The Waterboys

Next Thursday, 3 September, the Roig Arena gets a serious dose of Celtic soul, roots, rock'n'roll and good old-fashioned musical alchemy when The Waterboys return to Valencia for what promises to be one of the city's most intriguing concerts of the year.

The show begins at 9pm, and Valencia is the band's only Spanish date of 2026, making this a particularly tasty appointment for anyone who still believes that a great rock concert should feel like something slightly bigger than a collection of songs played in the correct order. Because Fisherman's Blues wasn't just another Waterboys album. Released in 1988, it was the record where Mike Scott and his band kicked open the doors of their rock sound and wandered into something far stranger and richer: Irish folk, country, blues, gospel, traditional music and roots rock all colliding in the same musical pub at three in the morning. The result was an album that has gone on to become one of the defining records of the band's career.

One of the great attractions of this particular Waterboys incarnation is the return of Steve Wickham, whose fiddle became one of the defining sounds of the Fisherman's Blues era. Then there's Steve Earle. The American singer-songwriter, guitarist and mandolin player joins the Waterboys for the revue, bringing his own Americana DNA into the band's Celtic-rooted universe. The resulting eight-piece lineup is designed specifically to revisit the spirit of the late-1980s Waterboys while giving the material enough room to breathe, wander and occasionally disappear down an entirely different road. (

The original Fisherman's Blues sessions produced an almost ridiculous amount of material, much of it recorded during the band's extended creative period in Dublin and Spiddal. Now some of that buried treasure is finally seeing the light of day. Atlantic Rain, a three-disc collection of previously unreleased recordings from those sessions, arrived in July 2026, effectively reopening the vault on one of the most fascinating periods in Waterboys history.

The Waterboys have been around long enough to qualify as rock institution, but that label doesn't really fit.

Institutions don't usually sound this restless. Mike Scott has spent decades moving between rock, folk, poetry, spirituality, country, traditional music and whatever else happens to catch his imagination. The Waterboys' great trick has always been making those collisions sound inevitable. And next Thursday, that restless spirit comes!

For last minute tickets: Roig Arena