by Mike Scott
In the autumn of 1982 I’d moved to London and was living in a basement flat off the Portobello Road. The area that had seemed so exotic to me six years earlier, when I’d mistakenly turned up at Island Studios for my recording session, was now my neighbourhood. It was the freest I’d ever been; living on my own, writing songs all day. Another Pretty Face had split that spring and with no bandmates to compromise or argue with I could follow my muses wherever they led. Thus I found myself in the middle of a writing explosion that yielded most of the first two Waterboys albums, and in September I went to New York, for the first time, to record some of my new songs with Lenny Kaye, my friend from the Patti Smith adventure.
I’d just checked into the Chelsea Hotel (my only night there on account of cockroaches in my room) when I got a call from Z. To my amazement he’d arrived in the city that day, also for the first time, and was preparing to hitchhike across America on his way to a teaching job in Mexico. We spent a couple of days together rekindling our friendship and found that all the things we’d liked and enjoyed about each other were still the same. We spent hours in the Grass Roots Tavern on St Mark’s Place, a funky basement bar and perfect venue for soulful conversation, then went exploring in Coney Island, remapping the broad spaces of our shared brotherhood as we walked along ocean highways and across green parklands, never quite finding the fabled Coney Island fairgrounds. At night, back on Manhattan, we re-enacted the punk wars, cheekily heckling intellectual art-prog guitarist Arto Lindsay at the Irving Plaza Theatre by calling for the kind of songs Arto was least likely to play: dumb-ass numbers like ‘Louie Louie’ and ‘Hang On Sloopy’. Our friendship was intact, the same as it ever was.
Even so, it was another eighteen months before we met up again in London in 1984. By this time I’d formed The Waterboys and we were beginning to make a name for ourselves on the London scene, though I felt like a musical alien. The popular sound of the day was all synthesizers, clicky bass drums and mechanical pomp played by angular-haired people with tablecloths round their necks who sang in portentously deep faux-Germanic voices; the purgatorial heyday of the New Romantics. With my dreams of acoustic-guitar walls of sound I was a thousand miles out of step with the times. The nearest kindred spirits were Echo & The Bunnymen and The Smiths, but they were in other towns, other dimensions, far from London pop city. No, I was deep behind enemy lines in the domain of Spandau Ballet, Modern Romance and Bananarama, none of whose manifestations appeared to admit of what I considered the foundation stones of modern music: Dylan, The Beatles, the Stones, punk, soul, Chuck Berry and the counterculture. Either they were all insane or I was.
The only people who seemed to share my ideas of how rock’n’roll should look and sound were the Johnny Thunders clones who hung out on a retro glam/punk scene that festered round some of the city’s music pubs, and for a while I was so lonesome I even took comfort there. Thunders himself, the Italian-American guitarist and ex-New York Doll who I’d seen at the Patti Smith bash years before, was the god of this scene despite being a notorious junkie who played only one good gig in every six or seven. My first sighting of him on stage was at Dingwall’s in Camden Town. The act playing that night was Sylvain Sylvain, another ex-Doll, and a rumour spread that Thunders was in town and would make an appearance. I was eager to see him so when the doors opened I got down the front and stayed there all evening. After the support act, Sylvain and his band entered by the main door, pushed through the crowd and trooped across the stage into the tiny dressing room at its rear (there was no other artists’ entrance) and I resigned myself to a Johnny Thunders non-appearance. I’d been there all night and he hadn’t come in.
Sylvain’s set was a master class in dumb rock’n’roll. During the encore he started strumming a Bo Diddley riff, leaned into the microphone and introduced a ‘friend’. The dressing room door opened and rock’n’roll walked out.
Clad in black cloak, scarlet waistcoat, white dress shirt, flat black Spanish matador’s hat tilted insolently, his lips curled in a sneer that made Elvis look like a pretender and Billy Idol like a gnat, Johnny Thunders strutted to the microphone, no guitar, and started to sing in a cartoonish, sleazy voice like Bob Dylan, had he been born in Little Italy instead of Hibbing, Minnesota: ‘Ah said ah was layin’ in a hospital BEDDDDD …’ with a ridiculously exaggerated lift on the ‘bed’. It was the greatest stage entrance I’d ever seen, and I realised that to ensure its impact Thunders must have gone into the tiny dressing room before the audience arrived and waited there all night, an incarceration of over five hours. That was dedication.
A couple of nights later he did his own show at the Hope & Anchor, a basement club in Islington I’d played myself a few times. I got close to the front again so I could study Johnny’s moves. Fortunately this was another night when Thunders was ‘on’. I’ve never witnessed a sharper guitar player. He’d deal out a lazy blues riff, one hand contemptuously fingering the guitar neck while with the other he pulled a steel comb from his jeans pocket and fixed his hair, preening for the girls in the front row. Then he’d swing full circle on one boot heel and as he came face-on to the crowd again crack out a machine-gun riff in perfect sync with a drum fill before swinging into another beatifically brilliant dumb chorus. He was outrageously great and no other flash rock guitarist, not Keith Richards, not Jimmy Page, not Jack White, has ever come close. But the next time I saw him a week later he was so out of it on heroin he had to be carried into the venue flaked out between two roadies, belly distended, eyes rolling and legs like Plasticine. When they propped him up on stage he couldn’t even play in time. He’d morphed from the sharpest man in the universe to the saddest, and I didn’t have time to stick around and watch his decline.
Another junkie, the rock journalist Nick Kent, lived a few doors up from me and I’d often see him standing in his garden, slightly dazed as if he’d just woken up, watching the world pass him by like a horse looking over a hedge. Further down the street a gang of truants sniffed glue every afternoon, holding plastic bags to their noses and staggering around cross-eyed. Each summer, as August Bank Holiday weekend approached and brought with it the Notting Hill Carnival, massive sound systems appeared on every street. Monolithic speakers emblazoned with the names of Brixtonian or Jamaican DJs blocked the roads, and the neighbourhood would shake to loud, feral Rasta music, its supersonic bass tones rattling the foundations of the Victorian houses.
Most days I’d step out wearing a cowboy hat I’d bought in New York with a couple of feathers in the brim, a pair of striped trousers, a black jacket with the sleeves rolled up, and jingly boots from Johnston’s on the King’s Road. As often as not I’d have my acoustic guitar with me, slung over-shoulder or carried under-arm ready for action. I’d stroll down Portobello Road digging the bustle of the market, buy bootleg albums and second-hand books, then go to Mike’s Cafe on Blenheim Crescent for lunch. Lots of musicians ate in this semi-legendary greasy spoon; I’d bumped into Mick Jones of The Clash here several times and the luckless A Flock Of Seagulls, whose notoriously over-the-top haircuts were just as mad close up. And once, the gay punk rocker Gene October, leader of perennially unsuccessful punk band Chelsea. I’d actually bought one of Gene’s records in 1977, a thug-like dole queue rant called ‘The Right To Work’. He sat down opposite me in Mike’s one day while I was eating my lunch, leaned across the table and in a conspiratorial cockney voice said, ‘You look like a muso. Wanna be in moi band?’ I was being invited to join Chelsea! It took me about one and a half nanoseconds to inform Gene I was already gainfully employed, thanks mate.
Then Z walked back into my life, turning up at my flat one March morning in 1984. He’d heard my Waterboys records on the radio and fancied working with me again for a while. Not as manager – he had no intentions in that regard anymore, but as an assistant, and strictly temporarily. I needed a road manager to organise and drive the band on our first tour, which started in a couple of weeks, so I had a word with my financial backer, Nigel Grainge, in his office
on nearby Westbourne Grove. Nigel was a London music biz man, something of a maverick, and he’d taken a shot in the dark by signing me to his Ensign label in 1981 when no one else was interested. He’d funded my musical explorations and encouraged me in what he felt were the right directions for me to go. And sometimes they even were. Happily, he agreed to bankroll Z for a hundred quid a week. We were off again.
Z moved into a flat on the same street as me and I introduced him to the four other Waterboys. Saxman Anthony Thistlethwaite was a beatnik character and former Paris busker. He’d been in my last combo, an outfit called The Red And The Black that had gigged round London a couple of years earlier. When Anthony played he turned into a human saxophone, and the mighty Promethean wail of his horn provided most of our solos. He also played mandolin with the exquisite tenderness of a lover. Our drummer was an unusual player called Kevin Wilkinson, a mate of Anthony’s with a pointed chin, a craving for Frank Zappa music, and a penchant for rearranging hotel furniture upside down. Keyboard player Karl Wallinger was a gifted, complex Welsh Beatles fanatic who’d answered my musician-seeking ad in the NME nine months earlier. And the bassist, a quiet cerebral fellow called Martyn Swain, was a friend of Karl’s.
Another Pretty Face had been like a gang, with a group mentality, and Z was one of that gang. But now there was a different dynamic. The Waterboys was indisputably my band, and the others, at least at this early stage, were hired guns with different degrees of empathy and involvement. I half-expected therefore that as soon as Z stepped in, the fact of our history would mean we’d reprise the two-man force-of-nature mentality we’d had in the past. I was wrong. Perhaps because our lives had been on different paths for so long, or because Z wanted to keep his options open, this didn’t happen. Nevertheless, it was good to work and travel with my old friend again, to feel a familiar hand at the wheel and once more witness his ability to deal well with business people. This came in particularly useful with one of our booking agents, a smooth young persuader named Steve, with short, smart hair and alarmingly blue Teutonic eyes.
Steve had strong opinions regarding what we should do, which concerts we should play, which groups we should open for. But if I didn’t agree immediately he seemed to regard me as an irritating obstacle. Why, oh why, I imagined him wondering, does Mike have to think about things so much? Why can’t he just say yes to the gigs I’ve worked hard to secure? Of course, I had my own sense of what was right for my band, though not as yet the ability to articulate it in a way that an agent or anyone else could understand. Consequently I always felt Steve to be impatient with me, and all the band perceived his presence at our shows as a pressure. Yet Z remained aloof from this feeling and he and Steve developed an understanding which allowed our train to keep rolling.
These were rough beginnings for The Waterboys. Though we’d been on radio and TV and were getting known in London, we were a long way from being established nationally. Many of our early concerts were poorly attended. We stiffed in Bournemouth and Folkestone, battled with the potted plants and disco lights of Busby’s nightclub in Redhill, and finally met our nemesis at the New Ocean Club in Cardiff, a vast hangar of a place populated at show time by all of six fans. By some miracle this event turned into that rare but blessed phenomenon that every up-and-coming band experiences once: the scantily attended gig that turns into the greatest night of everyone’s life. Those six guys came down the front and danced unselfconsciously to our rough but enthusiastic set like we were the best band in the world. And for those sixty minutes, I guess we were. They were certainly the greatest audience.
Things revved up when we were booked as support act on a twenty-date European tour with The Pretenders, then at the peak of their popularity. But when I turned up to meet everyone at the Westbourne Grove cafe that served as our touring departure point, the others had all got themselves variations of the dreaded then-fashionable angular haircuts, rendering me a long-haired stranger in my own band. Kevin had a new-romantic wedge with a fringe that jutted several inches from his brow, curly-locked Karl looked like a pruned bush, while Anthony had been to a trendy Kensington salon called Antenna where apparently a trainee had gone experimental on him, resulting in a look halfway between Billy The Whiz and a Mohawk. All my ideals of what a rock’n’roll band should look like were severely challenged. But at least Z was still his usual scruffy self and with my mate reassuringly at the controls we drove off, angular haircuts and all, on our greatest adventure thus far.
Touring as a support band is a fantastic way to see the world. We played nineteen towns in nine countries in a month and only had to play forty minutes at each show, leaving plenty time to hang out and explore the great cities of Europe. And because we drove everywhere the journey had an epic, real-time quality. Then there was the onstage education: as the tour moved across the continent I began to understand the differences between the audiences, and therefore the national characters of the various countries. Nordic punters were earnestly soulful, signifying appreciation by applauding in slow communal handclaps (a phenomenon deeply unnerving at first, for the same thing means impatience and contempt in Britain); the French were hard to please but passionate once roused; Italians were combustible, like dry tinder ready to be sparked.
In these pre-euro times, we had to change money every few days – lira to kroner to marks and so on – and generally had no idea of the value of what we were spending. It quickly became confusing, and in a fateful motorway service station on the Swiss border, hungry but with no usable cash, Karl Wallinger pushed it too far. He complained bitterly to Z that he had no Swiss francs, with the whinging implication that it was all Z’s fault as usual. Z, stretched beyond all reasonable limits after three weeks in foreign countries with Karl, blew his Scottish gasket and in one athletic movement spun round and landed a wild haymaker of a punch on Karl’s protruding jaw, knocking him, poetically enough, into a rack of Europop cassettes.
From Switzerland, and despite Karl’s punctured but soon restored dignity, we continued to Berlin, where Thistlethwaite smoked so much reefer his head changed shape, clockwise through Italy and France, and finally to Ireland. After our performance in Dublin, during the intermission before The Pretenders’ set, I was ushered by a red-haired roadie into a dark and cordoned-off projection room. There U2’s Bono awaited me, wishing to proclaim himself a Waterboys fan and talk with me about C.S. Lewis. Seemingly too famous already to stand among his home crowd, secreted in a hidden corner with a man to do his fetching, Bono struck me as a kind of benign rock emperor – a mixture of fervour, self-import, curiosity and a mannered humbleness that felt about seventy per cent genuine. We hung out with each other for half an hour and shared a bottle of champagne, beginning an occasional friendship which flourished for six or seven years. And in the dim room, with the hubbub of the waiting audience roaring like a restless sea in the background, I sensed Bono was sizing me up, measuring my energy and intensity, my charisma and desire, like a tiger sniffing out territory, to see if I was a dangerous competitor with my eye on the same prize as him. And at that moment, before I discerned other more distant and mysterious mountain peaks to shoot for, I was. What’s more, I was measuring him up too.
A week later the second Waterboys album, A Pagan Place, came out and we played the Glastonbury Festival for the first time. On our way there Z stopped to give me the gift of looking on Stonehenge with pristine eyes, and a few miles further on came another striking vision, our first glimpse of the fabled Glastonbury Tor, which rose ship-like on the horizon, its tower-crested profile Calvaryesque against the morning sky. I already knew the spiritual tradition of Glastonbury, of how it was said to be ‘the holiest earth in England’, and I couldn’t wait to play the festival that bore its name.
The gig was a shock. We were the first band of the festival, a thirty-minute performance on Friday lunchtime. When we walked up the slippery earth-encrusted ramp to the rear of the Pyramid stage and stepped out into the light, there before me was the biggest audience I’
d ever seen; fifteen or twenty thousand punters arrayed from skyline to skyline, most of whom hadn’t the foggiest idea who The Waterboys were. With no containing roof or walls, how was I to project my voice and songs into such a vast space and to so many faces? How could our presence fill this stage, this spectacle? By the time we returned to Glastonbury two years later, with the wind at our heels and victory in our grasp, I’d have solved these problems, but for now we were neophytes, dwarfed by the occasion, and played a blustery set that left the audience unmoved. Crowning our disappointment, half an hour after we came off stage an impatient Z, with some pressing but undisclosed London business of his own, announced he was leaving immediately in our van. For the band this meant leave now or stay and be stranded, but this was my first-ever rock festival and I wanted to soak it up. So drummer Kev and myself stayed and embarked on a sleepless twenty-four hour marathon of high jinks, reefer smoking and general wide-eyed and ecstatic exploration of the festival’s parallel universe. We also witnessed the greatest show I’ve ever seen at Glastonbury.