Adventures of a Waterboy

by Mike Scott

  We returned to Dublin the next afternoon and it was like being flung out of Eden back into a crazy land. Within days I could feel the city’s frantic energy scouring the wildness off me and undoing the west’s enchantments. A more serious cultural decompression followed a week later when Dunford, Pat McCarthy and I flew into Britain to mix the album at Rockfield Studios on the Welsh/English border. By God, rural Britain was dull: all high hedgerows, straight-laced towns and sensible fun-free pubs. Rockfield at least was a decent studio, one I knew from earlier Waterboys records. It occupied the courtyard and outbuildings of a farm and I liked the owner, an eccentric Welsh chatterbox called Kingsley who made his rounds each evening, looking in on the bands as if he was checking the cows in the stalls. But faced anew with the job of sifting through the maze of music we’d recorded since 1986 my vacillation returned and the perennial curses of the residential studio – isolation, boredom, absence of stimuli and inspiration, set in. Slowly, crawlingly, the song selections and mixes were done until, at last in late August 1988, thirty-two months after breaking ground in Windmill Lane, I finalised the album and called it Fisherman’s Blues.

  Chrysalis released it that October with a cover picture of band and crew outside Spiddal House. But the twelve songs, six from Spiddal and six from Windmill Lane, told only a fraction of the story not just of the music we’d made but of all that had happened since I’d come to Ireland three years earlier. We’d recorded nearly a hundred tracks and twice as many outtakes, probably the largest body of work ever for one album; and the stylistic and personal changes the music documented were as deep and manifold as some bands go through in whole careers. Fisherman’s Blues could and should have been a double or triple album but most of the Dublin recordings, including many of our best moments, would remain unfinished for another decade. Three hundred and seventy four master reels, piled floor to ceiling and wall to wall in a room at Windmill Lane, waited for the day twelve years hence when I’d return to complete the work.

  We didn’t even understand the story ourselves yet. Time and the west of Ireland had changed us. Steve’s marriage disintegrated on his return to Dublin; Anto would come back later to raise a family in Galway; and Trevor would leave The Waterboys in a couple of years and became a full time trad musician, never to play in a rock’n’roll band again. Meanwhile, in the months we’d been riding the winds of the old world, rock had discovered raves, ecstasy and sampling. Fisherman’s Blues would become the biggest selling Waterboys album but at the moment of its publication our trajectory couldn’t have veered further from the rock mainstream.

  As for me, I figured music wasn’t worth the air it occupied if it didn’t change both its makers and its listeners, but I was altered by my adventures to a degree beyond my comprehension. I stood looking back over the three years, wondering what the hell had happened. Unable to articulate the contents of my mind I decided to give no interviews, and did the one sensible thing I could and took The Waterboys back on the road. We called up Jay Dee Daugherty, Vinnie Kilduff, Colin Blakey, Roddy Lorimer and Tomás Mac Eoin and went out mob-handed on a sell-out forty-five date tour of Britain and Ireland. It was a storming comeback, almost my ‘colourful travelling musical explosion’ band-vision made real. But not quite. The last missing elements, whatever they were, would soon appear.

  Chapter 11: Sharon Has A Tune For Every Beat Of Her Heart

  Dawn in Kinvara. In the grey light a soft rain is falling, pattering gently on an iron roof somewhere nearby. I stand in a doorway looking out on a deserted street, drinking in the soul of the May morning while an achingly perfect melody, sad yet bright, gentle yet strident, comes from the front parlour of the house behind me. Through its open window, Sharon Shannon’s accordion is spilling out luminous peals of melody, a cascading chain of sound that steals my heart utterly. The tune is a Celtic march that reminds me of Scotland and yet, as it rises and swoops through the morning air, Sharon’s accordion evokes centuries of Ireland; its plaintive tone connects to the past that lingers like a drift of smoke over the towns and hills of the west of Ireland.

  An acoustic guitar, played by an Australian hippie called Steve Cooney, backs the accordion with a ragged rootsy strut. The two musicians deal out the tune over and over, now advancing towards a triumphant climax, now dropping to a muted refrain, always in absolute sympathy and taking my stricken heart with them on every turn and twist of the journey, though neither knows I’m still here listening. As I stand at the door with my senses wide open, all the elements that make up the moment – the morning, the rain, the crying gulls, the sleeping village, the enchanted tune, the passion of the musicians, and the myriad thoughts and emotions that run like a river through my mind and soul – blend into one exquisite feeling and a thrill of joy runs through me like a white fire. And though I will spend the rest of my life yearning for what I felt in this moment, I don’t care, for I have heard the sweetest music a man can hear, in the most perfect circumstances, and my heart has been cleansed, uplifted and redeemed.

  It was The Fellow Who Fiddles who met her first. Around the time I discovered Spiddal, Steve went to Doolin on the Clare coast. Every night for several weeks he stuck his fiddle under his arm and walked from his rented harbour-side cottage to the village and joined the sessions that roared perpetually in its three pubs. As well as getting a crash course in trad music he befriended the musicians who lived and played there, and among them was a nineteen-year-old kid called Sharon Shannon. She came from the nearby town of Corofin, and according to the Fellow she was something special, ‘a mighty, mighty musician.’ I was intrigued by this description, which conjured an image of a Herculean demi-god rather than a young girl, but it would be a year before I met her myself.

  A friend introduced us on a November day outside Neachtain’s pub in Galway. All I remember is an elfin face in the rain poking out of the hood of a blue cagoule, though even in that brief glimpse there was a hint of confidence and mastery. When we played Galway on our Fisherman’s Blues tour that Christmas, Sharon came backstage. She was five feet tall with a little girl fringe and a pair of dungarees and in the broadest, most lilting Irish country accent she said, ‘That was the very best concert I ever was at!’

  I was hanging out a lot in Galway between tours, renting my favourite Spiddal cottage, and in the early months of 1989 I bumped into Sharon a few more times. She was always in a hurry, carrying her accordion – the ‘box’ – on her way to some session or other. We hadn’t yet played together when, that May, shortly after the British leg of the Fisherman’s Blues tour, I got a call from John Dunford inviting me to come and record with her. She was holed up in the village of Kinvara, south of Galway. Dunford, the canny operator, had had his eye on Sharon for a while and recognised she was a player of the ages, a special talent bound for whatever form of greatness trad music could bestow. He’d offered to record an album for her, she’d accepted, and with his mate, a moustached mover and shaker called Philip King, Dunford had set up a portable recording studio in the bar of Winkles Hotel. All kinds of trad luminaries had been invited, including Donal Lunny. Lunny was The Greatest Living Irish Musician, the bouzouki-playing mastermind behind Planxty, The Bothy Band and Moving Hearts, three bands whose music ran like a bright flame through the story of modern Irish music. I’d played with Donal when he guested on a few Fisherman’s Blues sessions, but we weren’t quite at ease with each other.

  This was because of how we’d met. In 1986, when I was new to Dublin, I needed information on local recording engineers. My girlfriend Irene, who managed Windmill Lane, suggested I ask Donal. She phoned and asked him if he’d meet up with Mike Scott to give some friendly advice about the Irish studio scene. Donal agreed and even remarked, ‘Mike Scott? Oh, he’s a fine man!’ I was delighted. The great Donal Lunny thought I was a fine man!

  The meeting was at five o’clock next day in the Palace Bar, one of those stained-glass and wood-panelled pubs for which Dublin is renowned. The place was crowded, full of Dubliners having a
n after-work drink, and I was standing at the bar when Donal walked in. I recognised him from album covers: a dark-eyed, good-looking man with a distinctive bushy moustache. He approached, craning his neck this way and that as he pushed through the scrum, but walked right past me to the back of the pub. Then he pushed his way forwards again, still peering all around, not noticing me despite my standing on tiptoes and trying to catch his eye. Obviously he didn’t know what I looked like. As he squeezed past me for the third time, I leaned over and said, ‘You’re looking for someone.’ At last he registered me.

  ‘Yes,’ he said curtly as if I’d interrupted him in some very important business, ‘I’m looking for Robin Scott.’

  Oh shit. He’d got me mixed up with another British musician. Robin Scott had written and sung a hit called ‘Pop Muzik’ in the late seventies, and had recorded in Ireland some years before. Clearly Donal had meant Robin Scott when he’d said ‘he’s a fine man.’ He didn’t have a clue who I was.

  As I stood mutely assimilating this dire development, Donal forgot about me and continued scouring the bar. I wondered what to do. It was humiliating enough to be mistaken for someone else but I didn’t fancy compounding the matter by revealing Donal’s mistake to him and enduring the embarrassment that would follow. So I watched him give up his search and leave the bar and after a few minutes, when I figured he’d be a safe distance away, I walked out too. To my horror he was standing on the pavement a few yards away, quizzically stroking his moustache as he scanned the street looking in vain for Robin Scott. He saw me watching him and must have thought, ‘There’s that guy again.’ Now doubly embarrassed I slunk away in the opposite direction, imagining Donal’s mystified eyes burning into my back.

  A few streets away I found a phone box and called Irene. ‘He thought he was meeting Robin Scott!’ I cried. Irene said she’d call and find out what happened. Several hours later she rang me at my flat. ‘Donal’s mortified,’ she said, ‘he got the names mixed up, and he’s happy to meet you whenever you want.’ As it happened The Waterboys were recording at Windmill Lane the next day, so I left a message on Donal’s phone inviting him to come and play with us.

  Donal turned up a couple of hours into the session, and when he saw me he pointed stagily and said ‘There you are!’ as if it had been me he’d been looking for all the time. This was well intended, and a measure of the kind fellow Donal was, but I was too young and raw to meet this gesture halfway. The older man, it seemed to me, had papered over the misunderstanding with pretence and left the truth of the incident unacknowledged. I was stiff and uneasy with him during the session. Donal and I bumped into each other several times over the next few years, but I never got over the awkwardness of that first encounter. So when Wickham and I strolled up the main street of Kinvara village on our way to record with Sharon Shannon, and spied Dunford and Philip King walking towards us out of the dusk with Donal, moustache and all, my heart sank.

  I was wearing a pale green suit I’d bought a few weeks earlier for a wedding, and when Donal saw us approaching he called out across the street, ‘You’ll fill that suit yet!’ This genial crack, the older man’s affectionate witnessing of the younger, acted like a tonic and we were friends thereafter, if never quite bosom buddies, and allowed us to relax in each other’s company as we got on with the job of midwifing Sharon Shannon’s birth as a recording artist.

  Winkles was on a lane off Kinvara’s main street, a plain white building that gave no hint of its status as a hotel or of the delicious scene that awaited inside. Steve and I entered to find a long dark bar with threadbare but cheerful décor from the fifties. At the near end a space had been cleared and a circle of chairs assembled. Road-worn acoustic instruments lay on or against the chairs, and the floor was strewn with wires, instrument cases and empty glasses. The musicians were on a break and sat at the long bar, half of them grandees like Lunny farmed in by Dunford, the rest local playmates of Sharon’s such as teenage tin-whistler Brida Smyth and scowling, soft-hearted Eoin O’Neill, a giant who cradled a spindly bouzouki in policeman-sized arms. The owner, a gregarious music lover called Tony Moylan, held court behind the bar and poured everyone free drinks. A bunch of music had been recorded and the word was that Sharon was on a roll. And indeed within minutes of our arrival the twenty-year-old box-squeezer was back in position, hurtling through set after set of high-energy tunes, notes scattering from her fingers like machine gun fire in a shiny, impossibly fast but beautifully articulated stream of pure music.

  I’d never considered the idea that an accordion player could be a star, but here was the reality. Sharon sat on a low chair, a small yet powerfully charismatic figure, bobbing her head cheerfully side to side with a magnetic smile as if to say ‘Hello! Isn’t this fun!’ while functioning as the dynamo in the centre of a perpetually changing rota of accompanists. First Lunny strumming away on his bouzouki, as always like a happy clockwork toy, then Eoin O’Neill on his, then a rootsy guitar picker called Gerry, while the melody line players – whistlers, fiddlers and flute johnnies – revolved as well, each taking their turn as Sharon’s partner. Even U2’s Adam Clayton, entering the scene with an air of genial bemusement, having been shoehorned into the event by the cross-cultural diplomatic ministrations of Philip King, gamely added some rudimentary bass to a tune or two. Dunford orchestrated proceedings, scratching his bristling jaw at a portable mixing desk in an alcove at the far end of the bar.

  Close to midnight Wickham and I were called. We worked up a bluegrass version of Dylan’s ‘Forever Young’, which Sharon executed with a mix of sensitivity and naivety, for her forte was instrumental tunes and she was unaccustomed to playing songs. But her box and the Fellow’s fiddle sounded strikingly beautiful together – a fateful, luminous sound like the reunion of two lovers. Sitting between them I heard the marriage of rock’n’roll and trad, and I was smitten. Immediately I wanted to hear it in a Waterboys context. With a sudden vision of an an all-time classic Waterboys line-up in my head I sidled over to Dunford when we finished, only to find he’d followed exactly the same train of thought. We resolved to invite Sharon to join the band for our next series of shows, a run of six, climaxing in a set at the Glastonbury Festival.

  Many of the players stayed up all night, forming a once-ever ensemble called The Winkles Orchestra that made wild celebratory music till dawn, and when Donal Lunny and Adam Clayton got up at nine the next morning, fresh for the drive back to Dublin, they found us still there. I hitched a ride and drowsed in the back seat while Clayton gunned his car eastwards like a bullet and compared doleful notes with Lunny on the state of the Irish roads. Adam dropped us off on a dusty Dublin street in the noonday sun, and as Donal strode away indefatigably to another recording session I walked home, head in the clouds, whistling a tune I’d learned the night before and wondering whether Sharon Shannon would come and play with The Waterboys.

  I needn’t have doubted it. A week later she presented herself at the empty shop in Temple Bar where we rehearsed, tumbling through the door with several ‘boxes’, a couple of fiddles, and a bag of cassettes. And she wasn’t the only new recruit. Seeking a gentler sound than the Jay Dee Daugherty thunder of the Fisherman’s Blues tour, I’d brought in a subtle Dublin drummer called Noel Bridgeman, a veteran of our Windmill Lane recordings. Sharon’s accordion slotted sweetly between Steve’s fiddle, Anto’s sax and Colin Blakey’s flute, and lent the band not just an Irish feel but an unexpected cajun twist. The number of different instrumental combinations available to me as bandleader suddenly multiplied exponentially. I was like a happy Tom Thumb inside an exquisite musical box.

  As we worked I took the measure of Sharon. She was a model band member, eager to fit in and a quick learner. And she knew hundreds upon hundreds of tunes, endless streams of them flowing from her box and fiddle between songs, creating a contagious musical aura. ‘Sharon has a tune for every beat of her heart,’ one of her friends told me, and it was true. Sharon played tunes like other people breathed. She was f
un too, up for whatever mischief was going, whether donning carnival masks with the rest of us for a joke performance in the shop window, or trying to shoot a video of Jimmy Hickey’s willy while the World’s Greatest Roadie took a surreptitious pee in a back alley. Yet there was a powerful will behind Sharon’s cheerful exterior, and no readiness to suffer fools. She was equal parts friendly fun-person and the most driven musician I’d ever met.

  Our first concerts were in the South of Ireland. Before the opening show in Wexford, Sharon peeked through the curtains and ran back into the dressing room exclaiming with surprise, ‘The audience is standing up!’ But if this was her introduction to rock’n’roll gigging, she took it in her stride. By the second night in Mallow she was a veteran, sitting between Wickham and me on a high stool, feet off the ground, smiling and laughing at the jumping front row of the crowd as she squeezed the magic out of her box.