Adventures of a Waterboy

by Mike Scott

  In this state of mind I began making the music that would get me back in the game. And because my stock was so low it had be spectacularly good if I was going to get people listening to me again. I had a crop of new songs, harder numbers than I’d written for years, with cut-glass guitar grooves and titles like ‘The Charlatan’s Lament’ and ‘Dumbing Down The World’, each an autobiographical snapshot exploring the ebb and flow of my emotions and how alien I felt in the crazy London I’d returned to. As I rotated them on the radio of my imagination they crackled with a psychedelic, elemental roar. This would be the sound I recorded with, but I had to bring myself up to speed with rock’n’roll first; I’d been out of sync with rock for so long I’d stopped being creatively removed from it and become simply out of touch. If I wanted to make people pay attention to me I needed to absorb, master, and subvert the sonic fashions of the day. So I spent a year filling my head with Radiohead’s OK Computer, Mercury Rev’s exquisite Deserter’s Songs, Beck, The Wu-Tang Clan, Death In Vegas, Cornershop and a hundred other late-nineties luminaries.

  In the process I rediscovered the thrill of following the creative edge of rock. I decided to approach every instrument, voice and sound on my new record in a spirit of invention; to use the recording process itself as a form of creativity – like the artists I was listening to and as I’d done myself on early Waterboys albums – rather than just a physical space to capture performances in, which was what the studio had become for me since Fisherman’s Blues. To achieve this I needed a new arsenal of sounds, so for several months I haunted Denmark Street, London’s historic Tin Pan Alley where the city’s musical instrument shops were clustered in a brightly coloured row, and sought out the effects and gizmos that would enable me to produce the sound in my head. I loved Denmark Street. It was the scuzzy heart of British rock’n’roll and as I tramped its Dickensian pavement I could sense the ghosts of London’s musical past; song sellers, bandleaders, sharkskin-suited agents, teddy boys and skifflers, early sixties folkies just off the bus from Glasgow or Newcastle, the spectral figure of Jimi Hendrix strutting past in his brocaded guardsman’s jacket, Elton John and David Bowie hustling for breaks at the dawn of the seventies, the Sex Pistols loitering with intent five years later, fighting, fornicating and writing ‘I’m A Lazy Sod’ in a dingy basement eighteen months before the revolution they unleashed caught fire.

  I was walking in all their footsteps, jostling for my own corner once more in the landscape of rock, mining for the means of expression that would help me stake my claim. And I found what I needed. My sonic plunder included a metal device called a Micro Synthesizer, which turned guitars into snakes and made suckk! and ffooopp! noises; vintage phase and tremolo pedals that wired in tandem resulted in fizzling psychedelic paint-wheels of sound; a royal selection of fuzz, muff, crunch and distortion machines; a splendid scarlet-painted Theremin (a hollow box with an aerial that emitted rubbery-sounding electronic wails when I carved shapes in the air around it with my hands) and a blues harp microphone, which made my voice jagged and grotesque.

  In search of additional cultural ballast I went back to vintage gospel music, a passion from the Fisherman’s Blues days. I bought forty or fifty CDs of recordings from the twenties and scoured them for samples, lyric ideas and song titles, one of which I paraphrased for my album’s title A Rock In The Weary Land. Next I stashed up on all the BBC and movie sound effects I could find on CD or vinyl and even recorded my own, an absorbing pursuit that found me trudging the streets of Kew holding a microphone under an umbrella to capture the crackling sound of rain on fabric, or sitting on a tube train recording its rattling rhythm and fragments of people’s conversation. Finally I went to an Indian music shop in Southall where I picked up a Hindu beat-box, several weird-shaped tambourines that made bright shrashy sounds and, mightiest of all, two sweet-sounding harmoniums with inscrutable eastern drones and a button the turbaned dude in the shop called ‘the trembler’, which triggered a fast drrrrrrrrr sound like a musical pneumatic drill. Thus was I armed, equipped, suited and booted with the tools I needed to transfer the roaring music in the cave of my skull onto the miracle of magnetic tape, but before I could begin, destiny interrupted with some long-unfinished personal business. Tracking down my dad.

  I hadn’t seen my father since Christmas 1970. I remembered him from my childhood as a handsome moustached fellow who worked in an Edinburgh music shop and spent his spare time sculpting and painting in his study. His name was Allan and though he wasn’t a musician several of my clearest memories of him were musical: leading me and my mum in sing-songs in the family car, giving me my first guitar, telling me how exciting he thought the Stones’ ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ was.

  When he left he did so gradually: after he moved out of the house, he came round ever more rarely before finally disappearing altogether. He didn’t take me aside and explain what was happening, nor did he stay in touch once he’d left Edinburgh. And because children don’t know how to process such things, like most abandoned kids I felt I was to blame and that I must be wrong or unlovable in some way. But these feelings got buried over time and my father’s disappearance from my life became my normal. As I grew older I pictured him as a wanderer, a free spirit moving from scene to scene from whom I inherited the same tendency. I often wondered where he was and what would happen if I bumped into him; surely he was aware of my life as a musician and must have seen me on TV or read about me in the press.

  I’d never tried to find him but as I approached forty something shifted. I’d always imagined our meeting would trigger an awkward process of reconciliation or some form of rejection, and the fact of my lost father had grown in my mind until he occupied a large shadowy corner of my psyche, a domain better left undisturbed. But as I discussed him one day with Janette in the kitchen at Kew I realised I no longer cared about these forebodings. I didn’t, as the Glaswegians say, gie a shite. What I suddenly understood was that not knowing him was holding me back, stunting me. I needed to find the old man, discover who the hell he was, and most important of all reclaim authority over my own destiny. I needed to say to him: you may have walked out of my life but you can’t stay out of my life.

  The only information I had was that he’d moved to the South of England in 1971. So Janette and I went to the Family Records Office in Islington and spent several afternoons looking for any record of his having remarried. And finally, in one of the huge, medieval-sized volumes of records, we found his name on a marriage certificate for 1972. Bingo! Then, cross-referencing Allan’s name and that of his wife, we found details of the births of two children, a half-brother and sister I didn’t even know I had! There was an address too, near Birmingham, but it was for 1984 and I figured that after fourteen years they’d surely have moved elsewhere. But when we checked the voters’ rolls for the district, to my amazement there he was, the old fucker, still at the same address.

  Rather than tip him off in advance and risk denial or some other form of brush-off, I decided to go and knock on his door. So on a sharp, windy December day, a week before my fortieth birthday, Janette and I took a train to a town on the outskirts of Birmingham and walked the mile to my dad’s house, the longest mile of my life.

  I had the address on a piece of paper and counted down the houses. The Scotts’ was the last but one house on a suburban terrace, next to a bare little park. I knocked on the door and a teenage boy answered it – my half-brother, with a question-mark face and blond hair. To my surprise he didn’t show any recognition when he saw me. I asked if his father was there and the lad replied warily that his dad would be back in half an hour. I asked if we could come in and wait. But this was Middle England and bohemian outlanders in colourful clothes who come asking questions don’t get asked in to wait. Junior held his ground, like the good lad he was, and said no. The boy closed the door but he must have been alarmed because a neighbour woman, roused by telephone, quickly materialised from the opposite house. She bustled up to us and with concern and suspicion i
n her voice asked us what we wanted. I told her my business and she was immediately mollified but all she said was, ‘Oh, well, he’ll be here soon’ and hurried back indoors.

  And so we stood like tinkers on the pavement, feeling extremely out of place. My heart beat like a sledgehammer in my chest and Janette held my arm, a steadying rock until, somewhat earlier than the mooted half-hour, a car approached.

  I saw his face through the windscreen but couldn’t recognise him. It had been too long. But I knew it was him. He pulled up at the house and stepped out, reaching in his pockets for his key. As we walked towards him I tried to match the man in front of me with the memory traces in my mind. He turned and looked quizzically at us. I searched for the right words but after all these years, having arrived at the moment so long awaited, so often imagined, I couldn’t speak. Janette, seeing my difficulty, did it for me.

  ‘Allan,’ she said, ‘this is your son.’ My father’s eyes and mine met, and a cocktail of confusion and recognition passed across his still-handsome face.

  ‘I wouldn’t have known you,’ he spluttered then added, dramatically, ‘but I always knew this day would come.’ Lost for what to say next he asked us into the house. We walked behind him and I noticed two things: my little half-brother watching us through the window, and the way my father’s hair curled round his collar at the back of his neck, exactly like I remembered it from when I was a child. He sent the lad upstairs and sat with Janette and me in the lounge, a room like a million others, with family photos on the mantelpiece, an electric fire in the hearth and a copy of the Radio Times under the TV. In this domesticated theatre the long-withheld questions were finally asked: Why did I never hear from you again? Where did you go? Do you understand what your disappearance meant to me?

  Allan answered my questions, or tried to. He explained he’d never got in touch because he’d felt it was kinder that way. And clearly he’d done what he’d thought was best according to his wisdom, or lack of it, at the time. But though he tried to sum up what he imagined my experience must have been, it was clear Allan didn’t understand how his leaving had impacted on me. I didn’t need him to understand my reality, but I needed him to acknowledge that he didn’t, and to stop theorising about what it must be like to be the abandoned child. Though I couldn’t inch him towards such an acknowledgment now, I was determined I would in future.

  It was a weird afternoon; four or five hours that expanded and compressed as the conversation swung from deep waters to commonplace banalities. Much was discovered: Allan hadn’t known I’d become a musician and had never heard of The Waterboys, and his kids hadn’t known they had an older half-brother. When Allan’s wife and daughter arrived home from shopping, the lad was retrieved from upstairs and we were all introduced, sitting together in the living room, a strange uneasy sixsome. The tough conversation continued into evening.

  In the process I realised my dad and I were less similar than I’d expected. He was a real character, a cross between a straight Dirk Bogarde and an old-time stage tragedian. I liked him. And second time around he was clearly a loving, solid family man, but he wasn’t at all the figure of my imagination. All those years I’d believed I was cast in the image of my father, I’d actually been casting him in the image of me. The free spirit shifting from scene to scene was myself: a tendency I now understood came more from my mother, with her penchant for moving house every few years, than my old estranged dad. By learning who he was I’d learned a lot about who I was too, and when Allan drove us back to the railway station that night I’d got what I came for: a headful of answers and the right to have my father in my life.

  Next day I was overwhelmed by a tidal wave of feelings. Deep shit was working itself out inside me. At some subterranean level of consciousness I was reporting back to the young Mike whose dad had walked out on him, and the new information was rearranging the framework of my emotional DNA. And there was a new feeling too, an inner buzz of wellbeing and self-honouring that told me I’d done the right thing. I’d faced down my oldest fear and jettisoned a motherlode of obsolete psychological architecture.

  For the next year Allan and I corresponded by letter, an exchange that enabled us to express things still unsaid, and to establish the crucial point about his not understanding how his disappearance had impacted on me. These letters didn’t flow fast. Replies both ways took a month or more each time, a measure of the emotional depths we were plumbing, and step by step we cleared the debris of the past and emerged into the sunlight of a new and cordial relationship with each other.

  The reunion with my dad didn’t lead to a stream of new songs; in fact I didn’t write anything about it, without actually intending not to. But having confronted my old shadow, when I finally began recording A Rock In The Weary Land in early 1999 there was a difference in the way I felt and carried myself, and I worked with a new self-confidence. I needed it, too: I was coming back from career rock bottom without a record label, with only a headful of songs and the skin I stood up in. And because this was the first album I’d ever made without record company money and I’d lost my shirt on the Still Burning tour, I hadn’t anything to spend. But the gods of rock’n’roll sent me two benefactors. My ex-lawyer John Kennedy lent me money and I found myself a new manager who got me cheap recording time in a decent studio.

  His name was Philip Tennant and ten years earlier he’d worked as a recording engineer on Fisherman’s Blues. I can still picture him turning up on his first morning at Rockfield Studios, bright as a pin, to find me red-eyed and stubble-chinned, deep in late album burnout, having been up all night doing a very bad mix of ‘The Stolen Child’. Mercifully he took over and we finished Fisherman’s Blues together, becoming friends in the process. By the time our paths re-crossed a decade later, courtesy of a chance meeting on the ever-fateful Portobello Road, Philip had become a manager and promptly offered to represent me. As the Svengalis of rock weren’t exactly queuing up to have me on their books, and I remembered Philip as a good guy, I said yes. It would turn out to be my best managerial relationship since good old Z.

  The studio Philip found for me was called Maison Rouge, a faded old joint on the Fulham Road where I’d done a couple of sessions in the early eighties. Soon I was set up with my gear and gizmos, having a serious creative experience and a whole lot of first-rate fun at the same time, just as it should be. And as the project progressed I called in some fellow explorers.

  First was Thighpaulsandra, a Welsh keyboard warlock with a penchant for Mohawk haircuts and bloodcurdling prog-rock riffs. I’d seen a photo of him loitering by stone circles like a fur-clad gnome in Julian Cope’s ‘earth mysteries’ book The Modern Antiquarian. Expecting a lunatic genius, possibly speaking in Elvish, I was surprised to be greeted at the studio by a soft-spoken, casually dressed chap of about forty, smiling placidly behind a bank of keyboards, a cup of tea in one hand and his Mohawk grown out into a sensible crop. It was like meeting an assistant scientist or a technical boffin at the BBC. I couldn’t equate the gentle fellow before me with either his outrageous sexually charged name or his reputation as a sonic terrorist. But when the music began, someone else appeared.

  Thighpaulsandra’s first contribution was on ‘Crown’, a blues-hewn fuzz-Mellotron battle charge, and as the track blasted out of the speakers, I found myself watching a wild moonstruck elf, a brilliant Gollum locked in the frame of a man, and it was the elf that was making the music! The keyboard spoke in tongues, a ferocious but disciplined torrent of sound filled with brainstorms, shards of metal, lightning-struck towers and vengeful Druid horsemen, all of which seemed to materialise in the air of the room, passing before my imagination, conjured and manifested by the exultant elf-wizard.

  I’d seen such things before, trad players who morphed from shy farmers into flame-eyed centaurs the moment they stuck a tin whistle between their lips or a fiddle under their jaw, and I knew how to deal with it. I directed the music in terms of what the elf was capable of (which appeared to be anything) but I
addressed myself only to the man, who stepped seamlessly back into control every time the playing stopped. Thighpaulsandra had mastered the art of allowing his inner wizard, his genius, full expression while he played, without it hijacking or overwhelming his persona. Man and daemon co-existed in dynamic harmony.

  My next playmate was a teenage drum programmer called Rowan who lived in a top-floor bedsit on Ladbroke Grove, where I spent three days listening while he prepared rhythm tracks for me. Rowan’s sampling gear was state of the art, all shiny effects racks and wall-sized speakers meticulously assembled, and clearly meant more to him than life itself. But everything else in the bedsit was squalid and scum-encrusted, especially a vast pile of dirty dishes, not unlike the one in the opening scene of Withnail And I, that teetered round the filthy sink, abuzz with flies, and had been there long enough to become a culture. This tower of grime emitted a thin, curdled, somehow satisfied smell that haunted the room, though Rowan, like any teenager in his own mess, was oblivious and quite immune to it. I sat amidst the sordid scene till I could stand it no more, whereupon I fled to a local supermarket and bought rubber gloves, scourers and a bottle of yellow washing up liquid. I heroically cleaned Rowan’s abominable crockery mountain while he sat unperturbed on the far side of the room, sampling the drummers on ancient jazz records and turning fragments of their playing into slick, cunning grooves as pristine as his flat was vile.