Scott is a vocalist, guitarist and pianist, and has played a large range of other instruments, including the bouzouki, drums, and Hammond organ on his albums.

[5] Scott remembers that, "from the minute [he] bought" 'Last Night in Soho' by Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich in 1968 "knew [he] had to be in music", and mentions listening to Hank Williams as a "life-changing" experience.

Scott would later arrange poetry from William Butler Yeats, Robert Burns,[7] and George MacDonald for The Waterboys recordings.

Scott became interested in the British punk music scene, and began writing for fanzines, eventually starting his own, Jungleland.

Scott and a guitarist named Allan McConnell formed a band, The Bootlegs, which gave way to Another Pretty Face in 1978 when Caldwell and two other friends joined.

Nikki Sudden, who had interviewed Another Pretty Face in Edinburgh for ZigZag (magazine), asserts that "the APF stuff is still some of Mike Scott’s best work".

Anthony Thistlethwaite, Karl Wallinger, Kevin Wilkinson and Steve Wickham all made major contributions, but Scott describes the band as his project.

Along with The Waterboys, the next two albums, A Pagan Place and This Is the Sea, released in 1984 and 1985, contained songs mostly written by Scott, and together formed the band's "Big Music" period.

[11] Scott's musical style changed again to a more guitar based sound when he, under the name The Waterboys but without any other members, recorded Dream Harder, in 1993.

The band had dissolved over personnel issues and Wickham's desire to remain with a folk-rock, or purely folk music, sound.

For his second solo album, Still Burning (1997), Scott assembled a group of session musicians including Pino Palladino and Jim Keltner.

Following the commercial failure of Still Burning in 1997 Scott was dropped by Chrysalis Records and decided to revive the Waterboys name to achieve wider marketplace exposure, a process described in detail in his autobiography.

In 2005, Karma to Burn was released, also by Puck Records, and included tracks from Scott's solo career played by The Waterboys line-up at the time.