Room to Roam by The Waterboys

Room to Roam, the Waterboys' fifth studio album, hit British shops on Ensign on 17 September 1990, and it keeps rambling down the folk-rock road that Fisherman's Blues opened up in 1988. The band went back to Spiddal House in Galway, where some of that earlier record had been cut, and Barry Beckett is credited as producer. The title comes from a passage in George MacDonald's Phantastes, which tells you plenty about Mike Scott's romantic, mystic streak.

It plays like a crowded kitchen session, all fiddle, reels and sing-along choruses, with Anthony Thistlethwaite, Sharon Shannon, Trevor Hutchinson and Noel Bridgeman in the room. But the party was breaking up. Fiddler Steve Wickham, who had done so much to pull Scott toward that sound, quit just before release, Scott's crew swung back to the old Big Music roar on tour and then split, and the folk Waterboys stayed shelved until 2003.

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