MIKE Scott is in two minds about The Waterboys’ return to York Barbican for the first time since November 2001 on Thursday.

The 8pm show will be split into two halves, definitely with no support act, and certainly with Scott’s new seven-piece line-up playing “a killer set of vintage Waterboys” in one half and a performance of latest album An Appointment With Mr Yeats in its entirety in the other.

“But I don’t which will be the first half as it’s yet to be road-tested,” said Mike, at the time of this mid-February interview. “I’ll try it out both ways in our European shows and see what works; I’d prefer to get it one shape where it’s honed.”

Echo And The Bunnymen had opened their Ocean Rain show at the Grand Opera House last September with a set of hits and live favourites before playing The Geatest Album Ever Made in its 1984 track order after the interval, York Twenty4Seven mentions to Mike.

“We won’t be playing hits but a selection of songs that I love to play and people love to hear,” he says. “I go through the songs on my iTunes files with a guitar on my knee and see which ones catch me. I particularly want to play ones I don’t normally do, as I love that element of surprise and I’m not going to surrender it.”

Mike, whose Waterboys career stretches back to 1981, says his choice of set list is also influenced by who is in his line-up.

“For the first time, I have a pedal-steel guitarist, Melvin Duffy, from Brighton, who also plays blues electric guitar. I discovered him playing at a concert organised by Hamish Stuart of the Average White Band,” he reveals.

“Melvin was in the house band and I must have played half a dozen songs with them and really liked his style, so he’s joined the band – and it doesn’t mean The Waterboys going country but using pedal steel in interesting ways.”

Does this signify that, at the age of 53, the Scotsman with the predilection for Irish folk music, Celtic soul and his trademark Big Music, is broadening the Waterboys’ musical horizons even wider? “There’s a little bit of that, but I like lots of types of music; why shouldn’t I play them?” he says.

“Right now, I’m listening to a lot of late-Sixties soul music, Northern Soul, jazz from the age of Cannonball Adderley, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Mingus…but I listen to a lot of new music too, like Joanna Newsom. I find the moment she starts singing, I’m swept away, and I love Midlake too.”

Come Thursday, all will be revealed, both in terms of setlist content and running order, when Mike lines up with Duffy, stalwart fiddler Steve Wickham, Irish chanteuse Katie Kim, keyboard player James Hallawell, bassist Marc Arciero and drummer Ralph Salmins. Whenever the focus falls on An Appointment With Mr Yeats, first half or second, it will only affirm that last year’s album of Scott’s settings of 14 poems by WB Yeats was one of the pinnacles of his 31-year career.

“The project began as a show spread over five nights in March 2010 at the Abbey Theatre, the theatre that Yeats founded in 1904,” says Mike. “Those nights were a thrill, a spine-tingler, and then we did more Yeats nights around Britain early last year.

“I knew there was going to be an album, but I didn’t know what form it was going to take. At one point it was going to be live, but then I had a one-man delegation from the band’s bass player after I’d held a meeting to tell them of my intentions.

“Marc [Arciero] trooped back in and said, ‘I think these songs are too good just to record live’, and he came up with a plan for a studio recording.”

Recording sessions took place in North London and Dublin between March and June last year, although Mike had to add his vocals at home two weeks later. “That was forced on me as I caught a terrible virus when I was recording, so though I could play, I couldn’t sing,” he says.

Mike had first set a William Butler Yeats poem to music for The Stolen Child on The Waterboys’ 1988 album Fisherman’s Blues, and a full Yeats album has been a long time coming. “I’ve been working on these treatments for over 20 years,” he says.

“I wrote the music for The Faery’s Last Song in 1991; a few more in the late-Nineties; a few more in the early 2000s, and then I did about a dozen more in a cluster in 2005.”

That year was the turning point. Mike decamped to his music room armed with a copy of the Finneran Edition of The Complete Works Of WB Yeats and sat at the piano as he worked through the book.

“If the first line of any poem suggested a tune in my head, I’d persevere with it, and if it didn’t I’d pass on to something else,” he recalls. “I started at page one and worked through to page 600-and-something, and then I started again in case I missed any. I must have done that nine or ten times, to give the opportunity for each line to sing to me.”

By 2009, he had the 20 songs he needed for the stage show. “I wanted no filler, no weak points; that’s why I waited to finish it, as I wanted everything to sound like it came from a greatest hits album,” he says, resolute that he would succeed where others’ past interpretations had failed.

“There’s a good Van Morrison one, Crazy Jane On God off A Sense Of Wonder, but a lot are not good. They don’t work hard enough as the lyrics are so good.

“I wrote a lot more than I used on the album; I wrote some that I knew were just not good enough.”

Mike has no plans to make further Yeats recordings. “However, I’m thinking of doing a bonus disc of demos and the best of the tracks that didn’t make the record”, he says.

“I’ve sent them to the record company for them to consider it. A bonus disc doesn’t have to be as good, just interesting, and the demos are very interesting – they’re sparser and often were recorded as the songs were being written, which gives them a special atmosphere – and the extra tracks are really worth hearing.”

How might Mr Scott’s appointment with Mr Yeats inform his own future song-writing? “I think there is something that I will take from it but what it is I can’t say, though it’s got me acclimatised to writing lyrics of the highest order,” he concludes.

•An Appointment with The Waterboys, Leeds Town Hall, Wednesday, and York Barbican, Thursday, 8pm. Box office: Leeds, 0113 224 3801; York, 0844 854 2757.