Adventures of a Waterboy

by Mike Scott

  It was late at night and all scheduled performances had finished. Six lads who’d brought their instruments to the festival were playing an impromptu set at the side of one of the rough thoroughfares. A small crowd had gathered around them as they played a homespun mix of dixieland-cum-swing with guitars, sax, trombone, percussion and a stand up bass. Their name, The Forest Hill Bums, was proclaimed on a piece of cardboard propped up in front of them and their songs were catchy, good-natured and innocent. I don’t know whether they intended to be humorous, but the little crowd found them so, especially the exertions of the hard-puffing trombone man whose eyeballs swung from side to side as he blew, grunted and grinned. As we watched, the crowd’s mood began to shift from amusement to affection and then to deepen into something bordering love. This feeling spread and radiated itself to the band, who could feel it even if they didn’t know what it was. Before our eyes, raised by the surrounding audience’s emotion, the little band grew as performers, relaxing into their stride, sensing what was funny about themselves then subtly emphasising it, joining in with the gentle joke and hitting heights of confidence and excellence they hadn’t known they had in them. The love was thereby radiated back to the crowd and, now flowing both ways, lifted us all in a sweet and heady atmosphere. At the end of the set, as Kev and I walked off into the Glastonbury night, we felt as if our souls had been cleansed.

  The next day we blagged a lift to London with some friends and a week later regrouped with Z and The Waterboys for a tour of the UK. As we criss-crossed the country we were at first blighted by the same poor attendances as before, but after three or four dates I realised we were also suffering from a more immediate malaise: Z was burned out. The poor fellow was beginning to visibly wither, his skin grey and eyes bloodshot, and had taken to spending much of the day asleep in the parked van, neglecting his duties and leaving the band to fend for themselves. The solution, clearly, was to bring in an experienced tour manager who did this job for a living, and after a quiet conversation with our soundman, a stalwart Brummie called John who gave me the phone numbers of some likely candidates, I found one. Proving the truism that people who want to be successful will even fire their best friends, I sacked Z in the car park after a tough gig in a Preston disco full of oblivious soul fans. Next day his replacement turned up, a professional tour manager called Chris Rowley, and that evening we played what I still remember as the first truly great Waterboys show, in a tiny Manchester club called The Gallery. We were off again.

  This time it was Z’s turn to retreat to Edinburgh to lick his wounds. He knew I’d done the right thing and we remained friends but I was to see him less and less from here on in: his global wanderings would take him to Madagascar, Brazil and the Far East. Whatever lay in wait for me on the road of rock, I would meet it without my old mate and fellow dreamer.

  Chapter 5: The Black Book And The Moon

  It’s a wickedly cold January evening in New York and my Canadian girlfriend Krista and I are walking arm in arm down Lexington Avenue. As we cross Twentieth Street she asks me, ‘So, is it easy to write songs?’ The correct answer is, ‘Yes, no, kind of, sometimes, but it depends and every song is different,’ though that won’t win me any kudos with my girl. But a demonstration might. So I say, ‘Of course it’s easy. I’ll write one now,’ and pluck a pen and a three-day-old envelope from my pocket.

  I look around for inspiration. A luminous full moon dangles in the New York sky, the frayed edges of clouds streaming through its aureole like witches’ rags. On the envelope I write down a title – always a good starting place – ‘The Whole Of The Moon’, then a hook line pops into my mind: ‘I saw the crescent, you saw the whole of the moon.’

  Nothing more comes but it’s sufficient to impress Krista, who squeezes my arm and gushes, ‘Oh, that’s wonderful! I hope you’ll finish it.’ Well, we’ll see. It has a ring to it all right, and I can hear a hint of a melody dancing around the words as I spin them in my mind. I need my guitar. Fast. I fold my arm round Krista’s shoulder and hasten us back to our hotel.

  A few days earlier, on a shadowy New York backstreet, I’d discovered the most curious shop I’d ever seen. It was a witches’ store, its shelves filled with potions, grimoires, scraps of wood, bark, root and numberless weird things I had no words or names for. As I explored this strange grotto my eye was attracted by a massive, enigmatic-looking black-bound book. I drew it from the shelf to find it was full of blank white pages. Mystified, I asked the man behind the counter, a lantern-jawed fellow with an air of brusque authority, what it was for. He told me it was a ‘Book Of Shadows’ in which witches wrote down spells, rituals and accounts of their experiences. I’d heard of such things, but the idea immediately struck me that the book was perfect to write my lyrics into – and lyrics, with their intent to enchant and transport the listener, were a kind of spell anyway.

  Back at the hotel the beginnings of ‘The Whole Of The Moon’ were quickly etched into the newly purchased book, with a couple of added lines establishing the theme of the song’s hero seeing or experiencing more than its narrator. When I got back to London a few days later, I wrote into the Black Book all the other songs I had in progress, forty or fifty of them, the repertoire for the third Waterboys album, This Is The Sea.

  Having all my songwriting in one volume instead of on a hundred scraps and sheets of paper had an unexpected effect, for within a few days of using the Black Book I found that by simply opening its pages I entered the flow and absorption of my writing; a feeling like switching on a light. It may only have been a conglomeration of paper, cardboard and binding thread, but once filled with songs the Book was alive, a thing of power, a gateway. And it would accompany me on every step of the making of This Is The Sea; spread open on the floor as I wrote for hour after hour, next to me on the seats of a hundred black cabs as I travelled to the recording studios of London through the spring of 1985, laid open on the mixing desk, instructions displayed, while the album was being made, and doubling as a table top as I wrote out track sheets in the studio or rolled myself a reefer.

  Alongside each lyric, and covering the page in slithering hieroglyphics of tiny handwriting, were lists of rhymes and instruments, plus notes describing the recording process of each song and how I imagined the sound, sometimes accompanied by drawings: cartoonish electricity volts bursting from twin speakers with notes like ‘fades up then explodes’ or ‘shining trumpet against cloudy backdrop’. The Book was also filled with unused song titles, stray verses, poems, dreams, future concert set lists, potential album running orders, musicians’ phone numbers, artwork ideas and all manner of notes to myself, such as:

  Create new acoustic electric cold-country rock/folk music, jagged or rolling as the land (remember folk music corresponds in shape and form to the land it springs from), five string acoustics (no ‘G’), droning electrics, pagan drum grooves like the bass drum on ‘Be My Baby’, the sound of rocks, caves and hard places. Lyrics: resurrect the narrative in poetic wild impressionistic form. Express and use my own language and do not simplify for all.

  I lived in those days in a flat on St Mark’s Road in Notting Hill, where I wrote in a long sitting room with a velvet-curtained sliding door at one end, opening onto a little garden. The walls were decorated with photographs of American Indians and rock’n’rollers – Sitting Bull brooding, Iggy Pop snarling, Bob Dylan grinning over his guitar – and books lay everywhere. The mantelpiece supported a teetering cliff face of Waterboys cassettes and my record collection was stashed in rows on the floor, hundreds of vinyl albums propped against the wall. Aside from writing songs, my favourite pastimes were lying on the floor listening to Astral Weeks by Van Morrison or turning out all the lights, sticking on Steve Reich’s album of sacred music, Tehillim, and letting its swirling mosaic of female voices dance like illuminations in the darkness of the room. I call it a sitting room but it had no chairs. I’d crouch on the floor, guitar by my side, poring over the Black Book, working on ‘The Pan Within’ or the T
hatcher-era protest song ‘Old England’ or ‘This Is The Sea’ itself, a coming of age folk/soul ballad with twenty verses, which I intended to whittle down to five or six. Or ‘The Whole Of The Moon’, for which I drafted dozens of couplets developing the saw-more-than-me theme.

  As each song evolved it took on a life of its own and I’d be swept up in its flavour and personality, a feeling like being enfolded in a heady scent, or like being in love. Whether the soul of a song existed in some ineffable realm of music before I wrote it I neither knew nor truly cared, but at some stage in each song’s composition it would become a thing with its own distinct identity and take hold of my imagination. For days I’d live in the song’s atmosphere, and when I ventured out to the world to buy bread and milk at the corner shop or further abroad to Ladbroke Grove, I’d do so inhabiting ‘The Pan Within’, perhaps, or ‘Medicine Bow’, the song’s melodies and lyrics running ceaselessly through my head, new ideas flashing into my mind at any and all times so that it was essential always to have pen and paper with me. I restructured my life and relationships so I could work like this perpetually and it became my norm.

  Soon I began to notice that rather than making decisions about a song’s content I was following instructions; the music was telling me what to do. It was like being tuned into a wavelength containing the DNA of the song, and the wavelength was informing me. I’d recognise the authority of each instruction: make the melody do this, create a middle eight here – by getting a ‘go’ feeling in my guts, a kind of flavoured certainty, every time an idea was right. And if I didn’t get this feeling I’d keep trying different things till I did. I came to look on my role as being a kind of translator, discerning the will of the music and transforming it into sound so the listener could tune into the same wavelength. My absorption was broken every now and then by Anthony Thistlethwaite, who’d turn up in his car and whisk me off to the pubs of Chelsea or Primrose Hill (and once for a day in the country) because he thought I needed to get out more. Or by my fortnightly visits to Karl Wallinger, who had a home studio in his West End flat. Karl would patiently record me exploring my guitar and piano soundscapes, usually adding contributions of his own; a slinky synth bass line or a glittering keyboard backdrop. Many of the sounds that would define This Is The Sea had their sonic dress rehearsal at Seaview.

  When I’d arrived in London a couple of years before, I’d done my recordings in an eight-track studio in Islington called Redshop (actually in the back of an empty red-painted shop) where I developed the sound journalists called ‘the big music’, after one of my songs. The core of this sound was two twelve-string rhythm guitars. I discovered that when I played the second one immediately after the first, I could remember every nuance of the playing on the first one, and could match those nuances or, better still, play subtly different to them, with little rhythmic comments and echoes. When these performances were split into opposite speakers it sounded like two musicians incredibly in tune with each other, and with the fullness of the twenty-four strings the soundscape was broad and rich. When I added rolling piano and a hatful of reverb I had a shimmering wall of music. I fell in love with this sound and used it as the springboard for The Waterboys’ style. And when Kevin Wilkinson’s epic drums and Anthony Thistlethwaite’s sax were subsequently added the musical picture became huge.

  By 1985 I’d graduated to twenty-four-track studios and heard the songs full-blown in my head before I even started. But with This Is The Sea expected to be our breakthrough album, Ensign’s Nigel Grainge insisted I work with a co-producer. Nigel didn’t think I was ready to produce a hit on my own – he was wrong, as things turned out, and I agreed to work with the guy he suggested. John Brand was English, easy-going and mad about The Waterboys; I could feel his belief in me every time he walked in the room and I felt good about playing for him. Best of all there was no conflict between our agendas: far from imposing his own vision on the music, John was happy to create an atmosphere in which I could follow my ‘instructions’. He booked a studio called Parkgate on the southeast coast, an hour from London, and because we planned to record solo demos of the songs first, the two of us travelled a few days ahead of the band.

  The studio was in a converted barn, a vast high-raftered space with a spectacularly good grand piano. John set up microphones, I propped the Black Book open on the piano top and we turned the lights down. Then I spent two days and nights singing everything in the Book, including ‘The Whole Of The Moon’, which now had several verses set to one of my lop-sided teenage piano grooves, still played with one finger on the low notes and three fingers for the chords. John and I listened back in the control room and I imagined the song’s eventual sound: hurdy-gurdy carnival music with colourful flourishes weaving through it. But it wasn’t finished; it needed a chorus, and when we began recording the album proper with the band a few days later ‘Moon’ wasn’t even on the shortlist.

  The band at this juncture was Anthony and Karl plus a doleful session drummer called Chris Whitten. We set up as a four-piece, with Anthony on bass, and began knocking out numbers. Listening back to the band through the speakers I realised something wasn’t right. John’s sound was too indie. I wanted a powerful mainstream sound with no limitations on its potential audience, and we weren’t getting it. I was reluctant to split with John because his heart was in the work, but the music came first. So I phoned Nigel Grainge to ask if we could replace John with Mick Glossop, an engineer whose work with Van Morrison I admired. Nigel drove down from London that afternoon and to my shame I bottled out and let him tell John he was fired. They had the discussion in the control room and emerged after ten minutes. John looked glumly at me, shoulders drooping, and said, ‘Oh, Mike!’ in the saddest voice, a lover jilted. I felt one inch tall, and fair enough. But I was right to make the change. Glossop arrived next morning, cranked up a slick sound, and the game was on. Yet there was a trade off; I got the sonics right with Glossop but I lost the sense of empathy I’d had with John. Mick and I never perceived Waterboys music the same way; he understood the mechanics of the music but not, I think, its drama and romance. And though we successfully produced half of This Is The Sea together, including powerful recordings like the title track, when the time came to record ‘The Whole Of The Moon’ I cut loose and defected to a north London studio where I produced the song myself.

  In fact, even as spring laid its benediction on London and pink blossoms burst on the trees along Ladbroke Grove, ‘Moon’ was still being written. Finally in mid May I completed it with a chorus hook of ‘too high, too far, too soon’ and, though still only imaginary, a Beatlesque trumpet solo.

  Just as I was closing the Black Book on what I thought was another finished song I got a kind of itch in my soul telling me something else needed to happen, some kind of lift-off after the last chorus. I reopened the book, knuckled down and tried out numerous ideas: double-length extra verse, coda, instrumental bridge, all the tricks I could think of, before finally, in a moment of clarity, I got it: a list of all the things the song’s hero has seen.

  The phrase ‘unicorns and cannonballs’ was first and the rest came quickly, almost fully formed. Only the penultimate line ‘carriages and cars’ got changed later to ‘scimitars and scarves’ when I remembered from my childhood a book about the medieval crusades, with a picture of Saladin, the Saracen lord, slicing a blue scarf in the air with his scimitar. When I sang the ‘list’ back in my head I noticed that by raising the emotional heat of the song it created the necessity for a final heightened chorus. And just repeating the earlier chorus wasn’t sufficient; I needed to tweak the words to build on the heat the ‘list’ had established. So instead of ‘you stretched for the stars and you know how it feels’, which had featured in the first two choruses, I stuck in ‘you came like a comet, blazing your trail’, which supplied the emotional pay-off.

  There was another surprise to come. Three weeks later I sat in the recording studio, Black Book open on the mixing desk, as the newly recorded song cras
hed out of the speakers. My piano and a drum loop grooved beneath a carnival of trumpets, candy-flavoured ‘la-la’ backing vocals and Karl Wallinger’s masterful synths. I was leaning back listening, eyes closed, when as the last chorus rocketed by I got the itch in my soul again. Every time the words ‘like a comet’ jumped out of the speakers it seemed some final touch, some coup de grace, wanted to happen. When the idea dropped into my mind it was beautifully simple: add the sound of the comet. I found a firework sample on a BBC sound effects record, had my engineer Felix send it through a super-powered echo unit, then inserted it one beat after the word ‘comet’. No sooner was it in place than the final unforeseen part of the whole puzzle was revealed: have a sax solo explode out of the comet. I’d been wondering how to get Thistlethwaite onto this song. Now I knew!

  Chapter 6: Don’t Forget To Get On The Bus

  A quiet London pub on an autumn afternoon. I’m standing at the bar with two men, one of whom is The Waterboys’ booking agent, a silver-haired, silver-tongued trickster called Ian Flooks. Flooks likes to introduce me to other musicians and today he’s brought me to meet Jackie Leven, the singer with a band called Doll By Doll, a gently spoken long-haired fellow eight or nine years my senior. When Flooks goes to make a phone call Jackie asks how I’m doing. Because he’s older than me and a fellow Scotsman, I find it easy to confide in him. There’s always been something about older Scottish men I find comforting, as if they’re the big brothers I never had.

  I tell Jackie I’m OK but under a lot of pressure. The new Waterboys record has just come out and I need to find and rehearse two new band members for a tour starting next week. Meanwhile there are demands on me to sign contracts that will commit my future five, six years down the line, to make this or that video, do interviews, go to meetings, agree merchandise and publishing deals. It’s good to be wanted but I feel pulled every which way. Managers, agents, record company men, even band members and my forceful American girlfriend all want me to do what they think I should do – and they all want me to do different things. The clamour is driving me nuts and it seems like ages since I had the space to just hang out and have some uncomplicated fun. ‘What I’d like,’ I tell my patient listener, ‘is to be on the top deck of a bus in Edinburgh, looking out the window, just taking it all in.’ Flooks comes back and the conversation turns to other things. When I get up to leave forty minutes later, Jackie walks me to the door. As I shake his hand he leans forwards with a glint in his eye and says, ‘Don’t forget to get on that bus.’