songs." He has since doubled that number, and the result is An Appointment With Mr Yeats, a series of concerts (and, all going to plan, a studio album) in which the Waterboys recontextualise the words of Ireland's most venerated poet by setting them to rock music.
Scott has form when it comes to Yeats: as early as 1986 he was dropping The Four Ages of Man into the Waterboys' live sets, and he later recorded The Stolen Child for Fisherman's Blues and Love and Death for Dream Harder, both of which will be revisited in the new show. However, he's far from the only rock-seer in thrall to the Irishman. Yeats's words have inspired numerous musicians, including Van Morrison (Crazy Jane on God), Joni Mitchell (Slouching Towards Bethlehem, adapted from The Second Coming) and Bono (Mad as the Mist and Snow). A patchy compilation album of Yeats songs, Now and in Time to Be, was released in 1997, featuring Shane MacGowan, Christy Moore, the Cranberries and, yes, the Waterboys, alongside several lesser-known acts. Even Carla Bruni tackled Before the World Was Made and Those Dancing Days Are Gone on No Promises, her 2007 album, which tended to treat the words of great poets as though they had been torn from the Yellow Pages.
Just what is it about Yeats that is so attractive to musicians? His vision is both mystical and unflinching, and he adopted shifting stances – nationalist, liberal, nihilist, radical, establishment pillar – in a manner that would be familiar to any pop star, but there's more to it than that. "There's a depth and a weightiness to his work that combines with his wonderful ear for the sound and colour of words," Scott says. "Fortunately, he put a lot of his poems into meter and rhyme, and that's what suggests the music to me. Most of the ones I've done are the ones that scan, and most of the tunes came quickly."
Scott, who declares himself an "archivist" of Yeats adaptations, is a hard man to impress. Now and in Time to Be was, he feels, "a missed opportunity – there were too many slapdash interpretations," and he's similarly dismissive of most of the hundreds of other songs set to the poet's words. "I think, 'Oh my God, what I'm doing is so much better!'" he says. "I'm a competitive bastard." He cites the several dozen different existing versions of Song of Wandering Aengus as an example. "Most of them are very pretty and dainty, what some people think fairy music should be, but it shouldn't," he says. "With very few exceptions, they all fail at the most basic hurdle: they don't sound as if the singer has 'a fire in their head', which is the first line of the lyric."
Featuring a 13-piece lineup performing over five nights at Dublin's Abbey theatre, the Irish institution Yeats co-founded in 1904, Scott describes the Waterboys show as "a radical statement". In his hands News for the Delphic Oracle becomes a twisted, sinister waltz, somewhere between Tom Waits and Kurt Weill. Set to music during last summer's Iranian protests, Let the Earth Bear Witness – an amalgam of words taken from Cathleen Ni Houlihan and The Blood Bond – is a protest song with palpable modern resonance. Even The Lake Isle of Innisfree – "the chocolate-box poem, the one they all got in school" – becomes a blues. "Now, that's blasphemous," he laughs. "I love that. I think putting Yeats to rock'n'roll and doing it for 20 songs is radical. It's changing his context absolutely."
The Blue Aeroplanes, the Bristolian art-rock collective who have influenced like-minded bands from REM to Art Brut – and who have a new album imminent – have also made something of a speciality out of adapting poetry to music. On albums such as Spitting Out Miracles and Swagger, the words of WH Auden, Louis MacNeice and Sylvia Plath were spun over a riot of tangled folk-rock. Singer Gerard Langley has often pondered which poems fit with music and which do not.
"There's something innate in the poem that suggests it will work," he says. "I can go through an entire book of poems that I like and only a couple will fit. It's the rhythms. The reason that you could do the Beat poets with jazz is that they were already incorporating those rhythms into the poems. With older stuff it's slightly more difficult, but some of them – MacNeice and Yeats – were using rhythms from traditional songs anyway. Auden's Miss Gee was written as a cabaret tune." He sighs wistfully. "I did always like the sight of a couple of thousand people at the Forum moshing to Auden."
Poking fun at poetry slams and "stuff that's too redolent of arts centres", Langley is well aware of the stigma attached to the combination of music and poetry, a nightmare vision that tends to revolve around 60s explorers such as the Fugs earnestly declaiming the words of Matthew Arnold over bongos and freeform guitar. You end up either with a performance that's indulgent, pretentious and overrespectful, or else something à la Bruni that fails to connect with the words. Ideally, says Langley, the listener should barely be aware that they're hearing poetry at all.
"A lot of poems sung over music don't work because they're too poemy," he says. "Rather than words 'on top' of something, I'm trying to make it sound like songs. Our version of Sylvia Plath's The Applicant worked very well. The poem is structurally quite simple, but it seems more complex than it is because I fit the words into different parts of the tune for emphasis; then people start hearing it differently. We sent out advance copies to journalists and nobody spotted it was by Plath. In fact, I was criticised for my 'new man lyricism!'"
Idlewild's Roddy Woomble has worked with Scottish poet Edwin Morgan and curated Ballads of the Book, an entire album of collaborations between Scottish musicians and writers. He emphasises that, above all, the process should be fun. "There's a high seriousness associated with poetry, but it doesn't have to be that way," he says. "We didn't feel the weight of having to sing these sacred verses; the intention was to make a good album. Beyond the fact that there were poets involved, it had to be something you'd want to put on in the car."
For Scott, the trick is to tune into the intent of the poem but not to be intimidated by what it represents. Yeats died in 1939, meaning that under the 70-year rule his work has only just fallen out of copyright. This made life easier because, although the Yeats estate granted him permission for the project, Scott undertook some judicious shuffling – the bridge of White Birds, for instance, is taken from Yeats's play The Shadowy Waters – which may have tested their resolve to preserve the integrity of the poet's work.
"Part of the creative process is to change things in the poems to make them work as songs," he says. "There are 20 songs in the show and seven or eight are untouched, but the rest have got subtle changes. Sometimes I've used a verse from another poem, or I've changed a word that might be confusing, or perhaps the rhyme doesn't quite work. I worked with a very clear brief: I might change something for the sake of the form, but I'd never change something that affected the meaning or the intention of the poet."
Perhaps these nuances explain why poetry and music tend to remain wary bedfellows, despite Scott's grand plan and many other examples. Former PIL bassist Jah Wobble turned William Blake's The Tyger into a dub reggae song and has recorded two albums of poetry set to music, The Celtic Poets and The Inspiration of William Blake. Blake "chose me", says Wobble of a poet whose visionary status has made him susceptible to rock adoration (Mark E Smith and Patti Smith are both fans). "When you do something like this you feel you're part of a lineage, that something is being passed on that's bigger than you are," Wobble adds. More recently, Rufus Wainwright has set three Shakespeare sonnets (10, 20 and 43) to music on his new album, All Days Are Nights: Songs for Lulu.
Aside from the creative riches on offer, there are expedient reasons for plundering poetry. With copyright control rarely an issue, it offers an entire world of words, often gratis; it's also a sure-fire means of defeating writer's block. "When I haven't got enough lyrics of my own, I'm always looking around for things I might want to do," says Langley. "That was originally one of the reasons for doing it." Scott agrees: "Lyrics are always the thing that takes most time with me, and here I had a bye to the next round!"
Wobble laments a rich seam of inspiration largely left untapped. "I want drama, and poetry is fantastic for that," he says. "It's a dramatic colour and I'm surprised musicians don't use it more, tying everything together, playing with connections and combinations. You could make an outstanding record using Shakespeare, because there's so many eternal truths there. Look what [film director] Akira Kurosawa did with him. You take the essence of what he wrote and use it."
Scott agrees that musicians shouldn't be afraid to bend poetry to meet their own purposes. Despite his affection for Yeats, he claims the Abbey shows aren't an exercise in reverence or nostalgia. They're about making the words sing in new and exhilarating ways. "I may be in awe of Yeats's skill, but I'm not in awe of his reputation," he says. "It's my job as a musical writer to treat the lyrics like I'd treat my own – to be ruthless with them, and unglamoured. My only responsibility is to make it as great as I can, and not to compromise. I can't be intimidated."
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