The last hurrah of the fractious relationship between the Waterboys’ founding member, Mike Scott (pictured), and the multi-instrumentalist Karl Wallinger, The Whole of the Moon limped to No 26 in the year it was released (though it reached No 3 six years later, when reissued). Jotted down by Scott on an envelope when his girlfriend asked how easy it was to write a song, the concept of one artist labouring in the foothills and looking up to the heights scaled by another became, in the recording studio, one of the most extraordinary singles recorded in the 1980s.

“I pictured a rainbow/You held it in your hand,” Scott begins, over a brutal snare- and bass-drum attack, with the singer’s original piano part pounding away underneath. As Scott raids his fevered mind for ways of illustrating his defeatist, if pragmatic, observation (“I saw the crescent/You saw the whole of the moon”), Wallinger, utterly in thrall to Prince as the sessions began, throws everything - polyphonic keyboards, Bowie-like descending vocals at the close, synth bass, crashing cymbals and the rest - at the song.

Credited solely to Scott, The Whole of the Moon has long been a source of disagreement over its authorship. Disputes about songwriting credits are 10-a-penny in rock, but perhaps the real cause of Scott’s insistence that he alone wrote it - and Wallinger’s equally strident claims to the contrary - is that both realise quite how miraculous and one-off a piece of music it is. Few songs in the history of music are as reckless or as life-affirming. When, towards the end, just after Scott has sung “You came like a comet/blazing your trail”, a sampled firework explosion sounds, followed at once by Anthony Thistlethwaite’s sax bursting into the picture, the listener toys with two reactions. First, that, compared to The Whole of the Moon, most other music is just by-numbers drivel. And second, that, for all that they fell out so spectacularly after the release of the song, Scott and Wallinger created here something that didn’t entertain second thoughts, but threw itself off the precipice. Scott abandoned “big music” ambitions for Ireland and fiddles soon afterwards; Wallinger formed World Party. Neither ever managed such grandeur again.

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