Adventures of a Waterboy

by Mike Scott

  To escape from horror, the saying goes, bury yourself in it, and there was nothing to do but dig in and get on with the job of promoting my record. But how to explain where I’d been and what I’d done to a sceptical media to whom the esoterics of somewhere like Findhorn were beyond any comprehension? I accepted the challenge gamely, struggling for the language that would express my experiences in a manner intelligible to hard-boiled NME journalists or speed-talking DJs without my sounding like a lunatic. And sometimes I even managed it. Running parallel was the realisation that my status was diminished without the charisma of the Waterboys name. Mike Scott meant little by comparison, and I recognised how successful I’d been throughout my career in camouflaging myself behind the Waterboys brand. I was in a position the opposite of the ‘star gravity’ I remembered from the days of This Is The Sea, when I was a music business supernova about to burst into flame and my entrance to a room would change its atmosphere; or the era of Fisherman’s Blues when my arrival on any Dublin scene would magnetise all attention in my direction. Now I was just some dimly remembered guy, an impression confirmed by the number of entry-level interviews I found myself doing with obscure cable TV channels, and from the shrunken coverage I got in newspapers and music magazines.

  Rock’n’roll was a changed landscape too. I was deposited as if from a spacecraft into a world I hardly recognised. Most of our contemporary bands of the eighties were gone, including all the best ones – The Clash, the Bunnymen, The Smiths – while Mick Hucknall and Geordie Michael were global superstars. How had that happened? Only the renewed success of Paul Weller seemed logical, as if the world was still spinning on its right axis. Even the music I’d picked up on during my still-recent spell in New York was looking old: grunge was passé and Kurt Cobain, as they say in Glasgow, was deid as the day is long. And a pantheon of new, dark-browed musical godlings was on the rise: the thuggish-but-melodic brothers Gallagher, intellectual barrow-boy Damon Albarn, and Richard Ashcroft, a cadaverous stick insect bringing back speed-freak chic with his band The Verve. The scene struck me as a warped twist on the mid sixties just before psychedelia hit; the days of ‘Paint It Black’, mods, greasers and the pomp of Tamla Motown. If I’d been twenty I’d have known where to pitch myself and my music in relation to this retro-hedonistic topography, preferably in a position to rip it down. But I was a name and face from a recent past that was itself busy being ripped down. And more than that: having parachuted in from a mystery school with a headful of songs about inner experiences and mysticism I was hopelessly out of step with the times. Cosmic drug explorers apart, there was no archetype in rock’n’roll for ‘seeker returning with news from the unknown’ for me to play with. I couldn’t work out where to insert myself into the picture.

  Nor could I figure out my sartorial style. Confounded as to whether I should look like a star or a regular person, I would overdress to compensate for my confusion, walking round London rehearsal rooms in flash clothes while everyone else was in trainers and t-shirts. It’s easy to dress down when the world wants to know you. I’d spent 1987 dressing like a scarecrow while a huge audience wondered what my next move would be. Now, with diminished status and a wardrobe of Versace gear, I couldn’t seem to stop dressing up. This tendency reached its apogee at a show in Edinburgh where I wore the nightmare rig-out of spotted jacket, striped trousers, hooped socks and a checked shirt. I was finally cured when I turned up at BBC radio in a pair of plush velvet trousers with a glittery spangle. DJ Mark Radcliffe, amused that I should wear such luxurious pants for a radio show where no one could see me, roasted me on air, commenting in his withering Lancashire brogue, ‘I bet you don’t do the gardening in those.’

  Meanwhile, as if in a weird dream, I found myself invited to perform on Christian youth TV programmes. The producers of these breezy Sunday morning shows knew I was singing about spirituality from a perspective other than theirs and extended the hand of brotherhood across the metaphysical divide, which was admirable, and I agreed to appear because I liked the idea of infiltrating mainstream religious broadcasting with my heretical, gnostic songs about The Mysteries. But my fifth-columnist efforts had an undesired result: most people tuning in just thought I’d become some kind of Christian rocker.

  Things weren’t going at all as I’d envisaged when I’d left my Findhorn eyrie, and when the single of ‘Bring ’Em All In’ got hardly any radio play and didn’t chart, a doom threatened to descend on my team. But it dropped big-time the day the album was released. I was in New York, getting ready to perform a show, when I got a phone call in my hotel room telling me Roy Eldridge and Mike Andrews had been fired. My mental picture of working with these guys for years of campaigns, tours and follow-up albums burst into smithereens as I stood with the receiver to my ear. I knew such things happened to artists: your allies at the label get the boot and you have to work for the rest of your contract with new people who may have no feeling for your music. Now it was happening to me, which was tough enough, but coming on the day of my album’s release it was a catastrophe. And a creepy catastrophe: the EMI bosses behind the firing must have monitored the situation for a while – these guys don’t just piss in the wind – and would have known the axe was set to fall when they authorised my contract eight weeks earlier.

  On our return to London, Dave, Diane, Janette and I went, like a confused, bereaved family, for an audience with the EMI division chief. J.F. Cecillon was a lewd Frenchman with crafty eyes and a sharp line in the kind of frothy repartee the music business loves (‘I will not zleep till I ’ave a number one’). J.F. was detailed to steer Chrysalis till a new label boss was chosen, and sat purring in his office like a great fat cat, receiving the parade of shell-shocked managers anxiously wondering what future their artists had under the new regime. He said all the right things – ‘You are a priority at zee label’, ‘We will make your next seengle a heet’ – and maybe even meant a few of them, but here was no chemistry between us and I found myself stuck for the next several years with a record company man I hadn’t signed to, nor would have.

  Creeping out against this unhappy backdrop, the Bring ’Em All In album snuck into the charts at a lowly 22 and disappeared the following week. This was confirmation of my diminished status and of Alan McGee’s sober estimation of the album’s hit potential. And most of all it told me I’d missed the target. I’d sought to make a record about my Findhorn experiences that would resonate with a mass audience, and I’d called it wrong. An unadorned acoustic record, it seemed, wasn’t a persuasive enough medium, and I made a mental note to give my next album, which would have similar lyrical themes, a robust, commercial band sound.

  Two weeks later I went on tour. The shows were good but Dave Jaymes and I had started to argue about anything and everything: which interviews to do (Dave wanted me to do them all, I wanted to be selective to keep my currency high), the length of my one-man shows (Dave’s view: if I played shorter gigs I’d have more energy for interviews), touring costs, and how to deal with the new order at EMI. And when records aren’t selling the scope for disagreement between artist and manager expands exponentially. A particularly fractious issue was the question of whether to release singles in multiple formats. I’d always resisted this music business ploy, designed to get fans to buy the same record several times and so give a single an inflated chart entry. The scam worked by offering different tracks on the B-sides of the various editions, all of which the diehards would feel compelled to buy. It was scuzzy of record companies and artists to take advantage of this degree of fandom, a kind of bullshit tax on the devoted. But after the single of ‘Bring ’Em All In’ sank I came under intense pressure from J.F. Cecillon and his minions to issue the follow-up, ‘Building The City Of Light’, in two CDs and a seven-inch single, each with differing bonus tracks. Dave agreed with them.

  I was still holding out when one day, as Diane and I stepped into a hotel lift together, she suggested I should take Dave’s opinion seriously because ‘he’s got lots of experi
ence of having hit singles’. ‘What do you mean?’ I asked as the lift whirred upwards. ‘Oh,’ she replied, ‘he was in Modern Romance. They had seven top-ten hits, you know.’ The lift stopped, but I felt as if someone had opened my skull and the contents of my brain were still ascending into some abominable ether-land. I was being managed by the bass player from Modern Romance! This distressing revelation didn’t help my relationship with Dave, for now whenever I looked at him I saw the spectre of the blonde-bobbed geezer preening away on Top Of The Pops like a mocking shade. Our days were numbered.

  Nevertheless I caved in and let Chrysalis have their ‘formats’ for ‘Building The City Of Light’. But it availed us nothing; the single bombed and I felt I’d compromised myself, the fans and the music. Nor did we have any more luck in North America, where the album was dead in the water. Having disappeared not just once, but twice (in 1986 and again in 1993) I was seen in the States as someone who’d passed up his chances, and the US rock media had no further use for me. Even worse: by sodding off to Findhorn it looked like I’d spurned success to pursue spirituality instead, thus defying the prime credo of fame at the fag-end of the twentieth century: thou shalt have no other gods than me.

  Then John Kennedy called to tell me, almost tearfully, that he was giving up his lawyer’s practice to become head of Polygram Records. I was glad for John, but gutted for me. My ally of a decade, the artful big brother who’d been my consigliore, fixer and protector, was gone. So soon were Dave and Diane. Whatever the nature of the alchemy at that first meeting, it hadn’t translated into a successful working relationship, and shortly after the end of the Bring ’Em All In tour I let them go. Their place as my advisers was now taken by Alan McGee, who emerged as an unexpected friend and mentor. I asked Alan to listen to the demos for my next album, Still Burning, and after hearing them and pronouncing himself excited he offered to be A&R man for the record and oversee the recording process from start to finish. This was highly irregular considering I wasn’t on his label, but working with a man like McGee, who lived and breathed rock’n’roll, was more attractive than running my songs by the new guard at Chrysalis.

  Alan became a regular visitor to the house on Lansdowne Road, where I played him my songs and listened to his comments. And it was a lot of listening, because McGee was one of the world’s great talkers. A gregarious Scottish skinhead invariably dressed in a checked shirt, Alan would hold forth in Glaswegian tones for twenty, thirty, forty minutes non-stop, while I sat on the edge of my chair trying to find a gap to get a word in. He had a cunning, honest-but-flattering way of giving musical criticism. ‘That song’s no as guid as some o’ yer ithers,’ he’d say tactfully when underwhelmed by a demo. And when he liked something he was spectacularly positive. ‘It’s a thing o’ genius, man,’ he’d coo. ‘Beau’iful, beau’iful.’ At that precise moment in rock history McGee was king of the castle, having discovered the era’s totemic band, Oasis. This wasn’t a big deal to me; what mattered was that he understood Mike Scott/Waterboys music. But the fact he was championing me, waxing lyrical about my new songs and old records in newspapers and on radio, was a boon. McGee’s word carried weight in the music media and if anything could buy me a hip ticket and restore my commercial and critical fortunes, it was his patronage.

  EMI, meanwhile, were perplexed. Here was the famous boss of a rival label advising their artist, stealing the A&R cap from under their noses. But though I’d lost leverage at EMI due to the failure of Bring ’Em All In and the firing of the men who signed me, I still had some layer of mystery, a cultivated fog of professional distance between me and the company. I deployed it now, staying out of range and phone contact till my creative relationship with McGee was established and the direction of the album was set. Then one morning McGee and I went to see J.F. Cecillon’s new label manager at Chrysalis, a chubby boy called Mark Collen who was still getting used to the dizzy novelty of finding himself in charge of a major label. Deploying our best diplomacy we sold Mark on our song selection and reassured him I wasn’t about to do a bunk to Creation Records. To my amazement he agreed to everything we asked for. As we left the EMI building, McGee, impressed by our smooth passage through what we’d expected to be hostile territory, trilled, ‘Ye’re wi’ the right record company, man. They luvv yew in there, they luvv yew!’ They wouldn’t for long.

  Now the wheels clicked into gear. Chrysalis booked recording time and I flew Niko Bolas over as co-producer. Niko and I put together a top-notch studio band: Jim Keltner, whose drumming on the Waterboys San Francisco sessions in 1986 I’d never forgotten; Chris Bruce, the ace lead guitarist I’d met in New York; and Pino Palladino, a tall, gangly bassist mate of Niko’s, best known, rather unjustly, for his slithery ‘pyoing, yoing’ fretless playing on hits by British singer Paul Young a decade earlier. I was especially thrilled to be on the cusp of working with Keltner again. In the weeks before the sessions I listened over and over to his playing on John Lennon’s ‘Jealous Guy’, George Harrison’s Concert For Bangladesh, and the 1986 Waterboys tapes. When the first day of recording came I couldn’t quite believe he was really in London, but my crew manager Malcolm confirmed that yes, Jim had already checked into the hotel and was waiting for me at Olympic Studios. I walked in and there was the old god standing by his drum kit wearing what looked like the same shades and leather waistcoat he’d worn all those years before in Fantasy Studios. He addressed me as ‘Michael’, smiled like a million dollars through his scrubby buffalo beard, and held out to me a sure, steady hand with long wizard-like fingers.

  When we played Keltner was as great as I remembered, driving the music with a profound combination of power and sensitivity. And I could see why Pino was known in music circles as one of the world’s best bassists: every economic note was in the right place, the fabled sweet spot, for maximum funk and groovability. Chris Bruce was no slouch either: a fashion-conscious black dandy and switchblade-sharp guitar player who invented all his own parts, choc-full of hooks, and never needed a word of guidance. But working with a hired one-off band and a set of structured songs was very different from blowing free improvised music the way Keltner and The Waterboys did in those far-off days in San Francisco. This band didn’t have the telepathic familiarity I’d enjoyed with Steve and Anto, and the sound we made devolved to the area of crossover between our various skills and styles – a kind of classic-but-conservative rock meets soul hybrid. Working Nashville style (me showing the guys a new song each morning then spending the next six or seven hours recording it), we cut ten tracks in as many days including at least one potential hit. ‘Love Anyway’ was a mid-paced rocker with a hustling Keltner groove and a hazy, chiming guitar figure, which both McGee and EMI, in their different ways, pronounced a winner. ‘It’s fuckin’ beau’iful genius, man!’ said McGee like the Glasgow punk rocker he was. ‘It eez ze beezness.’ said J.F. Cecillon, purring like the crafty fat cat he was.

  The playback for Chrysalis was held in the Olympic control room. I’d always found playbacks excruciating and preferred label executives to listen to my new records without me there, so they didn’t feel they had to feign enthusiasm or dance round my feelings. But the maintenance of good relations required I bite the bullet this time and invite J.F. and Mark Collen to the studio; after all, they’d played more than fair by indulging my work with McGee. To my surprise, they were remarkably well behaved. Properly house-trained, they didn’t make the usual record company faux-pas of getting song titles wrong, nor did they mark the tracks out of five like Geffen’s Tom Zutaut had done once (but only once). The playback was a success and the only jarring note was Niko’s unwitting insistence on addressing J.F. as ‘Jeff’ throughout, which the Frenchman admirably contrived not to notice.

  J.F. and Mark were sufficiently enthused to pay for the recording band to reassemble for a one-off show at the EMI conference, a three-day junket in a motorway hotel somewhere outside Birmingham. Keltner, Pino, Chris and I descended on this wasteland and in a garish neon-lit conferen
ce suite one lunchtime we romped through two songs for the gathered executives – possibly the strangest gig I’d ever played, right up there with the Maybole Orange Lodge and Burns Night in Findhorn. But it worked. EMI and Chrysalis were ‘motivated’, I was suddenly popular at my record company (a welcome if unfamiliar feeling), and ‘Love Anyway’ was proclaimed by one and all to be a ‘smash’.

  Before I could get back to the happy land of chart success, however, I had to find new management. My first choice was Alan McGee but he refused, saying, ‘Ah dinnae want tae take yer money, man.’ Instead he suggested a then-successful English fellow called Osbert Prince who, Alan claimed, ‘got the big picture.’ Osbert was a well-tailored fellow who knew his way round a wine list and a tour schedule, but Alan undercut his recommendation by warning me, ‘Dinnae trust him wi’ yer money’, which didn’t exactly sell me on the guy. Next I beat a path to a selection of London’s greatest living managers, including Dire Straits’ veteran gatekeeper, a deliciously dodgy bon viveur called Ed Bicknell who I’d turned down when he’d courted The Waterboys in the late eighties and who now got his gentle revenge, keeping me dangling for several months before regretfully declining my overtures.