Adventures of a Waterboy

by Mike Scott

  Irakli Gaprindashvili (musician): I live in New York, but I was born and grew up in Georgia, at the time a Soviet republic, now an independent country. I and all my friends were huge Beatles fans. The way we accessed western records in Georgia was by giving a blank cassette tape to ‘recording booths’ on the street run by guys who had smuggled in LPs. After a couple of days you’d go back and get your cassette with the music on it. No titles, no artwork, nothing. But because ‘Strawberry Fields’ was only a single, not on an LP, I hadn’t heard it. In 1990, when I was fifteen, I got an invitation to go for two weeks to Saarbrücken, West Germany, in a school exchange program. That was my first time in a western country, and my mind was blown with all the available music in record stores. The family with whom I was staying were Beatles fans and had every release. I spent most of my time listening, reading credits, lyrics and copying the music to cassettes. Finally I got to ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. I can’t exactly describe or remember any mental images at the time, but I do remember everything sort of stopping around me. I listened to it over and over again, trying to figure out words (my English was below basic at the time) but it didn’t matter that I didn’t know what John was singing about. That song, more than any other, had power to take me out of any situation and to take me with it; to space, or some other form of place in time. I returned back to my summerhouse in Georgia and reunited with my friends, proudly holding the cassette with ‘Strawberry Fields’ and other newly acquired treasures (‘I Am The Walrus’ was another mind-blowing discovery). We spent every evening until we had to go back to school sitting on my porch listening to that tape, rewinding and rewinding, really FEELING ‘Strawberry Fields’. Now, whenever and wherever I listen to Strawberry Fields, I see the balcony of my house, moonlight peeking through the apple trees in my garden, peace and quiet of a summer evening, and three of my friends sitting around the table dealing another hand of cards. I’m there.

  Clive Goodwin (live sound mixer): A surreal shambolic merry march of toy soldiers, teddies, and rag dolls.

  Steve Gullick (photographer): Spinning treetops, dirty hands, an evil circus master; general unpleasant woodland chaos.

  Hugh Gunderson (schoolboy): A band in uniform marching off a cliff overlooking the sea but instead of plunging into the sea they plunge into a melting candle.

  James Hallawell (musician): I’m at John Lennon’s place out in Weybridge or Ascot or somewhere. It’s 5am and the sun’s coming up, me and him in the kitchen drinking tea, talking about everything and nothing. I’m looking at myself in the reflection of his round blue shades. Then I’m in a room at Paul’s listening to a track. The speakers are clad in purple silk and Paul’s wearing a suit of the same material. We listen to the playback. It feels strange to be making music with a Beatle. The track ends, then I hear a toy box melody and wonder what song this is the intro to. Flying backwards, with shapes and colours streaking past me, I awake in a London bedroom to the toy box alarm tone of a Nokia phone.

  Martin Harrison (live sound mixer): Like having the just faded-out main song spurted back, but with all the sweetness taken out of it and its dark, malignant side exposed, and the flutey Mellotron phrase, which I associated as a child with the music of Space Patrol, a UK puppet series, being particularly pernicious. The most prevailing image is a train or some other monstrous machine, emerging from the pitch dark, but like a circus procession inhabited by mischievously malevolent beings.

  Leonard Hawker (musician): Summer wheat fields, fire engines, tractors, swaying dancers in Bollywood garb, and a guy with a megaphone driving a crane, which veers madly from side to side.

  Martin Herbert (guitar technician): An infinite dark background with diagrams in the left-hand side representing all the percussive elements of the music and sheets of colour coming from the right, which represent the textures laid on top by the other sounds and instruments. The repeated dirty guitar note is an impostor, which looks like a zigzag.

  Jools Holland (musician and broadcaster): I was nine in 1967 when this was released. On hearing the song I visualised The Beatles in the recording studio and me hanging out with them as a precocious nine-year old playing piano on the track. I would be making musical suggestions that they agreed would be brilliant. It is often these sort of fantasies that can lead to a career in music.

  Mary Hopkin (singer): On first listening (1967), I watched in awe as amorphous, swirling figures danced on a path ahead of me. Later that year, when The Prisoner enraptured the nation, the song and the series became inextricably linked in my mind. Bizarre, colourful, brainwashed characters from Portmeirion joined us on the path, while Rover (the huge white balloon that was sent to capture escaping prisoners) hovered menacingly alongside.

  Stephen Jobes (theatrical director & playwright): A fife-and-drum band in tight trousers and loud jackets, ragged and unknown, turning the corner at the bottom of a street. I wasn’t happy to hear the outro when young; my longing to be free was large, my longing to be wooed by some muse, some gamine lovely gal to take me away. ‘Strawberry Fields’ is where, I imagined, she might take me and free me into exactly what, I didn’t know. I longed for it; I feared it too, the chaos as well as the sweetness and lift. Didn’t know if I went, if I’d come back. It wasn’t a band I could follow.

  Daniel Levitin (neuroscientist, musician, and author): Just when you think it’s over, they’re back with their Mellotron (like a flute with the hiccups) and those oddly military drumbeats. As an eight-year-old I envisioned a fairground with sawdust and wood chips on the ground, a warped and broken-down calliope, live horses bobbing up and down on its rotating platform, big toothy grins and floppy ears taking in the scene of chaos unfolding around them: Beatles dressed in Sgt Pepper costumes running around like keystone cops, a marching band dispersing in all directions with drummers beating bass drums the size of small cars, kids with balloons and stuffed animals scrambling every which way, and a clown ambulance whizzing past in time with the siren-like electric guitar at 3:44. All was in fun, as though watching a movie rather than a newsreel, amusing non-threatening chaos.

  James Maddock (songwriter and singer): I picture myself as a four-year-old, sat on the floor in front of one of those suitcase record players in the living room at our house on Lanesborough Road in Leicester. My mum in the kitchen making some tea and me just sat there alone, totally immersed in a fantasy made by this band called The Beatles, the only band I had ever heard of. Playing the songs over and over and over, hours at a time, feeling the music so deeply but never understanding any of it.

  Nicola Meighan (journalist): From my vantage point as a four-year-old the exotic chaos of ‘Strawberry Fields’’ final, fitful flashes of brilliance merged the anarchy and tradition around me. The outro evoked the lawless pop and free jazz of The Muppets’ band, Dr Teeth & The Electric Mayhem; and processions of bagpipe players marching up the Abbey Craig to the Wallace Monument, their uneven, reedy chanter echoes billowing into my tiny back garden. I still see Muppets and pipers whenever I hear ‘Strawberry Fields’. And I see a child outside a bungalow, embracing the end of a much-loved song, populating its notes and beats with bricks and history and puppets.

  Colin Meloy (singer, The Decemberists): Marching, a grand procession of some sort. Vibrant colours: magentas and deep blues. There’s an urgency to the procession. It’s loping and maybe a little drunken, but deliberate in its movement. And there’s a darkness behind it all, a little dangerous like it’s inviting you to come along but with a strong caveat that you will be taken beyond the pale of your comfort and experience. And there are definitely elephants involved.

  Andrew Merry (singer): A military band in a busy city watching a spinning coil collide with oncoming traffic.

  Kieron Moyles (record plugger): A groundswell of dwarves grumbles to the left and a giant army of weighted plastic birds bobbing into water troop past as a questing eye moves through the undergrowth and then everything fades away to vibrations.

  Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh (musician an
d composer): A long-forgotten chaotic carnival world, spinning on a dismal little record player in the corner of a junk shop. In one of the grooves is a curious chap wearing wellies and squelching in the mud, running against the grain and staying ecstatically stationary. There is a wind-up carnival organ, the workings of which have gone wonky, doomed to dementia. There’s that fire brigade going past, of course, and disappearing – not to a fire though. And a train rattling down the tracks. Under the glass between the sleepers stands a strange old man with an ungainly moustache, reasonably well dressed but wearing runners, smoking a cigar and slurring his mutterings, quite drunk. He’s obnoxious, yet somehow magnetic. All these people are engaged in these activities for an eternity. There is no way out. They are doomed.

  Peter Paphides (music journalist): As far as I’m concerned it is – and always has been – the sound of what the woodland animals get up to when the last humans have left.

  Nick Pegg (author and playwright): Some sort of motley Bohemian raggle-taggle procession of figures, walking, dancing, and marching across a field away into a golden sunset with horses and gypsy caravans in tow; a circus leaving town.

  Ali Pike (concert lighting designer): White flying birds, possibly Liver Birds, with a trail of white sparks behind them swooping overhead, and a marching band in bright red jackets and busbies; an almost cartoon-like quality to the scene.

  Ian Rankin (author): All a big carnival funfair, with the Beatles as ringmasters. Floaty, too. Summery. But summer with an edge. The smiling balloon-seller holds a knife behind his back. His thick black moustache is fake. Hints of Indian mysticism (I didn’t know what a sitar was). Yes: dreamy, floaty, but a bit scary. This at a time when a hall of mirrors could freak me out, and ghost trains were a definite no-no.

  Comrie Saville-Ferguson (schoolboy): A zooming carousel with horses bolting backwards, wheeling so fast it takes off and flies into the ether. Birds playing the xylophone. A rocket-powered train, with a black hole in tow, sucks everything in before imploding and spitting out a new universe. Munchkins breakdancing. John Lennon fighting elves. Panpipes in a blender. Hyper Fireman Sam on drugs. Time-travelling string and pipe band flung through the vortex, landing at an Indian rave.

  Mark Smith (musician and producer): A huge space (warehouse? cave?) full of strange people and things, chaos and activity. The trumpet a call to arms (not fighting, necessarily, but something exciting and a bit scary but brilliant).

  Wesley Stace (novelist and musician): I think of it like the soundtrack for one of those weird old sci-fi films like The Incredible Melting Man, where some bizarre transformation occurs, though the victims are completely unaware. The strange, perhaps inebriated, pipe and drum band, dressed possibly à la Sgt Pepper, are marching down a country road, going about their merrily un-tuneful business. We see their progress through the warped blurry eye of the lava-like extra-terrestrial. The insistent guitar represents the moment when this invisible alien force possesses them (in the movie this would be represented by some throbbing psychedelic effects) but they don’t know! They just carry on regardless. Even their own families won’t be able to tell the difference, but bizarre behavioural changes will give the game away. They are no longer human. They are now a Pipe Band of Zombies.

  Thighpaulsandra (musician): For some reason the end section always reminded me of the sound of empty trucks being shunted on lonely railway sidings; the grass and weeds creeping up through the gravel and around the oily sleepers. This had a melancholic feel with a slight edge of menace. I must have been about nine when ‘Strawberry Fields’ was released and often took the train with my grandmother from Pontypridd to Cardiff. We passed lots of empty coal trucks and box wagons, which always seemed abandoned. Why they scared me I don’t know. Such are the miseries of childhood. I’m sure what I saw in the music was totally different from other people but then I had a rather strange childhood.

  Graeme Thompson (journalist and author): A small army, by which I mean an army of very small people, marching – speeded up – over some kind of moor, until they disappear entirely.

  Kondo Tomohiro (singer): A scene where a mysterious band takes me to a strange and foreign town, like the ending of the Grimms’ fairy tale, ‘The Pied Piper’. Very colourful landscapes and darkest black at the same time.

  Annie West (illustrator): A merry-go-round going backwards, as if I’m standing right up close to it (too close maybe) with all the colours and lights going by me then shifting and going in the opposite direction. And I’m very small.

  Steve Wickham (musician): I’m on a train with George Harrison playing sitar then we pass through to a tunnel of silence/darkness to the magical place of strawberry fields where some Technicolor strawberry people are going about their business (making lovely roundy sounds as they waddle through their strawberry town). The train steams right on through.

  Heidi Wickham (painter): A thousand white-faced harlequin clowns on a loud protest march through the streets of New York.

  Damon Wilson (musician): Landed gentry on a foxhunt with horses, red coats, dogs, and bugles in an idyllic English setting.

  Acknowledgements

  My love and gratitude always to Janette Campbell Scott, who read every draft of this book and edited it with me.

  Thank you for help with facts, advice etc: Stuart Bailie, Willem Beekman, Edward ‘Z’ Bell, Colin Blakey, William Bloom, Paul Charles, Peter Chegwyn, Crigg, John Dunford, Cait & Mairtin Flaherty, Lyndsay Guttridge, Gerry Hanberry, Hanna at The Portobello Hotel, Sharon Hickey, Seb Holbrook, Stephen Hunt, Theresa Kereakes, Vinnie Kilduff, Philip King, Joe Kingman, Roddy Lorimer, Maureen Martin, Chris Merry, Tony Moylan, Andrew Mueller, Richard Naiff, Carol Napier, Jim Powers, Mary Quinn, Mike Rogers, Simon Reynolds, Robbie The Pict, Anne Scott, Sharon Shannon, David Spangler, Wesley Stace, Frank Surgener, Anto Thistlethwaite, Crispin Thomas, Graeme Thomson, Alex Walker, Andy White, Steve Wickham, Ali Wilson.

  Special thanks to these ‘angels’ in my musical life: Doreen Loader, John Kennedy, Mark Astaire, Philip Tennant, Nigel Grainge.