Adventures of a Waterboy

by Mike Scott

  My favourite book was Peter Russell’s The Awakening Earth. See entry above.

  Dion Fortune. Born Violet Mary Firth in Wales, 1890, Dion Fortune was author of many spiritual books including several novels, and founder of The Society Of The Inner Light. She died in 1946.

  I read everything on the Findhorn community I could find. Two of the best books about the community are The Findhorn Garden (Harper & Row, 1975, republished by Findhorn Press as The Findhorn Garden Story, 2008) and Eileen Caddy’s autobiography Flight Into Freedom (Element, 1988, republished by Findhorn Press as Flight Into Freedom And Beyond, 2002).

  The community was in Northeast Scotland. The Findhorn community – comprising the settlement at the caravan park, Cluny Hill College and a network of associated people living in the local area – is a separate entity from the Scottish village of Findhorn, built on the shores of Findhorn Bay, with its own traditions and character.

  I went to a lunchtime meditation at one of the community’s sanctuaries. This experience is also described in the song ‘Long Way To The Light’ (on Bring ’Em All In, Chrysalis/EMI 1995)

  Chapter 16: Some Kind Of Pop Star Living Up At Cluny

  The Findhorn community is celebrating Burns Night. Also known as a Burns Supper. This ceremony is held around the world wherever Scots are gathered on 25th January, the birthday of our national poet Robert Burns.

  Ceilidh. Pronounced ‘kay-lay’. Gaelic word for a social gathering featuring energetic country dances.

  I wasn’t the first interloper from the world of show business to descend on Findhorn. Nor the first rock star to have a connection with a mystery school. By their nature such connections are often discreet, but musicians with esoteric interests have included Richard Thompson (a practising Sufi for several years, still a Muslim), Van Morrison (numerous references to spiritual teachings in his songs circa 1979–83 and a palpable spiritual atmosphere in his records of the time, especially the album Common One) and Kate Bush (many clues in her songs suggest that Kate is an explorer of The Mysteries).

  I found myself called on to sing at holidays, funerals, weddings and, most of all, charity shows. I was also cajoled to join The Findhorn Jazz Band, though my then-miniscule knowledge of jazz meant our repertoire comprised only four songs: ‘Accentuate The Positive’, ‘It Ain’t What You Do (It’s The Way That You Do It)’, a clarinet-led instrumental of ‘Rudolf The Red-Nosed Reindeer’ and a comedic number of mine titled ‘Universal Hall’ (not the title track of the 2003 Waterboys album).

  News Of The World. A British tabloid Sunday newspaper, which folded in 2011.

  Niko Bolas … whose name I’d seen on a couple of Neil Young album covers. Niko co-produced This Note’s For You (1988) and Freedom (1989). He worked again with Neil on several albums in the noughties, sharing production credits with Neil as The Volume Dealers.

  I’d hired Niko to record B-sides for the singles off the Dream Harder album and it turned out to be a momentous session … ten cracking tracks, which had all the power and passion Dream Harder itself lacked. I wanted to use several of these on Dream Harder but Dick Lackaday and Geffen’s Tom Zutaut disagreed on the grounds they had too different a sound from the tracks already recorded. Only two Bolas-recorded numbers were cherry-picked by Zutaut, ‘Corn Circles’ and ‘Wonders Of Lewis’, and added to the album. Seven other songs from the session were released as B-sides and bonus tracks over the next few years.

  Five Rhythms on a Monday. The Five Rhythms is a movement meditation practice developed by Gabrielle Roth.

  Chapter 17: My Wanderings In The Weary Land

  The spectre of the blonde-bobbed geezer preening away. Actually I liked Dave Jaymes a lot. Of all the people I’ve jousted with in the music business, Dave was one of the most honourable and honest.

  A gregarious Scottish skinhead invariably dressed in a checked shirt. Alan McGee had hundreds of checked shirts on clothes rails, and a dedicated room at his flat to store them in.

  When we played, Keltner was as great as I remembered. And he almost got a Beatle to play on my record. Jim Keltner offered to ask his friend George Harrison to do a guitar solo on the Still Burning album. As a long term George fan, and a believer that All Things Must Pass is one of the greatest albums ever made, I was thrilled and suggested a poppy number called ‘Big Lover’, which I thought would suit George’s style. ‘Uh, no Michael,’ replied Jim, ‘George loves songs with fat snare sounds. The one to give him would be “Questions”.’ Questions was a brass-driven soul stomper with a very fat snare sound indeed, but it already had a guitar solo worked out note-for-note by my favourite Scottish rocker – myself, and Beatle or no Beatle, George or no George, I didn’t want to scrap it. So I insisted ‘Big Lover’ was the track. ‘Well, all right Michael,’ said Jim dubiously, and a DAT of the song was couriered down to George’s house at Henley-on-Thames. Two days later Jim announced he’d had a call from George who couldn’t think of anything to play on ‘Big Lover’ but sent this enigmatic message: ‘Tell Mike I’ll meet him somewhere down the road and Bob’s your uncle.’ George died before we got to have that meeting and I now wish I’d sacrificed my solo.

  The charts had become so manipulated, so gamed by the music industry, that they were stretched out of all shape and logic. Some of this shape and logic has been restored, though in constantly changing and unpredictable ways, by the democratic influence of the internet.

  He used wonderfully meaningless Father Dougal-esque phrases. Father Dougal McGuire is a character played by Ardal O’Hanlon in the nineties Irish/English comedy TV series Father Ted.

  My commercial standing was at an all-time low. On the way to my 1997 tour of Japan, I spotted a photo booth in Heathrow Airport and went to get my picture taken for a laugh. Inside I discovered it was actually a video booth; if I put a five-pound note in the slot it would film a three-minute VHS video. I had a quick brainwave and dug into my bag for a cassette player. I slotted in a tape of my next single ‘Rare Precious And Gone’, pressed play, clicked the ‘film’ button on the booth’s control panel, then mimed the vocal to camera. Instant promo video. All the band members stuck their heads in to see what was happening and they got on the film too. When the video popped out of the machine ten minutes later I packaged it up, addressed it to our promo man and popped it in a mailbox in the airport departures hall. Within a week it had been shown on several TV shows, exceeding the combined broadcast tally of the last three £50,000 videos I’d done for Chrysalis and Geffen. But even this exposure, and the dubious distinction of having made a video for a fiver, couldn’t propel a Mike Scott song into the charts in 1997.

  Chapter 18: A Man With A Fiddle And A Dog At Number 12a

  As I greeted him I felt like Dean Moriarty in On the Road. Jack Kerouac’s classic book, published in 1957.

  The Connacht Ramblers. Connacht is the northwestern of Ireland’s four provinces. The name of Steve’s band came from a well-known Irish jig called ‘The Connachtman’s Rambles’.

  Chapter 19: Hoop Dancing

  That May I returned to Spiddal to film a performance for Irish television. A one-song performance on an Irish language soap opera, set in Spiddal, called Ros Na Rún. I appeared under my own name with a six-piece band playing the Waterboys song ‘Killing My Heart’ in a fictional local pub. The band included Anthony Thistlethwaite, Trevor Hutchinson and ‘Fingers’ from my Still Burning band.

  ‘I’m A Lazy Sod’. Officially titled ‘Seventeen’, but always referred to by its more colourful chorus line in early press reviews of Sex Pistols shows.

  My sonic plunder. The Micro Synthesizer can be heard on ‘Let it Happen’, ‘It’s All Gone’, the outro of ‘Crown’, the background of ‘Is She Conscious?’ and almost every sound on ‘Dumbing Down The World’. The ‘psychedelic paint-wheels’ are on ‘His Word Is Not His Bond’. The blues harp microphone was used on ‘Crown’ and the outro of ‘The Charlatan’s Lament’. The Indian harmonium with ‘the trembler’ is at the end of ‘My Love Is My Rock In T
he Weary Land’. The Hindu beat-box lay unused for several years till Steve Wickham unlocked its secrets.

  The Theremin. An electronic musical instrument created in the twenties by Russian inventor Leon Theremin and most notably played by Clara Rockmore. Film clips of Rockmore’s uncanny performances are included in the documentary film Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey (1993). The most famous example of a Theremin in pop music is The Beach Boys’ ‘Good Vibrations’ (the instrument enters at 0:25 with a distinctive high-pitched ‘whee’ sound). In 2000 Richard Naiff played Theremin on The Waterboys’ Rock In The Weary Land tour.

  Allan hadn’t known I’d become a musician, and had never heard of The Waterboys. My father finally saw me performing at a Waterboys show in Warwick, England, in 2001.

  Maison Rouge. The studio was knocked down in the early noughties and turned into a car park.

  Reams of ancient fan mail. Among the letters was one sent to me in 1985 by a sixteen-year-old James Dean Bradfield, later of Manic Street Preachers. His enthusiastic communication ended with the postscript ‘Look out for my name, preferably in lights’, and the paper had been carefully singed round the edges for dramatic effect. Twenty-five years later I bumped into James on an aeroplane and greeted him with the words, ‘I got your letter.’

  A new keyboard player, Richard Naiff. Richard went on to play with The Waterboys for nine years. He features on the albums A Rock In The Weary Land (BMG, 2000), Universal Hall (Puck, 2003), Karma To Burn (Puck, 2005) and Book Of Lightning (Universal, 2007).

  Walking with a Monsieur Hulot bounce. Jacques Tati’s classic comic character, immortalised in the films Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday and Mon Oncle.

  Appendix 4: Visions Of Strawberry Fields

  “I assumed the images I ‘saw’ when I listened to any piece of music were somehow encoded in the record. Surely everybody knew the outro of ‘Strawberry Fields’ represented a procession of brightly clothed Beatles jigging in and out of traffic during rush hour in an Asian city, pursued by water buffaloes and snake charmers? But when I asked my friends, they either imagined nothing at all or saw totally different images.”

  Soon after writing the above (from Chapter 1), I asked some friends and colleagues what they imagine or feel when they hear this piece of Beatle music, either now or when they first heard it. I requested they listen from 3:34 to the end of the record, and here are some of the responses I received.

  Alan Berry (musician): Scores of anthropomorphised lemmings whistling happily as they march off the end of a half-finished version of the Forth Road Bridge.

  Norrie Bissell (poet): Some kind of industrial complex in another world, slightly menacing, almost nightmarish after the dream-like-floating-in-clouds quality of the main song.

  Patrice Brennan (Waterboys fan): A colourful, noisy Indian market, high walls (the market in the courtyard of a castle perhaps). Definite image of snake charmer with turban and straw basket.

  Rosanne Cash (musician and author): I felt the outro was spoken directly to me. I felt it was the first drug I ever took, that I understood something not everyone could understand. I thought if I understood that music, I could enter a world of art just beyond my reach. It also made me feel angry at ‘the people who were trying to box me in’: my mother, my teachers. Not my father. I knew he understood this wildly expansive, dark, wake-up call of a song, but he didn’t know he could talk about it to such a young girl. Shortly after I first heard the record I wrote a letter to my dad, who was on the road, saying I knew there was something bigger out there for me, and that I wanted to do creative things, important things, and that I had IDEAS and passion. He saved that letter his whole life, and I found it after he died. I’m not saying the outro to ‘Strawberry Fields’ caused the inspiration, the awakening, the rebellion, but it came at exactly the right moment to help me begin my life.

  Paul Charles (booking agent and author): Two bands coming, one from left to right, one from right to left. They meet in the middle and pass on. I also used to have an image of Lennon jumping in and out of the tree (from the video) when I heard this section.

  Richard Curtis (screenwriter and film director): Well, it’s a strange thing. I can’t remember what my original feelings were about the last 45 seconds – though I can remember where I was when I heard them, sitting with two other boys in a master’s room at boarding school. We sat on the couch and listened to both sides of the single with Mr Foster-Watson, and we knew that they were good. But now, when I listen to the end of ‘Strawberry Fields’, all I see is that wonderful image of the five of them – The Beatles and George Martin in his tie – clustered round a machine, listening back and delighting in what they’d made. The joy of the creative freedom, the delight in everything new, the intimacy of the five of them in a room, in the knowledge that millions of people all over the world would listen to it – but it didn’t matter, because they were liking it, and pushing boundaries, and laughing and arguing and free.

  Dave Depper (singer and musician): As I was raised in a fanatically pro-Beatles household, ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ was one of the first songs I ever heard. Even at such an early age, I was able to identify Ringo’s frenetic martial pounding as the product of drums, conjuring up images of disembodied sticks clattering hard against a mass of floating drumheads. And my interpretation of the piercing electric guitar notes was similar then to how it is now – an infinitely long, thick guitar string, stretching out of sight down a dark tunnel and glowing as if charged with electricity. But the elephant in the room is the crazy Mellotron flute line that dominates the coda and sounds like nothing else on earth. I didn’t know what a Mellotron was until I was twelve, and even given a Mellotron now, I would have no idea how to recreate whatever John is playing on it. And having no real-world associations to make, my visual representation of this sound was forced to get deeply psychedelic. As best I can describe, the Mellotron looks like two butterflies made of audio tape fighting in mid-air, as viewed through a kaleidoscope. It’s a big bundle of shimmering ribbon that pulsates along with the vibrations of the sound, growing and collapsing with the volume. And, for the record, ‘cranberry sauce’ is yawned out by a comically giant John Lennon lying prostrate on the floor.

  Chris Difford (singer and songwriter): With a wobble I saunter off towards the garden with my water wings on both arms. I dive into the green of the garden and embrace the blue of the sky above, and life seems strange from upside down. In the potting shed a magazine with hand-drawn pictures folds into my hands. There I journey prancing like a horse going over fences and through bushes in slow motion. There is danger in the arc of a clown. He smiles, she cries. I melt like butter into a dish. Back in the house and the sun throws light suddenly into my eyes. I wake for one last time and see nothing but colour, nothing but green, nothing but blue, nothing like lemon. It’s over and I wake by the side of the bed, next to me the pillow I chewed in the night, this now, me now, we now and one. Strawberry Fields Forever.

  Ger Eaton (musician): A marching band winding its way backwards through a fairground.

  Dave Eggers (author and publisher): Growing up, I was a bit of an Anglophile and was fascinated by London. Everything I knew about the city I learned from Paddington Bear, and later, Monty Python. So when I would hear that section of ‘Strawberry Fields’, I pictured Paddington trying to get on a bus somewhere in the city, and just as he was doing so, a constable would walk by, harrumphing – maybe disapproving of a small bear riding the bus? – and after Paddington gets on the bus it heads into a tunnel of some sort (do they have tunnels in London? I don’t know), while another vehicle is going the other way, honking. That was always what I pictured when I heard the end of the song.

  Gillian Ferguson (poet): Blue birds like huge kingfishers are playing pear-shaped stringed instruments on a small stone stage in the space bar where Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan met Han Solo. Amid the hazy purple smoke, everyone is from different species but just getting with the groove, even although the music is alien; phraseology, nota
tion, key, structure, all different to Earth music. Then a golden trumpet call – fanfares, flutes, drumming. Everybody rushes outside to see a vast marching band coming over the turquoise horizon. Enormously oversized strawberries and Magic Roundabout flowers cluster all around. Then I notice childhood toys are among the marchers. Something sinister has darkened the atmosphere. Why are they gathering? Are they hostile? There are Nutcracker dolls like generals. A disturbing voice drags from a tall black-hooded figure, striding at the front like a spindly Pied Piper, saying, ‘I marry swans’ as he passes. What does it mean? The music and marchers are no longer happy; the trumpets have called them and they must answer. There is fear in the dazzling sunlight. All children are called – and all children, bar one, must leave their dreams and march forwards.

  Eamonn Forde (journalist): The outro always spooked me as a kid. It still does. Those low strings and brass stabs during the song were bad enough as they conjured up images of the devil, fat on the bones of the dead, dreaming up something looming and sinister. But the outro was something else entirely, amplifying the disquiet and taking you off guard by making you think this strange, sinister song is finally over. But, no. Here it comes back from the dead, crawling out of the speakers like a determined, demonic electric snake. It still scares me, like Rosemary’s Baby still scares me, through what’s implied rather than what’s seen or heard. Whatever is happening, I don’t like it. Not one bit.

  Nancy Franklin (journalist): I was ten when ‘Strawberry Fields’ came out, and it was the first Beatles song that felt like it wasn’t quite a Beatles song. John’s depressed and draggy voice pulled me into a place where I wasn’t comfortable. The last 30 seconds struck me in a literal way. The horns were train whistles, the scratchy, rhythmic sounds of who knows what instrument or found object were wheels turning, and the darting flutey sounds and jumble of voices were people trying to get somewhere in a crowd. The horn got louder as the train left the station, perhaps away from the place where “nothing was real”. Or were we going towards that place? Though I listened to the song a lot, I was always relieved when it was over. My internal life was already chaotic enough. I was more at home in ‘Penny Lane’ (the flipside of ‘Strawberry Fields’), where everything was reassuringly real.