by Mike Scott
I had my own history in the teenage mess department. When I was seventeen my mother went off to teach at summer school for a fortnight, leaving me a set of keys, a list of instructions and a huge fresh chicken on the sideboard, which I absently picked at for a week. One morning I heard a strange sound of distant munching as if an army was gobbling food several miles away. To my horror I saw the chicken had metamorphosed into a vibrating mass of maggots the size of a rugby ball. I sprang into action and did what any sensible teenager left on his own in a house would do: ran and got the woman next door. Neighbour Maggie took one look and whisked my unplanned nature project into a dustbin outside the back door, plate and all, then poured a kettleful of boiling water after it.
Fortunately there was nothing alive in Rowan’s pile of dishes; I’d got to it in time. And his work was brilliant, well worth the price of three days’ purgatory. Using a young creative spirit added a hip freshness to the music, but I needed older heads too. Anthony Thistlethwaite played fuzz mandolin on several sessions; Kevin Wilkinson, veteran of the first Waterboys shows, Dave Ruffian from the 1986 band and Jeremy ‘Swipe’ Stacey all drummed. Palestinian jazz sax-man Gilad Atzmon, The London Community Gospel Choir and a procession of backing singers, including ‘Bjorn’ from the Abba tribute band Bjorn Again, all added their notes. By the summer of 1999 the album’s style was established and my songs nestled in a glittering beautiful-cum-grotesque psychedelic soundscape.
Then midway through the assemblage of this sonic architecture Kew imparted its next revelation. Whenever I’d moved in the previous two decades I’d put my stuff in storage, and by the late nineties I had container-loads of tea chests and boxes stashed in several different cities. In the summer of 1999 Janette and I moved to a house with a large attic, and for the first time I had space to store them all myself – and to go through them.
There were boxes from teenage Ayr, punk-wars Edinburgh, eighties London, Dublin and Spiddal, nineties New York and Findhorn, each a memory capsule with a power to immediately transport me back in time and place, and put me in touch with how I’d felt at all the stages of my long strange road. I found over a thousand books dating from as early as childhood; stacks of music weeklies from 1969 onwards; colourful piles of superhero and underground comics; reams of ancient fan mail and press cuttings documenting the rise of The Waterboys; over a hundred lyric notebooks; my teenage record collection; photo albums of my first bands; cassettes of early Waterboys music I hadn’t listened to in ten years; old clothes; shoeboxes full of personal letters, maps, tour itineraries, promo pictures, menus from restaurants in Jerusalem and Skibbereen, notebooks, scrawled addresses and sets of playing cards.
Lots of things made me cringe – early lyrics, lists of grandiose plans for records and tours that had come to naught, reminders of friends lost or neglected when I’d moved on. And some curious mysteries were explained; for example, why Simon Le Bon of Duran Duran had been weird and standoffish every time I’d passed him in Maison Rouge Studios that spring. An old press cutting I found revealed the answer: in an early eighties interview I’d gratuitously slagged off Duran Duran, and it would appear that Simon remembered. I made a mental note to apologise to him next time our paths crossed.
But the process was inspiring too: my old lyric books enabled me to re-inhabit the Mike Scott of my twenties, a bracing experience like standing on a cliff top in a fierce wind. That young guy had been so wildly on fire, so drunk on wonder, that it was a wonder all over again just to make his acquaintance. Similar glimpses allowed me to re-engage with my teenage dreamer, my west of Ireland trad explorer, my Findhorn seeker, and so on, and to discover that all these characters were still inside me like a set of wavelengths, and that if I chose to I could re-think myself into each one of them.
I’d always wanted to be the kind of artist who could draw on every strand of his music and personality at will, but I hadn’t known how. If I played a rock’n’roll tour I wasn’t able to weave acoustic or Celtic music into it, and vice versa. Now, for the first time, all my past selves and the inspirations they’d worked with were accessible. The discovery reminded me of the concert I’d attended once in New York by The Native American Dance Theatre, the highlight of which was the Hoop Dancer. I’d wanted then what the Hoop Dancer had, the ability to balance my worlds within me and move between them with ease. Seven years later in an attic in Kew, with the contents of two-dozen tea chests strewn around the floor, I’d found the key.
At a one-off solo show that summer I flung songs from all my eras into the set and tried on their different personas like stage costumes. It worked. I could move between them like a shape-shifter, maintaining contact with the original streams of inspiration that had driven each stage of the music. I was the sum of my parts at last. Getting my fire burning again with Steve Wickham, for our two-man Sligo concert occurred shortly after, dovetailed with this process. My partnership with The Fellow Who Fiddles was another wavelength I could tune into, and now it had a future, not just history. But for now the music said ‘wait’ and so I finished A Rock In The Weary Land without Steve.
Philip Tennant, meanwhile, had hustled me a deal with BMG, one of the few record companies I’d never been with (all I needed was Warner Bros and I’d have the set). The guys who signed me were a Swedish A&R man called Per and a wily old label boss called Harry McGee, no relation to Alan, known in the business as ‘the silver fox’. Per and Harry thought they were getting Mike Scott and were gobsmacked when halfway through negotiations I told them A Rock In The Weary Land was going to be a Waterboys album.
This was no light decision; I’d thought about it for three years. I’d come to detest the idea that there was some difference between Waterboys music and Mike Scott music, and I recognised that only by using the better-known name could I gather it all under one banner. Then there was the size of The Waterboys’ audience, several times larger than I commanded as a solo singer. And thirdly, most of all, I missed the alchemy of the name, the sense of being part of something bigger than myself, with band members who had the status of fellow Waterboys, not just backing musicians. So in the summer of 2000, as the release of Weary Land approached, I assembled a new Waterboys. And in the same way that I’d created the original band by selecting musicians who’d played on that era’s album, A Pagan Place, so this line-up comprised three players who’d worked on A Rock In The Weary Land: Jeremy Stacey, Livingston Brown and a new keyboard player, Richard Naiff.
Richard was one of those rare musicians who’d come to my attention, like Steve and Anto, through my hearing them by chance and wondering, who the hell is that? I was working in Maison Rouge late one night when the liquid tones of David Bowie’s ‘Lady Grinning Soul’, a favourite song from my teens, floated from a room down the studio corridor. The original had been played by the great Mike Garson, an avant-garde jazzer shoehorned into Bowie’s Spiders From Mars in 1972 in an inspired piece of cross-cultural casting by David and his bandleader Mick Ronson. Surely it couldn’t be! I walked down the corridor, stuck my head round the door and caught a glimpse of a bearded young guy, not Garson, hunched at the piano, a river of sound spilling from his blurred hands.
I didn’t want to interrupt so I asked my assistant engineer to run in when the music stopped and get the guy’s details. At the end of the evening I was handed a scrap of paper bearing the scrawled name Richard Naiff and a north London phone number. Next day I called Richard and invited him to come and record with me. On the appointed day he turned up at the studio, not looking much like anyone’s idea of a rock’n’roller. Thickly bearded, walking with a Monsieur Hulot bounce, clad in a patterned woolly jumper and with an extremely shy, self-deprecating manner – no eye contact whatsoever – Richard was more like a librarian than a rocker. I asked him what bands he played with and he replied, looking at the wall behind me, that he only did a few part-time gigs. ‘What do you do the rest of the time then?’ I said. ‘Oh,’ he told the wall in hesitant, embarrassed tones, ‘I’m working in a library
.’
I’d found myself a real live talent in the raw: librarian or not, when Richard played he could turn his hand to anything. High melodic beauty? No problem, mate. Thundering storms of chordal passion? All in a day’s work, guv. Classical intros played on an outrageously distorted Hammond organ? House speciality, sir.
Most of the keyboards on Weary Land had been played by me or Thighpaulsandra, whose day job with the druggy British band Spiritualized precluded him from touring with The Waterboys. But as Richard’s version of ‘Lady Grinning Soul’ suggested, my new discovery was able to master whatever musical parts were put in front of him; he just needed the sounds that had been used on the album and his fingers would do the rest. So Richard’s first task as a neophyte Waterboy, a week before our tour commenced, was to make a pilgrimage to Thighpaulsandra’s remote Welsh farmhouse, commune with the prog-rock elf, and transfer the crucial sound samples into a travelling keyboard module.
Richard and a mate set out in an old banger. They journeyed through the West Country, over the Severn Bridge and deep into Wales until they reached Thighpaulsandra’s lonely farmhouse, high on the side of a hill. Like me, Richard was expecting to meet an Elvish wizard and he too was surprised to be greeted by a softly spoken Welsh gentleman. But once in the house, things turned strange. The lights were dim, the curtains were drawn and the temperature was dramatically high. Richard assumed this was because Thighpaulsandra lived with his mother, who was unwell, but as his eyes got used to the gloom he realised that slithering freely round the floor and walls, or poised unnervingly still on the arms of chairs, were numerous geckos and lizards.
Thighpaulsandra acted as if it was absolutely normal to live in perpetual twilight with a crowd of reptiles and made Richard a cup of tea. Then they went through to the music room, Thighpaulsandra leading the way while Richard loped behind, followed by several scurrying lizards, to find himself in a dark chamber filled wall-to-wall with vintage keyboards and art-rock paraphernalia. He squeezed himself into a smidgen of space, plugged in and proceeded to download Thighpaulsandra’s Mellotron samples under the baleful eye of a gecko, motionless on a nearby shelf.
Keyboard sounds assembled, the new four-piece Waterboys gathered for a crash course of London rehearsals and a six-gig romp around Norway to warm up. This was the debut live outing for the Weary Land sonic rock music, and it took until the final couple of nights for us to fully gel as a band. Unfortunately our second show, a scrappy affair in a Bergen aircraft hangar, was reviewed nationally and the Nordic journalists were aghast at the difference in sound and personnel from the old band. ‘This isn’t The Waterboys!’ fumed Aftenposten and Bergens Tidende, two newspapers which a helpful native translated for us on a ferry midway across a fjord as we travelled to the next gig. But the scathing headlines only motivated the band and our last two Norwegian concerts, in a packed theatre in Oslo, were shot through with defiance as we began to hit our groove and catch fire.
A few days later we played to five thousand punters at the Glastonbury Festival, in a rammed Acoustic Tent with a set that was anything but: a maelstrom of electric guitar, fuzz keyboards and Mellotron powered by the funk-blown Stacey/Brown rhythm section. We hurled out half a dozen songs from Weary Land – ‘Let It Happen’ and ‘The Charlatan’s Lament’ our opening salvo – and recast totemic old numbers like ‘Savage Earth Heart’. Standing on stage with a multi-coloured whirlwind of noise wailing around me, I felt the power of playing under the Waterboys banner for the first time in a decade and sensed the sum of all my changes. I was the hoop dancer at last, moving between my worlds connected to everything The Waterboys had ever meant to me or the audience: adventure, passion, The Mysteries, musical brotherhood. And it was right.
Backstage I was surrounded by happy well-wishers. The Silver Fox slapped me on the back while Philip Tennant shook my hand, thrilled to have played a part in the return of The Waterboys. Paul Charles, the agent who booked the Acoustic Stage, told me ‘this one will run and run’. Fans appeared at the fence outside the tent shouting their congratulations, and I recognised one of them, a wild-faced chap with straggly hair, from another festival in another age, fourteen years before, reappearing like the spirit of Glastonbury past.
After gathering our stuff, the band clambered into a minibus to go back to our hotel. Slowly we drove through the mad midnight of Glastonbury, amid biblical crowds, past crackling bonfires and huge dance tents from which thundering bass grooves boomed apocalyptically across the blackness. I leaned back in my seat, Janette’s head on my shoulder, my ears ringing from the show, and wondered into the future. The Waterboys were back but I still had everything to prove. How would A Rock In The Weary Land be received? Would radio still play us? There were lost highways to recover, a Fiddler yet to return, and who knew what challenges and adventures ahead.
We passed the main gates of the Festival and reached the open road. I leaned over to kiss Janette’s head and smelt the womanful scent of her hair. Down the hill behind us the last bass notes were booming through the air, and as we sped through the night they faded until I could hear them no more, and the music in my head took over.
Appendix 1: Illustrations
Mike, London, 1972 (© Anne Scott).
Mike's mother, Anne Scott, c. 1969 (© Anne Scott).
Jungleland fanzine, issue 6, November/December 1977 (© Mike Scott).
A Patti Smith pose, 1978 (© Mike Scott).
John Caldwell and Mike Scott, London, 1979 (© Ally Palmer).
Another Pretty Face, 1979 (© Virginia Turbett).
A poster for APF's 'Heaven Gets Closer Everyday' single, 1980.
Mike, 1982 (© Jill Furmanovsky, rockarchive.com).
An advertisement for Mike's shortlived band The Red And The Black.
The NME ad to which Karl Wallinger replied, 1983.
The Waterboys on tour in the USA, 1984 (© Patrick Durand).
Legendary drummer Jim Keltner, 1986 (© Pete Vernon.
Steve Wickham and Anto Thistlethwaite at Mill Valley, California, December 1986 (© Mike Scott).
Steve Wickham and Anto Thistlethwaite, Werchter Rock Festival, July 1986 (© Philippe Herriau).
The Waterboys in Kenmare, May 1987 (© Sean Brady).
Mike, Steve Wickham and Vinnie Kilduff on board the Greenpeace ship Siruis, May 1987 (© Frank Miller).
By the Liffey, 1987 (© Stefano Giovannini).
An outtake from the Fisherman's Blues cover shoot (© Steve Meany).
Mike and Tomas Mac Eoin, Galway, August 1988 (© Steve Meany).
Mike in Spiddal House, 1988 (© Colm Henry).
Seamus Begley and Steve Cooney, 1989 (photographer unknown).
Sharon Shannon on the Waterboys tour bus, 1989 (© Shona MacMillan).
The Waterboys at the Glastonbury Festival, 1989 (photographer unknown).
Barry Beckett and The Waterboys, Spiddal, March 1990 (photographer unknown).
Mike and Janette, Venice, March 1994 (© Mike Scott).
Universal Hall, Findhorn (© Mike Scott).
Findhorn, May 1994 (© Jeff Alexander)
Appendix 2: The Black Book
Appendix 3: Notes
Chapter 1: Music In The Head
A mysterious language I didn’t understand, full of esoteric words like cans and foldback. Headphones and the sound played through them.
The Sooty Show. A British children’s TV programme featuring glove puppets, popular in the fifties and sixties. Sooty was a glove puppet bear operated by Yorkshire entertainer Harry Corbett.
Chapter 2: The Realm Of The Teenage Band
There wasn’t a whole lot of anything going on in Ayr. Other combos struggling to get something going in the musical backwater of Ayrshire included accomplished older bands like Garbo and Southbound, who played bluesy rock covers; local stars The Dead End Kids, who supported the Bay City Rollers on tour and had a hit in 1977 with a remake of the sixties oldie, ‘Have I The Right?’; Corpus, featuring Davy Flynn, lead guitarist in my first ban
d Karma; Paradox, the best band in town, led by the charismatic Mij; teenagers Fragile Sky, whose guitarist Gordon Goudie went on to play with Echo & The Bunnymen, Simple Minds and others in the nineties and noughties; and the luckless Groper, who played semi-punk originals, were reviewed (badly) by the music weekly Sounds, and had what must be the worst-ever band name in rock history.
My mother’s waiting car. My mother, Anne, regularly drove our gear to and from gigs.
Orange Lodge. A Protestant-only fraternal club, deeply tied to Northern Irish (and Scottish) sectarianism, and named after William of Orange, who defeated the Catholic King James The Second at the Battle of the Boyne in Ireland in 1690.
