One popular rock ‘n’ roll myth is that The Waterboys’ 1985 song The Whole of the Moon was written about Prince. In fact, Prince himself may well have been aware of this rumour, as he covered the song on more than one occasion.
The song was written by principal Waterboy Mike Scott who, answering a reader’s question in The Guardian, says: “Prince did it twice. He did a solo piano version at Ronnie Scott’s in 2014, which I’ve never heard, and a version in Minneapolis in 2015 with 3rdeyegirl. I love it when people change my songs and make them their own. He flipped the lyrics round to sing ‘I saw the whole of the moon’, using the song to make a Black Lives Matter statement, which I thought was very powerful.”
In changing the ‘you’ to an ‘I’ (or ‘U’ to an ‘eye’, in Prince speak) Prince may also have been playing up to the rumour that he was the subject of the song’s lyrics. In a previous interview with The Guardian, though, Mike Scott not only addressed the potential origins of said rumour, but also debunked it.
“There was a message I wrote on the record’s label saying, ‘For Prince, U saw the whole of the moon, but it’s not about Prince,” he explained. “I wrote the greeting because Karl Wallinger [keyboards] and I thought a lot about Prince when we created the sound of the record, in Livingstone studios in north London.”
In fact, Prince had a very direct influence on The Whole of the Moon. “Karl played bass on his synth - a brilliant sound - and did some backing vocals,” Scott recalled. “For the top line synth, I asked him to play something like Prince’s 1999, and he made it his own as he always did. Another four-note sliding melody was influenced by Prince’s Paisley Park.”
All of which is fascinating, but one question remains: if not Prince, who is the song really about?
“The Whole of the Moon is about someone like [author] CS Lewis, who seemed to see so much and explore issues much more deeply than most people,” said Scott. “Or it could be about a Jimi Hendrix-type person who comes ‘like a comet, blazing your trail’ and is gone too soon, but it’s not specifically about anyone.”
Case closed, then, to a certain extent. Regardless of who The Whole of the Moon is about, it’s a cracking tune, winner of an Ivor Novello Award and, eventually, charting highly around the world (it made little impact when it was originally released, in 1985, but was much more warmly received when it was re-released in 1991).
There have been countless other covers, too. U2, The Killers and - more recently - Bleachers have all played it live, and then of course there’s the version from British sitcom Father Ted, which Scott says he loves, too.
Finally, to bring us back to where we came in (sort of), we can also tell you that The Waterboys have also covered a Prince song. And not just any Prince song, either - they've played Purple Rain and, better still, they did it at Minneapolis's First Avenue, the club where a large chunk of the movie of that name - starring Prince, of course - was filmed.
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