Adventures of a Waterboy

by Mike Scott

  I went to meet the Chrysalis boss in London. Doug D’Arcy was an affable fellow with a sculpted beard and a Yorkshire accent, but he perplexed me. I was so used to Nigel trying to get me to do what he wanted, as if my own ideas about my music were an obstacle to be worked around, that I was confounded by Doug’s willingness to listen to me and let me do what I felt was right without my having to fight for it. Like a traumatised dog finding itself in a safe home for the first time, it was a couple of years before I started to trust Doug and use him as the shrewd counsellor he was. The first thing I told him was I didn’t want an A&R man interfering with my records. After delivering the goods with This Is The Sea I wanted to keep making albums my own way. Doug accepted this and amazingly didn’t even ask to listen to what we’d already recorded. Then he bankrolled our Bob Johnston recordings in San Francisco, and with nary a raised eyebrow backed me when the band spent several months in Windmill Lane through the winter and spring of 1987.

  In fact we had enough killer music for an album from our Dublin sessions the previous year, only I couldn’t see it. I hadn’t yet learned that with spontaneous studio recordings it’s crucial to accept flaws. All the best records are full of mistakes, as any sixties Stones or Dylan album will attest, but I felt I had to re-record a song if there were slight tuning or timing problems, or when a drummer overplayed or my singing didn’t please me, even if the overall impact of the track was powerful and infectious.

  And the variety of material was overwhelming. I had dozens of songs in almost as many genres and my usual focus and ability to make hard decisions were undone by the volume of music. As the stack of tracks grew the scope of possible album directions became dizzying and decisions went unmade until it grew harder and harder for me to hear my ‘instructions’ and locate the inner musical will that had steered me through This Is The Sea. Another factor was that we didn’t have a full time drummer, so we were forever trying out new guys or bringing back old ones. We outdid Spinal Tap: no less than fifteen tub-thumpers played on this one album. And because the sound and feel of a song changes dramatically with each drummer, and because some of our songs were recorded on three, four, or even five separate occasions with different dudes on the drum stool, the range of strikingly different yet usable versions of the songs expanded. How was I to choose between the Pete McKinney version of ‘Fisherman’s Blues’ with its lusty, crashing drums and the Noel Bridgeman version with its subtle groove, both of which I loved? Even as I vacillated the music kept evolving with new sounds and players entering our orbit, like Vinnie Kilduff and his Irish pipes. We fearlessly integrated these new elements with often thrilling results, but with the consequence that songs we’d cut a year, even six months previously now sounded like another group.

  By the late summer of 1987, a year after the Chrysalis purchase, I felt like a madman trying to steer a runaway train. If ever I needed a strong hand on my shoulder and some artistic steering it was now, but as a consequence of my own choices no one was empowered to play that role. I was alone in my responsibility for the album, acutely aware that the eyes of the music world would be on its eventual release. Burned out, confounded and with over sixty tracks in various states of completion, I withdrew from the studio. I didn’t know whether I’d come back to the existing work after a break, or whether I’d scrap it all, re-gather my energies and quickly record an all-new record that captured the band at its latest stage of development. For out of the studio the changes in the music kept right on coming. The new folkier elements in our sound were integrated during shows in Dublin and Galway that autumn as trad music, which had begun to enchant me in Kenmare a few months before, now cast its whole spell.

  I’d started hanging out with piper Vinnie who lived in the street next to mine in Ranelagh, on Dublin’s Southside. Vinnie was a dapper Brylcreemed fellow with a maroon waistcoat, a headful of craftiness and an insatiable appetite for hedonism – a cross between Brer Rabbit and Mr Toad from The Wind In The Willows. He would stand in the middle of his living room, its walls covered with Irish movie posters and dodgy pop pin-ups torn from the pages of Smash Hits, a straw-thin reefer dangling from his lips, while holding forth on the stylistic differences between tin whistle players in adjacent town-lands of County Mayo. An ever-voluble font of information on all things trad, Vinnie became my guide, initiating me into the mysteries of Irish music and bringing me to sessions; not recording sessions but pub sessions, the lifeblood of the trad scene, in which musicians sat round a table and played tunes – reels, jigs, hornpipes, polkas and slides – while the bustle of the pub went on around them. To enter a Dublin bar and find a gaggle of musicians firing off joyful, celebratory music is a delightful experience, as any lucky tourist will confirm. And to my ears it was heaven. Here was a wild, articulate music that expressed the soul of Ireland and evoked its landscape, played with power but without machismo, with mastery but without ego. How this appealed to me in my weary and confused condition! The charms of traditional music emerged from the mist as eternal verities to be envied and achieved, emanations from a world far removed from the manipulative, distorted ghetto of the rock business.

  Soon this education was expanding my musical consciousness and changing the way I listened: trad tunes flew by so fast I had to sharpen my wits just to follow what was happening, and as I drew closer to the music I discovered sophistication at work – nuance, ornamentation, interplay, the personality of individual players, all of which my ears had to learn to grasp and my mind to process. And the instruments! Dusty bustling fiddles, sputtering banjos, melodeons and button accordions that sounded like trails of winking lights, the primal wail of the pipes, the thrum and plash of the bouzouki, the lonesome purity of the whistle and the warm quizzical burr of the flute all recast the musical colour scheme of my imagination and resonated with new possibilities, the promise of magic. In addition to Vinnie’s ministrations, our soundman John Dunford was turning me on with live recordings of the great Irish groups he’d worked with like Moving Hearts and De Dannan, and slipping me preconception-busting albums by The Bothy Band, full of elemental, Promethean music.

  The Fellow Who Fiddles and bassist Trevor caught the bug too. Trevor taught himself bouzouki while Wickham got busy learning tunes from the trad player’s bible O’Neill’s Music Of Ireland, an inch-thick yellow tome containing a thousand manuscripted melodies with archaic titles like ‘The Fiddler’s Frolic’, ‘The Bashful Bachelor’ and ‘Banish Misfortune’. As 1987 marched to a close all influences conspired to bring The Waterboys ever deeper into traditional music and the older, wilder world it represented.

  I spent that New Year in Scotland and bought some Scottish folk records while I was there. When I listened to them I recognised the music was the same as Irish, only a different vernacular: harder, more angular perhaps, and paradoxically more straight-laced and less free, but as like to it as brother and sister and flowing from the same Celtic wellspring. And many of the tunes I’d been hearing in Dublin, I realised, were Scottish. This was a revelation. As a teenage rock’n’roller I’d considered Scottish folk music a hinterland of kilted buffoonery. Now I heard it anew, and the music I was in love with was the music of my own ancestors. In the bloom of their youth on the Isle of Mull my great-grandparents themselves might well have shaken a leg to ‘The Fiddler’s Frolic’.

  I flew back to Dublin in the grip of a dream, devouring Celtic albums on my Walkman at the rate of nine or ten a day, and having made the decision to go immediately to the west of Ireland, the cradle of Celtic culture. I wasn’t up for dabbling; I wanted to step fully into this older world, absorb it, become it and bring back what I found, however long it took. And despite the pressure of the unfinished album, I was relaxed about time. A Canadian band, The Cowboy Junkies, mining the same vein of country and American roots we’d been exploring for two years, had pipped us by releasing The Trinity Sessions. That horse had bolted. And with The Joshua Tree, on which I heard the spiritual seeker vision and big music of the last two Waterboys al
bums re-calibrated as towering arena rock, U2 had relieved us of the responsibility of making the follow-up to This Is The Sea. I was free to explore, and both the road less travelled and the way of fascination pointed towards the Celtic dreamtime.

  And so on a cold, clear afternoon in early January 1988, John Dunford drove me to Ireland’s West Coast to look for a cottage I could rent for a few months. We arrived in Galway City at nightfall and checked into an old-fashioned seaside hotel where a wedding party was in full swing: a good omen. Dunford and I spent a week scouting County Galway to the North and Clare to the South, driving under vast ever-changing Atlantic skies through a land of lonesome harbours, wild hills and tiny coastal villages scented by the sweet, intoxicating smell of turf fires. And as we drove, John recounted to me the entire history of modern Irish music while the car stereo crackled to the sounds of Sweeney’s Men, Planxty and a hundred more. But as far as finding a house went we were out of luck. Cottages that looked enticing in brochures turned out to be behind petrol stations; others were in lonely depressing spots miles from anywhere; yet more were only available in season, from April to September.

  On the seventh day we were in one of Galway’s music bars where a session was in progress, five or six players hunched round a drink-strewn table. I knew one of them, a bouzouki-plucking mate of Vinnie Kilduff’s called Brendan O’Regan who called me over to play. I sat down and banged away on my guitar, guessing the chords and stomping my feet. Then, gathering my breath between tunes, I fell into conversation with the musician on my left, a cheeky-faced fiddler. He knew I was ‘yer man from The Waterboys’ and asked me what I was doing in Galway.

  ‘Looking for a cottage where I can stay for a few months and do some writing,’ I replied.

  ‘Oh? My old man’s got a place, out along the coast. Meet me tomorrow and I’ll show it to you.’

  I didn’t know whether this would turn out be a mirage like all the other leads Dunford and I had followed over the last week, but there was something about my sparkling-eyed new friend, whose name was Sean, that I trusted.

  Next morning we met him at a car park overlooking the harbour. ‘Jump in your car and follow me,’ he called with a grin. We drove out of town by the coast road in the only direction we hadn’t yet explored. After a few miles we left the city behind. The full majestic expanse of Galway Bay opened on our left, while to our right lay a strange, rocky land of hills and ancient stone walls. I began to get goose bumps. The wildness of the land and the light on the bay did something fateful to me and I turned and said to Dunford, with a sudden certainty, ‘This is the land of my soul!’ And it really was. The western fastness of Connemara, into which we were advancing, would become my favourite place in the world and the spiritual home of The Waterboys.

  After ten miles of coast Sean turned right and we followed him up a hill road with a kaleidoscope of tiny rocky fields on either side. On the crest of the hill was a modern white bungalow. We parked the cars, Sean opened the garden gate, and I walked up to the house. Standing on its doorstep I looked back downhill over the vastest land and seascape I’d ever seen, laid like glory under immense blue and white skies. My eye tracked far inland to the east where hazy mountains rumbled in the dim distance, then south across the shimmering face of Galway Bay and westwards to where the Aran Islands floated like three upturned boats on the far horizon, the broad Atlantic glistening in the sun beyond them. Peace and stillness enfolded the scene and the only sounds were the birds of the air, cars humming far away on the road below, and the haunting moan of the wind in the telegraph wires. I laughed out loud and rented the house on the spot.

  A week later I moved in. I set up the living room, which overlooked the view, as a music space with an electric piano, record player and a low table for the industrial-size acoustic typewriter on which I did my writing. On the south and north walls of the room I stuck huge maps of Ireland and Scotland. In the big country kitchen I pinned up Irish ordnance survey maps, each showing a small part of the country in fantastic detail; houses, towers, old castles and the tiniest country lanes or boreens. I covered a wall with these, creating a montage that showed the whole sweep of the west of Ireland, then spent hours dreaming into the maps as I played my new Irish bodhrán, a primeval round drum of goatskin stretched across a shallow wooden frame, which made delicious stone-age rubdub crackadub thwack sounds.

  On the third night Sean’s ‘old man’ turned up to check me out. His name was Charlie Lennon and he had white hair and a long, serious face like one of the philosophers in The Crock Of Gold. He seemed very concerned about what condition I kept the house in and insisted on placing lace covers on the arms of all the chairs. But when Charlie saw the living room arrayed as a musical den he exclaimed, ‘How wonderful!’ and told me he was a fiddler and composer of traditional tunes. We became friends there and then and he took me to Hughes’s bar, a stone-floored tavern in the nearby village of Spiddal. He sat me at a table in front of a roaring fire and made me play bodhrán while he and an accordionist played impossibly complex, almost classical tunes. The locals conversed in Irish around us, a winter wind blew in from the Atlantic and charged up the street outside, and I felt plugged into an older, saner world.

  Soon I established a groove in my hilltop house of rising around noon and working through the day, playing and listening to music, writing songs and reading. I’d eat in the early evening – always the three ‘b’s: boil-in-a-bag braised beef, baked beans and baked potatoes – then work again late into the night, often till dawn. And as the mood struck, I’d cycle into Spiddal and organise a taxi to take me into Galway.

  Galway was the port at the last outpost of Europe, at what was once the end of all things, the beginning of the unknown. And how much wonder and mystery still lingered in the first syllable of its name, that profound long ‘Gal’ with its evocation of distance and immensities. She was a convivial city then as now, but in 1988 Galway had a slow, magical character, mostly lost when it became a Celtic Tiger boomtown in the nineties. It was a cross between an old-fashioned county town and a hip village arts project. The counterculture – or at least a bohemian Celtic version – was a tangible presence, and its actors, poets, philosophers, hippies, writers, students and musicians co-existed happily with the old fishing folk, once the very lifeblood of Galway, and the robust country people of the west: ruddy-cheeked, broad-shouldered men and sharp-eyed queenly women from Connemara, Clare and Athenry. It was common to see wild-looking musicians, parchment-faced fishwives and flat-capped farmers contentedly sharing time, space and conversation in Galway’s ancient pubs.

  The city was large enough to be cosmopolitan, small enough to be homely. A roaring river, the Corrib, divided it in two and a network of sleepy canals, secret lanes and walkways turned its neighbourhoods into islands. Charming tumbledown streets with satisfyingly logical names like ‘Shop Street’ and ‘Middle Street’ were lined with archaic storefronts unchanged since the forties or fifties. Scruffy cargo ships and brightly coloured fishing boats anchored in the bustling harbour, and on the edge of the Atlantic lay Galway’s greatest glory: the majestic spaces of South Park, a huge green common, opening onto the Bay and the western sky. I’d make raids on my favourite establishments, Kenny’s Books and Powell’s Music Emporium, then hook up with friends and join sessions in the pubs. Brendan O’Regan, my closest pal on the scene, was fond of shouting over the music, ‘The craic is mighty!’ He spelt it ‘craic’, of course, the ubiquitous Irish word for pleasure and high spirits, but whenever he said it I imagined a thin crack opening in the fabric of the universe and a bright light of joy pouring through.

  I’d return to my hilltop eyrie late at night, head full of the evening’s fun, arms laden with a haul of books and records to absorb. That winter in a chair snug by the fire I read Daniel Corkery’s The Hidden Ireland, James Stephens’ luminous faery novels, the complete works of J.M. Synge, Liam O’Flaherty’s The Ecstasy Of Angus, Yeats, Douglas Hyde, Tomás O’Crohan’s The Islandman, and The Poems O
f Egan O’Rahilly, the eighteenth-century Gaelic satirist.

  Spiddal village was charismatic too, comprising a long main street with a crossroads, three pubs, two general stores and a handsome grey-stoned church I never once stepped into. The residents were characters, one and all, seasoned and shaped by the uniqueness of the place and its raw Atlantic weather, a collection of walking tarot cards: stout, sad-eyed patriarch Festy Conlon; white-bearded American giant Hank, who’d marched with Martin Luther King in the civil rights years; sharp-tongued Celtic Queen pub-owner Brida Hughes; and a hundred other distinct personalities inhabiting an almost Shakespearean tableau of village intrigues and dramas, as if fate had shaken them all down to the end of Ireland to take part in a perpetually unfolding passion play. I was a tarot card myself – the Fool, surely – and entered wholeheartedly into the spirit of Spiddal. And because I’d arrived in the dead of winter, people treated me as a newcomer not a tourist. The O’Flaherty family who lived a hundred yards down the hill from my house kept an eye on me and brought me bags of turf and Polish coal. I had no TV, no radio, no phone, no fax, no email. If I wanted to contact the modern world I had to find a phone box or write a letter. For months the only way Chrysalis Records could contact me was by leaving a message in the Quays bar in Galway and it might be a week before I picked it up.

  When a storm struck in February I tasted the full elemental power of the west. Great winds roared around the house for four days creating a wild fantasia of howls, moans, creaks and whistles while the windows bent inwards and pantheons of clouds scudded like chariots across the sky. The storm was all I could think about, all that anyone I met on rare windblown forays into the landscape could talk about; the experience levelled all differences, humbled us all equally. When the storm finally blew itself out the stillness was like a benediction, as if a mighty god had passed and in his trail the wheels of the world had begun to turn again.