Adventures of a Waterboy

by Mike Scott

  And as I watched the changing tapestry of the days unfolding before and below me I started seeing the world through new eyes. I began to understand the mysteries of landscape: how every bluff, outcrop, hill and promontory had its significance, that each part of the landscape ‘spoke’ to every other part in a language beyond words. And I became aware of a subtle presence, a lingering sense of the past, which cloaked the west of Ireland like another dimension as if older times were here simultaneously, overlaid one on another like wavelengths. This presence acted on my imagination like a drug and made everything look huge, as if Ireland were as psychically vast a country as America was physically vast. And in these stirrings I found the answer to the question that had assailed me after the Pictish Festival a year before: what did it mean to be Celtic? Being Celtic was a way of seeing and feeling, of interpreting and inhabiting the world. The Celtic domain wasn’t simply a physical landscape spanning Ireland, Scotland, Wales and other regions on the Atlantic rim – it was a dream-space, a kingdom of the imagination with a coherency, a taste all its own, room to roam as the George MacDonald poem said. And this dream-space was inside me too. I was beginning to move at its speed and become a conscious participant in its quicksilver drama.

  Yet one mysterious dimension remained out of reach. Spiddal was in the Irish-speaking region, the Gaeltacht, and the language, which I heard in the shops and pubs, was a medium through which more of the experience of being in this culture was communicated than ever could be through English. Locals speed-talking in Irish across the counter of the general store were plugged into a communal mind from which I was excluded. Irish was the same language as the Scottish Gaelic my grandmother spoke, and I was separated from it by only two generations, yet it might have been a thousand years. I picked up a few words but the inner life of the language remained secret, a tantalising but unknowable dimension of consciousness all around me.

  I wasn’t the only cosmonaut heading west into the Celtic mystery. The Fellow Who Fiddles, seeking trad tunes to collect, had lit out for Doolin, a one-street, three-pub village on the Clare coast with a reputation for music far outstripping its size. And Vinnie Kilduff had made for Inishmore, largest of the Aran Islands, a wild outpost on the Atlantic horizon from which he sent me postcards with images of wild goats and the words ‘I’m shouting over the bay to you’ scrawled in his whistler’s hand, cajoling me to visit. And on an early March day I did.

  I brought Anto with me. The Human Saxophone had just arrived in Spiddal from London when I whisked him off to Galway airport (two huts and a hangar in a field east of the city) to catch the flight to Aran. It was a gusty day and we flew low in the sky, the little propeller plane bucking and dipping as the ubiquitous landscape of the west, all its mad knot-work of tiny fields and haphazard stone walls, passed beneath us, soon replaced by the grey roiling face of the sea. After only ten or twelve minutes the plane touched down on a grassy meadow in the middle of sand dunes, the propeller engines stopped and we stepped out into the low moan of the wind. Vinnie stood waving to us outside the solitary airport hut, his reddish-blonde hair blown back from his face, and as we approached I saw he was changed. Six weeks in Aran had left its mark: his cheeks were ruddy from the constant wind, but there was something else, a far-sighted look of nobility as if he’d morphed into a demi-god or a Viking, and his eyes were narrow and sharp like a bird’s.

  Vinnie had hired a minibus, one of only a few vehicles on the island, to take us the three miles to the main village, Kilronan, and as we drove we entered an otherworldly landscape. The colours, grey and green, were similar to the mainland, but unlike Connemara’s naturally random tableau, Aran looked designed, as by a darker god. The land rose on our left in a series of scarped stone terraces to a high ridge dramatically silhouetted against the sky. Straight ahead lay a hulking mountain-sized shoulder of rock with no trees or foliage of any kind, only more scarped terraces slanting crazily downwards from right to left. Nowhere was there anything soft or rounded on which the eye might rest, nor any familiar shape or suggestion of conventional beauty. And the scale was all wrong: it was too large, as if a tribe of giants had abandoned the place. As we drove deeper into this domain its personality closed in on us, dense and primal: a strange sensation for me, even after six weeks of cultural decompression in Spiddal, but what must Anto have been feeling? Yesterday he’d been doing his laundry in Hammersmith!

  We rounded a bay and approached Kilronan, a cluster of white buildings hunched on a hill round a little harbour. I noted a general store, a tourist shop not yet open for the season with windows full of Aran sweaters, and a sturdy village hall made of the same grey rock as the land. The bus dropped us off by the harbour. Vinnie was staying in a house a few yards away and we threw our bags in then went straight out again to explore. At a harbour-side shed grandly named Aran Island Bicycles we hired bikes and hooked up with a local musician mate of Vinnie’s called Sean Watty, a bulky fellow with a World War Two moustache and milk-bottle spectacles. As we mounted our bikes Sean told us, ‘Go slowly now, and you might see something.’

  I wondered what he meant. The play of light on the land? Glimpses of the inner soul of Aran? Whatever, I took the advice to heart and found myself cycling at a gentle pace alongside Sean in companionable silence, all senses open, a light spring breeze on my face. Across Galway Bay I could see the mountains of Connemara gathered like a cluster of giant buffalos, red and brown in the afternoon sun with slow cloud shadows moving over their flanks. And as we left human familiarity behind and penetrated deeper into the stone landscape, it wove its spell around me, producing a detached, mesmerised mind-set. Stoned, indeed. We cycled for several miles until we reached to foot of a hill where we lay down our bikes and began a long climb. After fifteen minutes Dun Aengus loomed theatrically above us, a ruined prehistoric fort, dark against the sky, a hundred yards across with stone walls three times the height of a man. A tiny opening came visible in its side, with a window of blue sky showing cheerfully through, and we squeezed through this, coming into the central enclosure.

  It was a sudden clear space; a roofless amphitheatre bounded on three sides by stone-age walls and on the fourth by a shockingly bare cliff edge and the vast panorama of the Atlantic. Far to our left the middle Aran Island, Inishmaan, rose out of the water like a dark snakehead and beyond it the coastline of Ireland tumbled endlessly southwards. I followed it with my eye until deep in the distance the thin faint line of the land faded into curling shapes of horned mountains like wisps of blue smoke on the horizon: the peaks and crests of County Kerry, last outpost of Europe, looking like a domain of magic, the lair of poetry and wizards. Anto and I had brought instruments, figuring that when we got to Dun Aengus we’d have a celebratory tune, but hundreds of feet above sea in a bracing Atlantic wind our hands were too cold to play. We would get music enough that night. Our imaginations satisfied, we descended the hill and cycled back across the island in gathering dusk. We ate greasy fish and chips by the light of the few Kilronan street lamps, then headed into one of the village pubs.

  The American Bar was as bright and cosy as the land was barren. Locals sat round the walls and down the length of the bar, all with the same wind-blasted cheeks and sharp, bird-like eyes as Vinnie. A corner was set aside for us where Sean Watty and another local musician called Máirtín were waiting with accordion and banjo at the ready. We squeezed in under the unnerving gaze of the villagers as the pub held its collective breath. Word had spread that there were members of some kind of pop group in the island and by our next actions we would prove ourselves duds or kings. And what would we play? Sean and Máirtín were strictly trad musicians and Anto was a blues man, but we found common cause in an ad hoc repertoire comprising a battery of country hoedowns and robust Irish reels with warlike titles like ‘The Silver Spear’ and ‘The Sailor On The Rock’, over which Vinnie shouted chords while stomping his foot on the wooden floor. A slap of the banjo and we were off, with Sean and Máirtín playing like warrior strongmen; S
ean ripping wild laughing torrents of music out of his accordion while Máirtín struck notes from his banjo like sparks from a flint. Within minutes we were surrounded by people cheering, shouting and talking unfeasibly fast in Irish.

  Towards the end of the night a group of huge dark-eyed young men dressed in tweed waistcoats and flat caps burst through the pub doors. These were the boys from Bun Gowla, westernmost village of the island, a remote storm-battered cluster of cottages seven miles away, who’d heard there were pop musicians on the island and had come to have some sport with us. They brought with them an atmosphere of time unbroken, and as we blasted out the reels they launched into a storm of savage step-dancing, heavy booted feet clattering rhythmically on the floor, grunts, shouts and whoops bursting in the air like fireworks. I’d played on the stages of New York, London and Hollywood, I’d fought in the punk wars and rock’n’rolled from Glastonbury to Glasgow, but nothing had been as wild as this. I looked over at Anto, his strumming arm a blur as he bashed his mandolin. He caught my eye, an understanding passed between us and as the riot of high spirits raged all around we laughed with pure pleasure.

  Thus initiated into the community we found next day that, like Vinnie before us, we’d been granted the freedom of Aran. Everywhere we went people smiled and said hello. We’d become part of the local colour, celebrities not because of our status as Waterboys but because we’d participated in an ancient social ritual: playing music for the people at the end of their day’s work.

  On the morning of the day we left I made for the lonely southeast coast of the island, clambering over cracked stone under warm March sun across the great ridge of Aran until finally I came to the edge of the Atlantic. Huge balls of spray were exploding off the low cliffs, and the sound of the sea battering the island was a continuous roar. Far out on the fringes of the world I stood where the only powers were wind, stone and sea. Looking east my eyes fell on the snakehead of Inishmaan, dark and sullen in the ocean. All its houses were on the sheltered slopes of its northern ridge, facing inland towards Ireland, but on the bare southern side that swept recklessly to the Atlantic there were no buildings at all. Might Pan, the god of the earth and its wild places, I wondered romantically to myself, live on the back side of Inishmaan?

  Pan! How much of my journeying, and even of rock’n’roll itself, was nothing more than a search for the spirit of Pan, for the combination of sacredness, wildness and freedom I mused on this for long sweet minutes while absently gazing into the onrushing waves, hearing them boom as they crashed full square into the cliffs below me. Then I turned my back to the wind, flipped up my collar, and made my way across the crackling stonescape, reaching Kilronan in time to say farewell to Vinnie and Sean Watty and catch a ride on a fishing boat back to the mainland with Anto.

  Chapter 10: Mansion Of Music

  Dunford steers the car through a crumbling stone arch then down a long slope with overgrown woodland on each side. At the bottom we cross a stone bridge and as I look down I see a white-flecked stream rushing underneath. The road rises again, veering left under the eaves of ancient oaks that grow so close they make a green tunnel speckled with jets and darts of flashing sunlight. Looking over Dunford’s shoulder, I catch my first glimpse of an enigmatic grey building through the branches. Suddenly we emerge into a sunlit driveway. Before us is an ivy-clad mansion facing a broad lawn. Beyond is a painting-like view of Galway Bay with the mysterious silver hills of Clare in the distance. It is a scene of high magic, private and reserved, as if we’ve stumbled on one of Ireland’s secrets.

  We step out. As I turn towards the house its heavy wooden door opens and a woman appears, petite, dark haired, of a certain age as the French say, with a fidgeting Pekinese dog in her arms. Our guide Alec introduces her as Mavis and from her accent and bearing she is one of the old Irish landed gentry fallen on tough times. Traces of beauty linger in her handsome face and as I meet her gaze I look into the flinty eyes of a survivor. She ushers us into the house as the dog yaps angrily at Dunford. ‘Quiet, Ambrose!’ she scolds.

  Inside is a dark corridor with a staircase on the right and a series of rooms on the left, facing lawn and bay, which we enter one by one. Each is a study in faded grandeur; ragged curtains, carpet-less floors and ancient furniture. Alec was right: Mavis could use the money. But the place is full of character and possibility. At the end of the corridor Mavis shows us a long sunlit dining room with chandeliers and wooden floor, large enough for the band. I clap my hands and hear a pleasing natural reverb, then imagine us set up and playing: Anto here, Steve there, drums in the bay window. Dunford and I look at each other and nod. Yes, this is our studio.

  Back in Spiddal, with spring in the air and the last of my studio burnout blown away by the blustery winds of Aran, I was ready to go back to work and complete the album. But I was so at home in the west why not bring the band and crew, the whole shebang, and finish the record here? If we were all in this landscape, what music, what magic, might we make? I turned this outrageous thought round in my head for a few days, expelling doubts and conventional ideas one by one, until I recognised it was perfect. I called Dunford and we reprised our two-man travels, looking for a hall where we could set up a studio. We found several unsuitable venues (a damp hotel at Killary Harbour, a too-small country house in the Maamturk Mountains, a cold school hall near Screeb) until once again a meeting with a musician led us to our goal. We’d just returned to Spiddal after an expedition to deepest Connemara and were sitting in Hughes’s bar talking to Alec Finn, a curly-haired exiled Yorkshireman who played in the Galway trad band De Dannan. When we told him what we needed he said: ‘Why not use Spiddal House? It’s big enough.’ I’d never heard of this place, but Alec nipped out to the village phone box, made a quick call and arranged for us to see it straight away. It suited beyond our wildest hopes, and Dunford rented it from the owner Mrs Buckley – Mavis – for eight weeks on the condition that she move out. Then we sped back to Dublin to organise band and equipment.

  We needed a drummer and Doug D’Arcy at Chrysalis suggested Patti Smith’s old skin-basher Jay Dee Daugherty, the chap who’d asked me who I was in her dressing room ten years before. When he arrived in Dublin and walked into our rehearsals Jay Dee didn’t remember me from 1978 and it was a long time since I’d listened to any Patti Smith records, but none of that mattered. From the first ear-blistering snare crack his drumming powered our music like a rocket blast.

  Two days later we descended on Spiddal House. We commandeered three consecutive rooms overlooking the bay: a snug lounge with wood-panelled walls became the control room with the mixing desk; a large sitting room with French windows, striped walls and an antique piano was our den for hanging out and jamming in; and the dining room, as already decided, was the studio itself. Then we rented several holiday cottages to sleep in because we didn’t plan on going stir-crazy by living in Spiddal House as well as working there. Steve, Anto and Trevor were in a house halfway down the hill from mine, Jay Dee Daugherty was shacked up in a one-bed cabin across the boreen, with a turf fire and no phone, probably wondering what the hell he’d got himself into, while Dunford, Jimmy Hickey and our young recording engineer Pat McCarthy were in a bungalow a short walk from Spiddal House.

  No band ever worked in more ideal circumstances. Each morning I’d step out my door with plans for the day’s music in my head, breathe in the sweet Atlantic air that tasted, as J.M. Synge would say, ‘like wine through the teeth’, cast my eyes over the awesome view, jump on my bike and swoop freewheeling down the long hill to the main road, then pedal a mile along the seafront, ocean breeze on my face. At the village crossroads I’d hang a right then turn left under the old stone arch, through the woods, across the bridge and finally walk in the door of our mansion of music to hear my bandmates already playing, drums and fiddles echoing through the hallway. As I sat strumming and singing in the studio this is what I saw: Jay Dee in a silver two-tone suit, clattering his drums in the bay window; Trevor Hutchinson standing by
his double bass in the far corner, silhouetted against the sunlight; The Fellow Who Fiddles halfway down the room, swaying as he played, a microphone dangling over his fiddle to catch its sound; and Anto on my right, leaning over the keyboard of a Hammond organ like a cosmonaut steering a spacecraft, or crouched over his electric mandolin, absorbed in music.

  And we meant business. Having learned from the previous year, I made sure these were disciplined sessions. There were no ten-songs-in-a-day blowouts. We focussed on one track at a time, finished it, then moved on to the next, keeping to a strict schedule: 1pm until 10pm in the evening. These measures restored order out of our creative chaos and in a few days we had our first song nailed. It was one I’d just written called ‘And A Bang On The Ear’, a nine-minute country-rock romp with six affectionate verses about my old girlfriends, each capped by a request to give the girl ‘a bang on the ear’, code for ‘say hello from me’.

  Though I’d often make up joke songs in rehearsals, this lighter side had never percolated to the front line of Waterboys music and made it to a record. I didn’t exactly have a rock reputation for humour. But something had shifted since I’d come to Ireland and I’d learned how to take the mickey out of myself without undercutting the point of a song. Polishing off ‘Bang On The Ear’, with tragicomic lines such as ‘It started up in Fife, it ended up in tears’, was something of a breakthrough for me, and it felt good. So did the fact that we’d pulled off the gambit of setting up a studio in the frontier wilds of the West of Ireland. With our first master successfully recorded and sounding as slick as if it had been made in London or New York, everyone was thrilled.