“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’”: Mike Scott says he enjoyed Prince’s cover of The Waterboys’ biggest hit, but did he really write it about him?

Prince.

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.”