Adventures of a Waterboy

by Mike Scott

  Next morning I was making lentil soup in the kitchen when Janette walked in holding the note and asked if it was from me. I said yes and, though mystified, she agreed to go for a drink with me that evening. We met in the Cluny lobby and walked through the woods to the bar of a nearby hotel. As soon as we sat down I declared myself. She was amazed. Far from expecting a suitor, she’d imagined she must have done something to offend this man she hardly knew, and that I wanted to tell her so; a logical supposition in the community culture, where ‘giving feedback’ was a common occurrence. She told me she felt flattered but that she ‘hadn’t thought of me that way’. It was a courteous refusal and after a pleasant conversation we walked back to Cluny, said goodbye in the lobby, and each headed off to our different parts of the building. I was deeply embarrassed to realise that all my romantic certainties must have been mistaken. How could I have been so sure and yet so wrong? In order to avoid Janette I didn’t go to the dining room for several days. Then one morning I bumped into her on the stairs. She stopped me and said she’d like to meet up again. Reluctantly, and thinking she was just being sorry for me, I agreed to meet her that night.

  When the hour came it was my turn to be amazed. She was dressed for a date, glamorous and elegant in flowing clothes, a symphony in brown, green and gold. As we strolled down the Cluny Hill driveway she took my arm and this time when we got to the pub she declared herself to me, saying that since our previous outing she’d found my face constantly appearing in her mind’s eye and that she wanted to give us a try. My declaration had worked! We conducted a magical courtship in Cluny, holding hands under the table at breakfast and lunch, kissing discreetly in the corridors, spending nights in Janette’s room, and bumping into each other with delight several times each day. In March we flew off for a dreamlike week in that most romantic of all cities, Venice, where we stayed in a sea-green room overlooking the lagoon, loved ardently, went for endless walks, first began to call each other ‘Darling’, and told each other our life stories in waterfront cafes.

  In April we moved into a cottage on Findhorn Bay and set up home. We had a front parlour overlooking the water, a tiny kitchen, and a bedroom with a window onto a whitewashed lane leading to the centre of the old village of Findhorn. There we witnessed our new love maturing into deep partnership. I’d been right after all: Janette was the one.

  In the cottage’s attic space, too low-ceilinged for me to even stand up straight, I created my smallest-ever music room and started writing songs articulating the experiences I’d had at Findhorn: ‘Bring ’Em All In’, ‘Long Way To The Light’, ‘Wonderful Disguise’. Soon I was ready to record an album that would tell the story of what I’d found.

  The previous year I’d met a recording engineer in New York called Niko Bolas, a handsome Greek-American with a skinful of attitude whose name I’d seen on a couple of Neil Young album covers. I hired Niko to record my B-sides for the singles off Dream Harder and it turned out to be a momentous session. He was a terrific catalyst: a no-nonsense bullshit-busting cheerleader. In a couple of days, with a raunchy pick-up band and Niko at the controls, I laid down ten cracking tracks, which had all the power and passion Dream Harder itself lacked. I wanted more of the same. But in keeping with the nature of my new songs I decided to play every instrument myself and record not in a big city studio but in the charged air of Findhorn. And amazingly the community had its own studio, a magical grotto in the basement of Universal Hall, built in the seventies. It was rarely used and its gear was prehistoric so we brought our own. Niko flew in from Los Angeles, having just fired himself from a Rod Stewart session (‘he asked me to do everything I hated’).

  Niko and Findhorn shouldn’t have gone well together but they did. Extroverted and stupendously tactless, Niko’s native repartee included bon mots such as, ‘It ain’t knockin’ my dick in the dirt’ (when something didn’t sufficiently impress him) and his customary greeting to, say, a fellow recording engineer was along the lines of, ‘Yo, man! That your mix playing? Sounds like a piece of shit!’ But he took to his new circumstances like a champ, cycling to Universal Hall each morning, attending meditations in the sanctuary, mucking in behind the bar at the hotel where he was berthed, and even going to a community lecture by a visiting Tibetan lama.

  Niko also made friends with the most unlikely people, including a local RAF crew who flew him illicitly across Scotland in a transport plane, making him spectacularly sick by doing loops and rolls over the Cairngorms. And a Swedish community member, a bearded intellectual called Stefan who noticed Niko’s fidgeting, antsy demeanour one morning and said to him, ‘So. Who was it?’

  ‘Who was what?’ retorted a bemused Niko.

  ‘Who drove you relentlessly as a boy’, replied Stefan, ‘to always excel, and turned you into the self-criticising, nervous lunatic I see before me now?’

  Niko stood stunned for a second, all the colour draining from his cheeks, then a smile cracked open his face and he broke out laughing.

  ‘Shit! That was my dad!’

  Niko was outrageously direct in the studio. He could tell me when a song didn’t quite make it (‘OK, now play me something with a chorus’) or indicate when I wasn’t nailing a performance (‘You suck today, man’). There was none of the let’s-mollycoddle-the-artist’s-feelings crap so many people in the music business deploy because they’re afraid of causing offence. And he had a cute, understated way of letting me know when I’d got it right. ‘You’re in the wrong room!’ he’d call cheerfully through the intercom while waving me through to the control booth. Best of all Niko recorded me as simply and directly as he communicated and the result was a clear, natural sound which absolutely suited the music.

  The experiment of recording in the community worked too. I was happy singing the songs in the atmosphere that had begot them, and something of the Findhornian aura found its way onto tape. There were drawbacks, however. The studio was sufficiently soundproofed to keep out the sounds of the planes taking off and landing at the neighbouring airbase, but not the sounds from the Hall auditorium above. These included Sacred Dance on Wednesday evenings with its familiar Balkan folksy burblings, Five Rhythms on a Monday (spacey new age dance grooves and clattering feet), and loudest of all the Dance Drama room on the other side of the studio wall, which hosted everything from aerobics to acting classes (shouts, mock-fights and very convincing screams). This was a far cry from the big city studios we were used to, where any distraction would be swiftly nuked by a phone call to the studio manager, but there was nothing we could do about it, and we accepted the mosaic of noise as the price of recording in a living, breathing community theatre.

  Halfway through making the album we received a visit from Jim Powers, my friend from the Chicago gospel church trip, who’d become an A&R man at Geffen Records. Poor Jim was despatched by the Geffen bosses to come and talk some sense into their wayward star and impress upon him the importance of delivering a commercial record with ‘three hit tracks that can get played on American FM radio’. This meant modern rock drums, lead guitar hooks and all the sonic paraphernalia of the grunge-centric mid nineties. Niko and I listened to Jim dutifully deliver his script in a café overlooking Findhorn Bay on a gorgeous Indian summer’s day, while clouds sailed regally across the blue northern skies and the mystery school of Cluny Hill brooded in the distance, and it was like hearing a bulletin from some old, half-forgotten nonsensical world.

  Though I received Jim’s entreaties with some sympathy for his position, I ignored them completely and kept right on making the music that was in my heart. When I delivered the finished album to Geffen in late 1994, it didn’t feature a single drumbeat. It was an almost wholly acoustic record: a despatch from my soul, yes, but a concoction with which the lumbering promotional machine of an American record company could seemingly do nothing. And to compound matters, I insisted on going solo in name. As there was only one person on the album, and all my current concert ambitions were based on the one-man show I’d tested at Univ
ersal Hall, I wanted to put out the record as Mike Scott. My Geffen contract stipulated I had to release all my work as The Waterboys, so I conferred with John Kennedy, still my trusty solicitor, and he suggested that if we spoke to Geffen in a language they understood they might let me have my way.

  Geffen were due to pay me a huge advance so Kennedy contacted them and offered to take a million-dollar cut if they’d let me release the album as Mike Scott. This was the right language indeed, for the change was promptly agreed and papers authorising it soon dropped through my cottage letterbox. The album was added to Geffen’s release schedule (they were bound by my water-tight deal to release whatever I gave them) but it was clear from the absence of communication coming across the time zones that they’d rather be rid of the whole thing. And me. I could understand this – my actions hadn’t made any sense to them for a couple of years now, if indeed they ever had. Kennedy’s canny advice was to wait till I received the balance of my recording advance and then negotiate to buy my way out of the contract: another million dollars. Once my freedom was secured we’d find a new record company who understood the acoustic Findhorn album and were willing to properly support it.

  With a record in the bag and Kennedy engaged in the delicate process of finessing my Geffen exit, I was ready to explore the prospect of touring from my base in Findhorn. In November 1994 I embarked on several short concert trips round Britain, my first anywhere in four years. I travelled bandless, accompanied only by Janette and a road crew from Glasgow, and on bare stages in small theatres I replicated the sound and atmosphere of my Universal Hall show, rediscovering my performance mojo along the way. Playing live night after night again was like breathing the fire of life. How could I have functioned without this for so long? Yes, I still wanted the life of the performer. Yes, I still wanted greatness. And I loved the freedom of being solo; I could take the music in any direction and throw in songs spontaneously without having to wonder if the band could play them. Perhaps best of all was the rekindling of my connection with the audience. The last time I’d met them, in the dimly remembered warzone of the Room To Roam tour, my back had been against the wall and the wind again me. Now, in calmer circumstances, we shared an intimate musical conversation.

  As the concerts progressed I noticed another desire rumbling inside, one I thought I’d lost somewhere back along the line – the yen for commercial success, as if now that I’d fulfilled a spiritual quest it was time to return and claim the things of the world. Soon I knew I’d want to make a band album, compete again with my peers and re-engage with the circus of publicity and stardom, but this time on my own terms and from my new perspective. And because in Findhorn there was none of the apparatus of my trade – managers, musicians, rehearsal studios, record companies – I’d have to move back to the city. After eighteen months the time in the mystery school was over and London beckoned. But London, rock’n’roll and Mike Scott had all changed in the ten years since I’d lived on Ladbroke Grove and made This Is The Sea. I would need my sense of humour, as well as all I’d learned in Findhorn, for I was about to embark on a mad rollercoaster ride through a depraved new world.

  Chapter 17: My Wanderings In The Weary Land

  I walk up the ramp of the Pyramid Stage as Ian McNabb calls out my name over the P.A. and the Glastonbury Festival crowd cheers. Ian’s backing band, unbelievably, is Neil Young’s Crazy Horse, with whom I shake hands with for the first time as I take the stage. Ralph Molina and Billy Talbot are grizzled Americans with the mark of the sixties on their faces, and there’s a younger dude too, Mikey, whose impossibly low-slung spare guitar I’m borrowing. I plug in, glance at the sea of faces, register the presence of the TV cameras, and await the count for the first number.

  Because I’ve just flown down from Scotland and couldn’t get to rehearsals I asked Ian to prepare ‘Glastonbury Song’ at a stately, slow-burning tempo, and to rock up the second number, ‘Preparing To Fly’. But as Ralph Molina counts in ‘Glastonbury’ I realise to my horror that Ian must have got the message mixed up and flipped the tempos. The groove is seriously fast. The intro melody sounds like The Pogues playing a jolly Irish reel and, fucking hell, I’m having to sing so speedily I can’t get all the words out. Somehow I make it to the end and catch my breath as Ian orchestrates one of those endless Crazy Horse outros, everyone gathered in a centre-stage huddle playing crash chords for what seems like forever.

  Then Molina leads us into ‘Preparing To Fly’, which, miraculously, is the right tempo. And with the full ragged power of the Crazy Horse rhythm machine we sounds immense; a steamrolling golden tumbleweed churning into infinity underpinned by the earth-shuddering thoom of Billy Talbot’s bass. In the midst of the sonic mayhem I look around me. The West Country hills are green, the punters are grooving, there’s an electric guitar in my hands and I’m back!

  Or so I think.

  I’d handled my own affairs since the demise of Dick Lackaday, and while I was in Findhorn there hadn’t been much for a manager to do, but with the move to London there soon would be. John Kennedy faxed me a list of possible candidates and I met several of them at the end of 1994. One was a chap called Dave Jaymes. His name stood out on the list because he spelt ‘Jaymes’ the same way as David Jaymes, bassist in the early eighties pop band Modern Romance. Back then, my punk rock prejudices had been severely challenged by this geezer, a preening, cheek-sucking, blonde-bobbed poseur at whom, every time he appeared on Top Of The Pops, my mate Joe Kingman and I would gleefully yell ‘BASTARD!’. But Kennedy didn’t think it wasn’t the same guy. And sure enough, when I met Dave and his business partner Diane in their office in Notting Hill he was nothing like the Modern Romance bassist. He was a dapper, dark-haired chap, sincere and enthusiastic, with a golly-gosh cockney accent and a firm, winning handshake. Janette accompanied me, Yoko-like, to all my meetings, and at this one something magical happened: we fell in love with Dave and Diane. As we talked, some alchemy, a kind of shared empathy, filled the room. Dave and Diane were a relatively inexperienced team but, moved by the encounter, I asked them to manage me.

  Kennedy meanwhile had extricated me from my Geffen contract, so Dave and Diane started touting my Findhorn album, titled Bring ’Em All In, to British record companies. In the spring of 1995 the field narrowed to Alan McGee’s Creation and my old label Chrysalis, now part of EMI. McGee told Dave and Diane the album was a work of ‘beautiful genius’ and they arranged for him to fly up to Glasgow, where Niko Bolas and I were doing final mixes. But McGee pulled out of the trip at the last minute, which my managers read as a portent of future flakiness. I’d only met McGee once, at a party seven years earlier where the sum total of our conversation consisted of him leaning into my ear and yelling above the sound system, ‘One day ah’m goan tae sign yew tae mah label, man! Fuckin’ brilliant!’, so I didn’t have an opinion about the guy other than a dim recall of Caledonian enthusiasm. But I was as perplexed as Dave and Diane when, a few days after cancelling his trip, McGee submitted a modest financial offer for Bring ’Em All In, which indicated that he expected sales to be low. Chrysalis on the other hand made a handsome offer, turned up for their meetings, and convinced Dave, at least, that they were the right home for me.

  I wasn’t so sure. When I walked into their offices the first thing I saw was a huge framed photo of Karl Wallinger, whose band World Party had been assigned to Chrysalis along with the rest of the Ensign acts in 1986 when Chris Blackwell had given me power of veto over Ensign’s sale. ‘Uh-oh,’ said my guts, ‘this is your old life. Steer clear.’ But I hadn’t yet learned to fully trust these inner promptings and I was swayed by the enthusiasm of the Chrysalis bosses, a convivial old music biz cove named Roy Eldridge and his intense label manager, Mike Andrews, who loved Bring ’Em All In and expected it to sell by the truckload. So I re-signed to Chrysalis in July 1995, and that month Janette and I left our Findhorn cottage and rented a pale pink four-storey house on Lansdowne Road in my old Notting Hill stomping ground. These were happy, o
ptimistic days – new record company, new management, and a powerful sense of purpose. But forty tons of karmic rain were about to come crashing down on my parade.

  For if it was one thing finding my inner groove in Findhorn’s conducive, meditative atmosphere, it was quite another doing it in the belly of the metropolis. Swept up in London’s juggernaut momentum I could hardly hear myself think, let alone discern the still small voice of my intuition. And it wasn’t just that I was beaming down from a pastoral mystery school; it was that London itself had changed. Everything seemed several degrees cruder, brasher and more … what would be the word? … loveless than I remembered. To my 1995 eyes London looked insane. In the ten years since I’d left the city had morphed into a playground of beer-bellied men with shirts hanging out and dyed blonde cropped hair in the style of troubled footballer Gazza, drinking in the open air and spilling across the streets like tribes of boorish overgrown babies. The cultural wars of the fifties and sixties were lost and the youth of the nation strode forth as identikit-clad, money-hungry business bastards. When I took my first look at British TV in a decade I saw a new generation of comedians who farted, swore and wove cruelty into their acts, using humiliation and vindictiveness to get their laughs and kicks like bullies I remembered from school. A plague of gossip and celebrity rags befouled the shelves of newsagents, the bastard spawn of Hello! magazine, all face-lifts, private hells and diet freaks packaged as superficial entertainment. And everywhere I looked huge billboards had materialised, bright-lit and cliché-ridden, dominating skylines and street views, for London had sold its soul and its civic spaces to the marketing industry. Living in the heart of the metropolis was like walking through a giant promo display.