1. Which two chart positions did The Waterboys’ single ‘The Whole of the Moon’ reach on the UK Top 40?
“Number 26 in 1985 and Number Three in 1991.”
CORRECT.
“When it first came out, the Number 26 chart placing was disappointing, but I wasn’t surprised because I thought the label had the wrong strategy when it came to our releases. I always thought the song deserved to be a hit, so I glad when it became one six years later. In the rave scene, the DJs had been playing it on the Balearic Islands so I knew there was a lot of demand for it.”
“The Killers?”
CORRECT. Frontman Brandon Flowers declared it “one the finest songs I’ve ever heard”.
“They also played it at a big open-air show in Dublin. One of our backing singers was standing at her window, heard it playing and thought: have I missed a gig?!”
It’s a song that’s been tackled by many, many artists including Frightened Rabbit and Bleachers…
“One of my favourites is a gay disco version by Boys of a New Age from 1998. It’s all programmed synthesisers and it’s seriously funky. They do a naughty thing I approve of where they change the first line from ‘I pictured a rainbow / You held it in your hands’ to just a repeated ‘You held it in your hands’, so it has a different meaning!”
Famously, Prince did a rendition and there was speculation that it was about His Purpleness for a while. Did you ever talk to him about it?
“No, we never met. He was a big influence on the sound of the track. It wasn’t about him, but our keyboard player Karl [Wallinger] and I were huge Prince fans, and we caught certain sounds from his records which we transformed into our own thing and put on ‘The Whole of the Moon’. That [Prince rumour] came from me writing on the record sleeve for a joke: ‘For Prince, U saw the whole of the moon.’”
3. Which chart-topping artist made her United Kingdom live debut as backup singer on ‘The Big Music’ at a Waterboys’ London concert in 1985?
CORRECT.
“She turned up with one of the record label guys and she was already in her very beautiful green stage dress. I knew her a little bit because she’d just been signed to the label we were on, Ensign records. We hadn’t spoken to her about singing with us, but the record label guy pleaded: ‘It’ll break her heart if she doesn’t get to sing. Come on, you’ve got to let her do it. She’s learned the song’. So we said alright, and she’d learned the song perfectly and was really great.”
