Adventures of a Waterboy

by Mike Scott

  Semi-traumatised by my ‘holiday’ in Kerry, and with Seamus Begley’s box melodies hurtling like wild horses around my head, I returned to Dublin for Waterboys rehearsals and a week later we embarked on a tour of the USA and Canada.

  We hadn’t played North America for four years and our music and the group had changed so utterly since our last visit that it was like a different band. But Fisherman’s Blues had preceded us so the punters knew something of what to expect, and our twenty-two shows in thirteen cities had sold out fast. I felt confident as I boarded the flight to Toronto. I was queasy though that Kate Lovecraft might still be sitting in a Manhattan loft with a crystal ball, eavesdropping on the contents of my mind or planning a dramatic entrance. But when we rolled into New York a week later Kate didn’t show, and several very welcome old friends did. Jay Dee Daugherty brought his kit and for our encore at the Beacon Theatre we executed the old ‘Keltner and Ringo at the Concert For Bangladesh’ manoeuvre with two drummers kicking up a storm. Marco Sin, who’d survived his near-death experience in 1985 and was now straight as an arrow and healthy as a redwood tree, stepped up to strum guitar, and Donal Lunny and Philip King, in town on their own musical business, added bouzouki, mouth organ and moustaches to an all-hands-on-deck finale of ‘This Land Is Your Land’. The set was drawn mostly from Fisherman’s Blues, with the addition of folk stompers like ‘The Raggle Taggle Gypsy’ and new numbers slated for the next album. But we also played several from This Is The Sea. Some, like ‘The Whole Of The Moon’ and ‘Old England’, were rearranged to include Sharon’s box, while for rockers like ‘Be My Enemy’ we morphed into an electric blues band while Sharon took a break.

  I got to know Sharon a lot better during our month in America. She may have been the most driven musician in Ireland, but she was still a young girl on her first long tour, and the only girl in a band with six men at that. As bandleader I felt a responsibility to pal up with her and make sure she was OK. Every morning I’d arrange to meet her for breakfast and in a nearby diner we’d chat over bacon and home fries while she told me about her life: the farm she grew up on in County Clare, her horses, the local school where she’d been affectionately nicknamed ‘the dreaded S.S.’ and how as a child she practised in the kitchen with her two musician sisters and brother all at the same time, each playing a different tune oblivious to the others in a mad cacophony. Sharon was great company and sharp as a whip, and with her natural authority I could tell she’d make a good bandleader one day. Late one night I came upon her, John Dunford and Jimmy Hickey in a hotel corridor. They hadn’t noticed me and I watched amused as Sharon, five foot tall in her dungarees, clapped her hands like a bossy playmate to summon John and Jimmy to attention, while the two grizzled road warriors rallied to her like a pair of big soft dogs. The instant she saw me she dropped her hands and reverted to the unassuming Sharon I knew, without missing a beat.

  We continued to play anywhere at anytime, unerringly locating in each city the best Irish or Scottish music bar for an after-hours stramash: the Plough & Stars in San Francisco, the Cat & Fiddle in Hollywood, Glocca Morra in New York. And musical pals, sometimes met for the first time the night before, guested with us on stages across the continent. This practice reached its climax in L.A. where we were joined by The Scottish Fiddlers Of Los Angeles, a wonderfully rag-tag collection of exiled Scots and assorted misfits in a riot of tartan outfits. I’d learned the slow air ‘Carolan’s Welcome’, which we’d recorded in Spiddal, from one of their albums and I invited them to perform it with us at the Wiltern Theatre as our opening number.

  I took the stage on my own, sat down at the piano, and played the first line of the courtly melody. Colin Blakey emerged from the shadows to accompany me with whistle for the next two lines. Then as we played the fourth and final line of the round, Steve and Sharon walked on holding their fiddles followed by Anto with his sax. But if the audience thought this was the band they had a surprise coming, for another fiddler appeared, then another, then another in a long procession until twenty costumed fiddlers had taken their places in a line along the front of the stage. Bang on cue they struck bow for the second round of the melody, sounding like a ragged Celtic orchestra from the seventeenth century.

  Our guests spent the rest of the concert lurking colourfully round the wings before rejoining us for another bash in the encore, during which I noticed one of their number, a dapper little man called Hank who wasn’t Scottish at all, playing along with a set of bones, making a loud clackerty-clack that stuck out over the music. Spurred by some mysterious instinct I laid down my guitar, picked up a bodhrán and started beating out a Bo Diddley beat. All the instruments dropped out leaving Hank and me centre stage duelling on bodhrán and bones. Hank started soft-shoe shuffling in his white shirt and baggy black pants, turning little pirouettes and mugging furiously in the spotlight as the crowd roared him on. I knew I was beaten and took a few steps back, ceding the stage to him as he spun in triumph, a pint-sized toreador, bones held high, snapping and clackerty-clacking in the air. If anyone in the theatre was still waiting for Waterboys rock numbers like ‘The Pan Within’ or ‘Red Army Blues’, they must have thought they’d stumbled into a different space/time continuum.

  On New Year’s Eve we played the best venue in the world: Barrowland Ballroom in Glasgow. Barrowlands, as everyone called it, had one of those old sprung floors which made the audience bounce up and down, and its ceiling was so low that the crowd’s energy was reflected back at them, setting up a perpetual flow of power till the place was almost exploding. And on Hogmanay of all nights the atmosphere was mental. The band and crew wore kilts, with Sharon Shannon cute in a feathered toorie hat, and as midnight approached, Wickham and I stood in the eye of the inferno and played Robert Burns’s immortal ‘A Man’s A Man For A’ That’. When 1990 struck it was as if a bomb of joy went off; we strummed the opening chords to ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and the broad-shouldered bouncers in the safety pit below burst into life, reaching across the barriers to grab audience members and link arms in a spontaneous and urgent expression of brotherhood. Every voice in Barrowlands rose in song, all those mad ecstatic Glaswegians gieing it laldy. Then as the last chord of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ rang out a platoon of the Glasgow Police Pipe Band marched onstage in full costume, seven feet tall in their busbies, playing a massive skirling reel as the place went mental all over again.

  We flew back to Ireland on New Year’s Day and began preparations for our new album. I had high dreams for this one – nothing less than the merging of pop and trad, the reunion of British and Irish rock music with its own indigenous culture: a roots Sgt Pepper. The blending had already taken place in the band; all we had to do now, I figured, was capture it on a magical record. And if the ethnic music of Scotland and Ireland got shoehorned back into the popular mainstream as a side effect, that would be the icing on the cake. I wasn’t asking for much. And to make the record that would effect this musical revolution we needed the right setting. The Spiddal House recordings had taken place in Connacht, the western of Ireland’s four provinces, and I’d got it into my head that this time I wanted to record in the southern province of Munster, Sharon and Begley’s land, the ancient seat of Irish poetry and music. So Irene and I spent a week visiting castles and stately homes across the region, and even a house on the West Cork coast in a place with the tantalising name of Seven Heads, one for each member of the band. But nothing we saw beat Spiddal House, so Munster was forgotten and John Dunford did another deal with Mavis.

  Returning to Spiddal after two years was a different experience. We weren’t explorers heading into the unknown anymore: we were part of the scenery ourselves. And it was a bigger operation this time, with a security team, carpenters, maintenance men and assistant engineers. The effect was like returning to the frontier after settlers have moved in and civilised it; the scenery was the same but the excitement and edge were gone.

  We had a new producer too. After Fisherman’s Blues I didn’t want the responsibili
ty again, so we hired Barry Beckett, an American who’d made his name with the Muscle Shoals studio band of the late sixties and co-produced Dylan’s Slow Train Coming ten years later. I loved the sound of that album and figured Barry was simply a guy who understood music and musicians, and that would do for us. He flew into Ireland, a thickset man, genial and slow, with a walrus moustache, a cool Southern air and about as little idea of what he was getting into as I’d had on my way to produce Cooney & Begley. After rehearsing our new songs under Barry’s watchful eye in Dublin we headed westward, but the West was another world, one without the creature comforts Nashville record producers were used to, and poor Barry, like Jay Dee Daugherty before him, found himself in a phone-less bungalow up a rustic country lane overlooking sea, fields and bog-land.

  Barry took this stoically though his patience was strained by the time it took our crew to install the studio, which had to be done from scratch. While hammers banged and saws whistled Barry wandered the house and gardens for several days muttering, ‘When are we gonna start cutting?’ Finally the great day came and we began ‘cutting’, but to the band’s alarm we discovered Barry had very different ideas from us. We expected to play all together, live and easy, like we always did, a raggle-taggle orchestra, but after listening to our rehearsals Barry declared he wanted us to lay down bass, drums and my rhythm guitar first, then overdub the other instruments afterwards.

  This spoilt our fun because part of the magic was what happened when we played all together, but as he was the producer we swung with it. But soon there was another pill to swallow. Barry had an electronic metronome, a palm-sized box that emitted a nasty high-pitched ‘beep’. He’d tap it as we played and it would log the song’s speed or tempo. Before each subsequent performance he’d switch on the beeper, playing back a ‘beep-beep-beep’ at the logged tempo to which we’d then start playing, so ensuring we’d always start the song at an identical speed. The problem with this was twofold: we hated the unmusical sound of the beeper; and we didn’t always want to play a song at the same speed. Barry’s distant predecessor Bob Johnston had encouraged me to set the groove and tempo of a song according to my mood in the moment, start playing, and have the band take the feel from me. That was still the model we used, and conforming to the rigid tempo of Barry’s ‘beeper’ took some more of the fun out of playing.

  After several days Noel Bridgeman and I took action. We snuck into Spiddal House in the middle of the night and found the beeper where Barry had left it on the mixing desk. There it lay, the little bastard, gleaming satanically in the moonlight ready for the next day’s persecution of the band. Noel pocketed it and we buried it deep in the Spiddal House grounds where for all I know it beeps to this day, heard by no human ear.

  Next morning Barry was perplexed not to find the beeper and went hunting room to room till at last he realised foul play had been employed. He sat us down in a big circle and said in his slow Alabama accent, ‘Now I know someone has hidden my beeper. I’m not angry but I want to know who it was.’ Seven faces held seven deadpan expressions. No confession was made. Barry accepted the inevitable and from then on we played the songs at our own chosen speeds.

  Each night after work we went down to the village for a late drink and often after the pub closed we’d go back to one of the band’s houses for a session. One night we were joined by Charlie Lennon and some friends. They started playing in the kitchen, always the best-sounding room in a house, and knowing Barry would appreciate the music I ran and fetched him from his bungalow. Barry loved it all right but mistakenly thought the presence of the big-time record producer would intimidate the musicians. Even if they’d known Barry’s history, the boys wouldn’t have been perturbed. Their view was that the Yank was welcome to listen, whoever he was. But Barry, deliciously misreading the situation, made the classic trad music faux pas of clapping loudly at the end of each tune then saying things like, ‘Don’t you worry about the ol’ record producer sittin’ here. Haw-haw! Just you keep right on playing and don’t mind a thing. You’re doin’ great, haw haw!’ A silent mirth was transmitted eye to eye around the room.

  Barry may have blown the protocol in the after-hours session but he knocked spots off us in the studio. His insistence that we record using overdubs, and the light this process shone on what each musician played, had an unexpected effect: it exposed fault lines in our sound. When I heard the music stripped down I realised that beneath the orchestral impact of the full ensemble, so persuasive in concert, there was a lot of odd stuff going on. People were playing wrong melodies, harmonies were off and there were tuning issues between instruments. More worryingly, the grand experiment of merging rock and trad wasn’t working. Stretched between two cultures, the music was being compromised; songs that needed a tough, ballsy treatment, like ‘A Life Of Sundays’, were being played too soft. Others, like ‘Something That Is Gone’, which needed a spare minimalist setting, had too many elements; sometimes accordion, fiddle or flute, or all three, simply didn’t suit a composition. In my zeal to blend the worlds, I’d neglected the needs of the songs. This necessitated a hasty reorganising of the music, with the result that several songs featured smaller groups of players. Often it was Sharon, the most traditional musician, who had to sit out, but sometimes it was Blakey, Anto, or even The Fellow Who Fiddles, my fellow walker between musical worlds, the sonic glue around whom the whole cross-cultural experiment revolved.

  Matters were compounded several weeks into the sessions when Anto, Trevor and John Dunford asked me to take over the production from Barry. The band felt Barry didn’t understand the Irish/Celtic side of the music and they wanted a more familiar hand at the tiller. So I spoke to Barry and he agreed to let me deal with the musicians one-on-one while he stepped back into the role of overseer. Roles duly shuffled we got on with the job and there were moments of inspiration, like when Blakey played a psychedelic fuzz flute solo at the climax of ‘A Life Of Sundays’. Or when we turned Anto’s sax solo on ‘Something That Is Gone’ backwards to discover a gorgeously weird sonic ballet that perfectly suited the mood of the song. But these were rear-guard victories in a lost war. As the album neared completion it was clear that my dream of merging trad and pop in a rootsy Sgt Pepper was busted. Room To Roam, as it was titled, was a mixed-up curio of a record: a musical kaleidoscope that had its charms but wasn’t quite in focus. And my beautiful seven-piece band was doomed. Whatever the long-term future of Waterboys music was, I knew it wasn’t this. Anto had been right: the winds had changed.

  And more was broken. Steve Wickham had gone through a painful divorce and by the time we finished Room To Roam he’d gradually withdrawn into himself, becoming a shadow presence in the band. All his joy and mischief, his very fellow-who-fiddles-ness vanished. Even his trademark holey hat was gone, taken by the ex-wife. At first I tried to give Steve space to work out his emotions, then when he just grew more distant I tried to find out what was going on, but he was unresponsive and closed to me in a way he hadn’t been before. My friend, it seemed, was lost, and I couldn’t reach him.

  We lost Doug D’Arcy too, our champion, when he was fired from Chrysalis. Then, towards the end of the recordings, former Waterboy Karl Wallinger, giving a series of press interviews for his new album, slagged me off for ‘hiding in Ireland for three years’ and cajoled me to ‘stop being an Irish git’. Perhaps he meant it lightly, or maybe there were deeper emotions at work, but his statements coincided with a wider perception in the music media that The Waterboys had taken a blind alley. Coming from someone who’d been in the band, Karl’s comments provided a focal point around which these perceptions coalesced and like the first shot of the hunting season, they proclaimed open fire on The Waterboys. Room To Roam was going to meet with a tough critical response, I knew, for it was all the things people were ready to pan us for: mellow, made in Ireland, Celtic and otherworldly. The aura of promise and momentum that had surrounded The Waterboys for five or six years was about to be shattered.

  But fuc
k ’em all, we still had a tour to do, an album to serve up, and fifty sold-out concert halls waiting in the cities of Europe and North America. And I had other things on my mind: I was getting married to Irene. We’d set the date for 14 June and were spliced in a registrar’s office on Molesworth Street in Dublin, she in white beaded dress, me in a dark blue double-breasted suit, just purchased. Steve and Anto were the best men and as we left the building they raised their fiddle and mandolin at the door, making an arch for bride and groom to walk under as confetti rained down.

  The reception was in a country house hotel in the foothills of the Wicklow Mountains and everyone made their way there in a convoy. The first thing Irene said to me as we got into our chauffeur-driven car was, ‘I think I’ll keep my maiden name,’ which wasn’t the best start. Anto compounded matters by slipping me a reefer through the window before we drove off, which I casually smoked all the way to Wicklow. Deliberately or not, Anto had made it about three times as strong as any reefer I’d ever had, and by the time we drove up to the grand hotel forty minutes later, I was as smoked as a kipper. The first person I met when we disembarked was my new brother-in-law Vinnie Flynn, a cheerful, no-nonsense County Dublin farmer who’d married Irene’s sister Mouse a year before. When I told him how stoned I felt he said, ‘Ah, don’t worry. It doesn’t matter how much you drink or smoke on your wedding day, you won’t be able to get out of it. You’ll be fine.’ This sage advice worked like a trick and my equilibrium returned. And it was true: no matter how much I drank on my wedding day I didn’t get drunk.