by Mike Scott
Rory squeezes his pipes, emitting another bloodcurdling wail, and launches haphazardly into the tune. And as I strum along, watching the dance, it strikes me that this has got to be the most surreal moment of my life. Three years after my last show I’m somewhere in rural Scotland playing the Monty Python theme with bongos and bagpipes, while forty or fifty cheery foreigners frolic back and forth doing The Gay Gordons.
When things collapsed with Geffen, Dick Lackaday and New York, my next move was clear. Set up camp in the powerful atmosphere of the Findhorn community. This was a leap into the unknown, not just for me but also for rock’n’roll: basing a band’s centre of operations in a spiritual mystery school had never been done before, as far as I knew. And in the late summer of 1993 I dragged my poor wife Irene to Scotland with the intention of convincing her to live in Findhorn.
When I’d returned from my first visit a year before, spectacularly inspired and excited, and having made a U-turn from my usual diet of chicken and chips to nothing but vegetarian food, Irene thought I’d been brainwashed, and decried the community’s philosophy as ‘codswaddle’. And she wasn’t much happier now. We drove up through Scotland, checked into a local hotel and made daily excursions into the community, Irene reluctantly tagging along. I couldn’t get her near a meal in the community centre, though I managed to persuade her to take tea with a few friendly members in their wooden eco-houses. And after a week it was official – she wasn’t having any of it.
I accepted that Findhorn wasn’t for everyone, least of all my wife, and so we focussed instead on relocating to Dublin, which was close enough to Findhorn for me to visit regularly. We rented a house called Campanella, an ivy-draped gaff with a walled garden, a gate lodge and a ‘Napoleon room’ full of grim-looking busts of the Emperor, a few hundred yards down the hill from Bono in the posh ‘rockbroker’-belt suburb of Killiney. But it was a dark, cheerless time. People we knew kept dying and we seemed to be forever attending funerals, while the house, set deep in the shadow of a hill and facing eastwards over the Irish Sea, got about an hour of sunlight a day and was cold and frayed. And all the while Irene and I grew further apart, the gulf between us expanding as our desires and ambitions diverged. As for Dublin, it was still a city full of ghosts, even more than when I’d left for New York two years earlier. The Fellow Who Fiddles and Anto were long gone, Vinnie Kilduff and other pals had decamped west. I still heard the odd busker doing a Waterboys song in the city centre, but the old magic was gone, and in my heart so was I. My physical form may have been wandering Grafton Street but my imagination was roaming in the clear northern air of Findhorn. It was only a matter of time before I cut loose and in the first week of 1994, promising Irene I’d be back in spring, I flew to Findhorn to begin a three-month stay as a guest, living and working in the community.
The North of Scotland was spectacular the day I arrived: serene and inscrutable under a pristine carpet of snow, with endless sailor-blue skies and barely a wisp of wind. I was billeted in the community’s main guest enclave, Cluny Hill College, a massive Victorian mansion, once a spa hotel, that nestled on the flanks of a pine-forested hill a few miles from the main campus at Findhorn. The taxi rattled up a curling driveway past cliff-side gardens covered in snow, then swung right. The College stood before us, gothic and sprawling like a great grey dragon, bright and stone-glistening in the winter sun.
‘Cluny’ was the very embodiment of the mystery school, a secret place set apart from the bustle of the world. It brooded in its hillside location like a fortress, cloistered by the deep woods. Its public spaces – long pale green corridors, quiet lounges and a majestic dining room – vibrated with a tangible meditative presence, a kind of buzzing stillness. Guests arrived every Saturday, some staying a week, some like me for longer, and around forty full-time Findhorn members lived there. A flotilla of cheerful white minibuses ferried people between Cluny and the main community site several times a day.
I’d stayed in Cluny once before, on a weeklong stay at the end of 1992, six weeks after my first visit, and I was beginning to find my place in the Findhorn universe. The community may have been a conglomeration of a few hundred souls gathered in a caravan park and a converted hotel, yet its imaginal space seemed limitless. Dozens of spiritual disciplines from East and West were practised here, and layers of knowledge and experience seemed to hang in the very air. It was like the bookshelves of Foyle’s Philosophy Room turned into a living village. Or a spiritual Spiddal, with the deeper wisdom crackling in the atmosphere around me just as the rarefied wavelength of the Gaelic language did in the west of Ireland.
I’d also begun to get the range of the Findhornian ‘contacting God inside’ philosophy, at least as it applied to me. Two things had happened. During my 1992 visit I’d experienced what that hackneyed phrase ‘an open heart’ really means. I’d done a lot on deep meditation work that year, and after three days in the spiritual hothouse atmosphere of Cluny I felt my heart begin to ‘come on’, as if I’d taken some kind of drug. The feeling was of a fire in the centre of my chest, emotional, physical and metaphysical all at once; tender yet at the same time incredibly powerful, like all the loves of my life rolled into one. And then some. I was enfolded in a wave of intense lovingness and awareness that lasted a week, a kind of transfiguration that left me changed and seeing the world through new eyes. For the first time I witnessed everything as it really is, part of a vast functioning system beyond the capacity of my mind to grasp but all looped and bound together with love and purpose. I recognised human society as a crazy dysfunctional thing that even with all its madness somehow played its perfect role in a far bigger picture. I could feel compassion for everyone and knew beyond doubt that under the surface, beneath the contrivance of all personas and disguises, we all had the same needs: to love and be loved, to feel useful and valued. What I was experiencing, I now know, was a classic spiritual heart-opening, an initiation undergone by countless seekers of all disciplines and hues both before and after me. I had found the central secret of The Mysteries in my own heart, and its name was Love.
When I returned in January 1994 there wasn’t a repeat of this heart-fire experience, but there was something else. After a couple of weeks I noticed a subtle inner will constantly directing me. I knew this reflex from my songwriting, the itch in my soul that impelled me to choose a particular line of lyric or twist of melody. Now I recognised that this inner prompting, my intuition, had been active at crux moments of my life: when I felt the impulse to befriend Z, when I walked away from Kate Lovecraft, when I first heard the playing of Steve or Anto. It had been present too when I’d made some of my worst decisions, and those, I realised, were the times I’d ignored it. Now, in the mystery school of Findhorn, I learnt that this guiding impulse was always available. If I bypassed the bustle of my mind and the clamour of my emotions I could feel it quietly directing me. Then all I had to do was trust it. There was nothing exotically mystical about this, and it pretty much equated to ‘if it feels right, do it, and if it doesn’t, don’t’, but the realisation that I was free to act when something felt right inside was deeply liberating after decades of basing decisions on mental calculations, fears or blind hope. And though it would take me years to integrate it into my daily life as a functioning modus operandi, and there would be slip-ups and fuck-ups along the way, I’d found my inner groove.
Such a process of getting real with myself meant a lot of changes, and a big one was accepting that I wanted to split with Irene. This had been a long time coming. I still cared for Irene but the marriage was going nowhere. I needed to forge my own trail and in early February I returned to Dublin to tell her. For two afternoons we sat in the gloomy lounge at Campanella and like negotiators on a knife-edge worked through the terms of the split, emotional and financial. Then I got in a taxi to Dublin Airport and flew back to Scotland.
All that winter I lived on the top floor of Cluny in a room overlooking woodlands and green hills. My days began around 7am. I’d meditate si
tting on a chair by my bed, then go downstairs to the sanctuary, a sparklingly silent room with tall windows, once the billiards parlour in Cluny’s previous incarnation as a hotel. ‘Morning sanctuary’ was optional and every day between ten and thirty people gathered for a group meditation lasting twenty minutes, sometimes silent, sometimes with instructions like the ‘sending light’ meditation I’d already experienced. Then I’d have breakfast in the cathedral-like dining room, sitting at a table with friends or strangers, the sounds of cutlery and conversation in our ears, early morning sunlight blazing through the bay windows.
Twice a week I took the ten-minute bus ride to Findhorn and spent all morning with the community garden team, donning gumboots, digging, gritting icy footpaths or collecting seaweed on nearby beaches. The rest of the time I worked in the Cluny kitchen, at first humbly chopping carrots and spuds, gradually progressing to accomplished soup-smith and pizza maker. I was part of an eclectic crew that included a passionate Dane called Neils who played loud opera music on the kitchen hi-fi first thing in the morning and said admirable things like, ‘May we never have another boring moment in our lives!’, a good-looking Swiss lady named Anita, and Wolfgang, a gentle German fellow who was curious about my life in music and asked me if I really knew U2.
For the truth about my day job had begun to slip out. I knew this for sure when I was in the community centre one lunchtime and fell into conversation with an Irish lady who remarked, ‘Have you heard there’s some kind of pop star living up at Cluny?’ After a second of confusion (I hadn’t noticed anyone like that) I realised the pop star was me. I wasn’t the first interloper from the world of show business to descend on Findhorn. Several people more famous than me had already showed up, but Shirley MacLaine and Van Morrison, who visited separately in the eighties, had come as their celebrated selves for day trips and only got a tourist’s eye view of the community. I asked Van about his visit some years later and all he remembered was ‘a bunch of old hippies’. It must have been the spectacles he was wearing. Burt Lancaster on the other hand, passing through in the late seventies, enrolled in a Findhorn programme and worked in the community. I suspect he also found, like me, that star status in the outside world didn’t automatically translate into opportunity and admiration in the parallel universe of Findhorn.
The community members took visitors as they found them. I learned this when I offered to perform at one of the regular Friday night concerts known as ‘sharings’. The organiser, a fearsome American lesbian called Patsy, told me I could have three minutes of performance time and no more. Relishing the prospect of surprising Patsy and her fellow organisers by being unexpectedly good, I chose a song which fit the prescribed length and let it rip on stage. But if I was expecting to win instant acclaim from the Findhorn audience, I was wrong. The applause was fair to middling and I was roundly upstaged by a comedy fashion-show given by the builders’ group, a motley parade of men in drag, G-strings and feather-strewn crash helmets, which drew from the scattered crowd all the enthusiasm my slot hadn’t. But I’d been noticed. Next day there was a little folded-up message for me on the Cluny noticeboard from one Rory O., inviting me to play guitar with the community ceilidh band. A swift rehearsal later I found myself pressed into service playing reels, strathspeys and the whole surreal glory of the Monty Python theme at the Findhorn Burns Night.
Being a community musician hadn’t been on my list of ambitions, but it was an unexpected consequence of my Findhorn odyssey. After the ceilidh I was asked to back all kinds of community singers, usually women. These included Nikki (willowy English rose with earnest songs), Diana (classy American singer with a penchant for showbiz numbers) and Julia (intense German lady who delivered, with great gusto, a Sarajevo women’s anthem she’d learned during a visit to the war-torn Bosnian city). It was a novelty being on stage without the pressure of being the star and I took to my new role with relish. For the first time I learned repertoires of other people’s songs and played the supportive sideman, and because I was backing amateurs, I had to learn how to sheath my onstage energy – my job was to let each singer shine, not overshadow them.
These concerts, like the ‘sharing’ I first guested at, were all in Universal Hall, the five-sided edifice I’d been stunned by on my first night in Findhorn. The Hall had a peculiar aura: used for performances, conferences, and community meetings, its atmosphere fell somewhere between a hallowed temple of the arts and a futuristic new age congress. And it was a highly exposed environment in which to work. Performers were on floor level surrounded by banked seating, and the community atmosphere dispelled the usual mystique and distance between artist and audience. Performing at Universal Hall was like stepping out on a high wire and the only way to keep balance was to be authentic. Any artifice or pretension was fatal.
This intensity blended comically with the inept. Despite its neo-Atlantean grandeur, Universal Hall was a local theatre deep in the provinces run by amateurs on a shoestring. Microphones failed, the sound system flipped on and off mid-performance, cats or children would wander on stage and once I even experienced that most cruel of onstage mishaps: the slack-jointed microphone stand that progressively tilts downwards through the duration of a song, rendering the luckless performer, by number’s end, a knee-buckled, shoulder-arched hunchback, desperately trying to make the enforced posture look deliberate. I also had to be my own roadie: there was no Jimmy Hickey now to string my guitar or scurry on stage if something went wrong. But all this was good for my rock star ego. Any lingering tendencies I had towards performers’ afflictions, such as self-aggrandisement or a yen to take myself too seriously, were roundly punctured in the crucible of the Hall.
At Friday night concerts I’d sing my own compositions, serious new songs like ‘What Do You Want Me To Do?’ or comedic numbers poking fun at community life. I was in good company. There was a tradition of lampooning at Findhorn and a talented troupe of comedians – Americans Rolf and Marietta, Jordi from Spain and a dry-witted Aussie called Peter Z – would roast the community for its idiosyncrasies every Friday. Targets included the tendency of members to wear purple, the perennial presence of parsnips on the dinner menu and individuals who used ostentatious meditation postures to show how ‘spiritual’ they were. Soon my increased profile meant I could command two songs a time at sharings, a Findhornian measure of success, and in the late spring of 1994 I finally did my own solo concert where I showed the community what I did for a living.
It was strange playing as a one-man band to an audience so totally different from a rock crowd. There was nowhere to hide, no moment when I wasn’t the focus of attention, and the community members weren’t cognoscenti with a grounding in the rock’n’roll I’d grown up with or the roots music I’d played in Ireland. They were people from many different cultures with casual musical tastes that tended to the conservative (pop, classical and singer/songwriters) or the far out (hypnotic new-age sounds and ethnic fare from India, Africa or Tibet). From my experience of Friday night shows I knew the songs that would make most sense in this context would be the ones that carried the deepest personal and emotional charge. The man standing alone with all safety nets and boundaries removed, I figured, was most effective when he dug inside and sang from the soul. But sustaining this level of intimacy for a full show was a new trick for me, and as I played my set – a mix of new songs and numbers from Waterboys albums – the mood in the Hall was strangely restrained. I played for seventy-five minutes in a pin-drop atmosphere, the songs punctuated by polite, quickly dissipating smatterings of applause. I had no idea what the audience was thinking until, as the last chord of the last song faded away, the place erupted into a blaze of applause, whoops and stomping feet. The show was a stupendous success! In the basement dressing room post-encore, with the Findhornians still stomping upstairs as wildly as any rock audience, I knew I’d struck on a new way of performing and that soon I’d take it out into the world.
After this my star shone brightly in the Findhorn firmament
and I found myself called on to sing at holidays, funerals, weddings and, most of all, charity shows. For as soon as it became clear I could pull an audience, I got asked to do every benefit gig going. Everyone at Findhorn seemed to have a pet project. I played for the Nepal Trust (providing health care for families in the Himalayas), Ecologia (housing orphans in the former USSR), the local Steiner School (educating the community kids, perpetually short of funds), and even for the restoration of the Hall’s grand piano. But my one-man show had another quite unexpected side effect: a local paper got wind of the performance and before you could say ‘codswaddle’ a national tabloid sent a muck-raking journalist and sidekick snapper-stooge to dig up the dirt on the rock star who’d given it all up and joined a commune. I’d just moved into a little fisherman’s cottage by Findhorn Bay, my three-month residency in Cluny having come to its end, when these two characters knocked on the door and asked me all kinds of questions with a dubious relationship to reality.
The story appeared as a double-page spread in the following week’s Scottish Sunday Mail (with a spin-off feature making it to the front page of the now-defunct News Of The World), and was an imaginative work of fiction wonderfully titled ‘Cult Saves Rock Star From Drinks Hell’. The writer had read an old interview in which I’d talked about giving up drink some years earlier and wove this into the article, making it look like I’d come to Findhorn to dry out, as if the community were some kind of new-age rehab centre. To support this premise, the article carried a decade-old photo that showed me sitting with a glass of water, mischievously captioned to suggest I’d been putting away multiple neat vodkas. The only thing the tabloid journos got right was the mention of a ‘mysterious barefoot lady’ who opened the door of my cottage. For there was a new love in my life. Janette was a Findhorn member, originally from Glasgow, who facilitated workshops and led dance classes. At first I’d admired her from afar across the Cluny dining room or caught my breath as I passed her in the corridors. In stolen glimpses during the daily life of the community, Janette impinged on my consciousness little by little and, without ever knowing it, took over my heart. I was convinced Janette was the one, my future ally, collaborator, lover and best friend, the partner-woman of my life. I’d been wrong about such things before, but this time I was deeply certain. I could feel it in my guts as sure as breathing. I asked my kitchen colleague Anita what the community protocol was when a man wanted to meet a woman. She told me to leave Janette a message on the noticeboard asking for a chat, then simply tell her how I felt. This was a few million degrees more upfront than I was used to being, but I did it, gingerly sticking my little folded-up scrap of paper on the ‘J’ space of the Cluny noticeboard late one Friday night.
