Adventures of a Waterboy

by Mike Scott

  In the summer of 1985, with The Waterboys’ third album This Is The Sea set for release, word was we were the next band likely to explode out of rock’n’roll and break America.

  America! Its music had cast a spell on me since I was a child. I dreamed and breathed its sound, its energy. I wanted to plug my soul into its motherlode and send my records crackling across its sweet airwaves. And so did my record company bosses, Nigel and Chris. At the thought of breaking The Waterboys in America they’d come over all intense; their voices would get louder as if someone had pumped gas into them, they’d slap their knees, talk in big numbers, quote the names of US promo men like they were holy talismans, and break into impromptu hollerings of the Dallas theme music as if to affirm ‘Yes! We’re coming to the party!’

  Meanwhile the music press was talking, though I had mixed feelings about what they said. When Rolling Stone headlined me as ‘rock and roll’s poet laureate’ or NME called me the latest ‘god-like genius’ I appreciated the enthusiasm but mistrusted the hyperbole. It wasn’t so much that they were likely to knock me down six months later, it was that the blunt sloganising of the headlines made me cringe. Why couldn’t they just say what they felt about the music without hanging weights around me? But they couldn’t or wouldn’t and the dramatic press coverage, fusing with the publicity machinations of the record company and the organic word of mouth that surrounded Waterboys shows and records, created a powerful sense of expectation and presumption.

  I could feel this power collecting round me like a breeze that blew when I walked, a beam of light that shifted direction when I turned, an edge that entered a room when I did. It was a powerful, almost hallucinatory stimulant, and for the moment I was comfortable within its gravity. I’d been dreaming and working towards this breakthrough since I was a teenager, and to feel the wind of momentum at my heels was part of the script I’d planned. I believed in myself, and though I had an uncertain relationship with my new American manager, a tough, gruff man called Gary Kurfirst, who managed several top bands I admired, and though there were fault lines in the personnel of my band, still my feet were steady on the rock of the music itself.

  I’d hired Kurfirst to make The Waterboys a success in America, and to stop Nigel and Chris interfering while I completed This Is The Sea. My two backers had championed and nurtured me as an artist for four years but we’d begun to disagree more than we agreed. Nigel had lobbied me to drop several of what I felt were my best songs, ‘Red Army Blues’ and ‘Old England’ among them, and putting my music through the filter of his judgment, which usually resulted in one of two pronouncements, ‘It’s genius’ or ‘It’s shit’, had become confounding. I got a sore head trying to figure out why some of my songs were shit while others were genius, and knew that if I wanted to make the records that were in my heart I needed to forestall Nigel’s influence. Kurfirst had achieved that for me. As for his effectiveness in America, that remained to be seen.

  Against this backdrop, and in perfect timing for the coming campaign, I found the final element of The Waterboys’ sound: The Fellow Who Fiddles. One night in his flat, Karl Wallinger played me a demo he’d just recorded for a new singer called Sinead O’Connor. Sinead was sixteen and Irish, a discovery of Nigel’s, and she had a great voice, but what caught my ear was the violin player behind her. I’d toyed with adding fiddle to our sound for ages and had already tried three fiddlers: a Polish session guy, a Liverpudlian squaddie, and a Marble Arch busker called Frank, but none of them provided the alchemy I was looking for. The player backing Sinead was rootsy and edgy, passionate and exciting; here was the sound I wanted. His name was Steve Wickham and I tracked him down through the Dublin recording studio Windmill Lane. He accepted my invitation to add fiddle to a song on This Is The Sea and two days later, on a hot July afternoon, he flew to London and came straight to my Ladbroke Grove flat. When I opened the door I found a cheerful gypsy-eyed ragamuffin looking back at me. He came in, lay on the living room floor with his head propped on an elbow and proceeded to tell me his life story with endless diversions, ruminations and meanderings, all in the most charming Dublin accent. After a few hours of tales populated by charismatic characters with names like Clancy, Cooney and O’Kelly, I made Steve some ham sandwiches and tomato soup. Then we picked up a couple of guitars and bashed out the Waterboys song ‘Savage Earth Heart’. By the way Steve played it, and though he hadn’t even picked up his fiddle yet, I knew we were going to be musical brothers.

  Next day we went to a studio where he played on ‘The Pan Within’, giving a masterful performance that exceeded my expectations; bright, gossamer-thin shards of melody that curled around my voice like a spell. I knew then that if I had Steve in The Waterboys we’d be the best band in the world. Steve was already in a Dublin group called In Tua Nua but I invited him to guest on the Waterboys tour due to start in six weeks’ time, and foolishly they allowed him to do it. Once ensconced in our rehearsal room with his electric violins to hand, a bank of effect pedals at his feet, and the sound of The Waterboys blasting around his ears, The Fellow Who Fiddles never fiddled with In Tua Nua again. Now I had a killer album, a tough manager and a new star instrumentalist. The only thing missing from the mix was that most dangerous of rock accoutrements, the manipulative girlfriend. And lo and behold, along she came.

  In late July I went to New York to meet with Kurfirst and the American record company. Someone had the idea of doing a TV film about The Waterboys and so I was introduced to a director called Kate Lovecraft. I knew Kate by reputation: she’d worked with artists I admired, including Dylan and Patti Smith, and she understood rock’n’roll. I’d also read she had a deep interest in Eastern spirituality, and this intrigued me. But nothing prepared me for the reality of Kate. Within minutes of our meeting she was flitting around her bright studio, sassy, lithe, petite and pointing a video camera at me while exclaiming in an adorable cartoony little girl voice: ‘Oh my God, you should see how great you look in this camera!’ Ten years older than me, she’d been a young adult in the cultural explosions of the sixties and seventies, and the mark of those fateful days was upon her. She burst on my consciousness like a love grenade and seemed to my impressionable eyes to be everything I looked for in a woman.

  Next day we met at her studios again. This time she was wearing a sweet, lacy white dress. She took me on the roof and as I stood being filmed, the Manhattan skyline shimmering behind me in the summer heat, a profound feeling descended on me. I suddenly felt heavy and awestruck as if my soul had received some great news. I looked at Kate pointing her camera at me, white-clad, her reddish-gold hair blowing in the rooftop breeze, and I began to fall in love. There was an old upright piano in a room of her studio and when we came in from the roof I sat down at it and poured out my feelings in deep, long rolling chords. Kate came into the room without a word, placed one delicate kiss on my cheek, and stepped out again. Filming finished, we walked up Sixth Avenue together in the early evening light, she still in white, wheeling a bicycle, me floating by her side, aching to get close to her. Outside a deli store, watched by a hard-eyed Chinaman on a stool, Kate turned to face me and we kissed properly for the first time. A few blocks later I left to catch my plane and we said goodbye, promising to get together on my next trip to New York.

  Back in London, ecstatic and excited, I booked plane tickets for a week hence and four nights in a New York hotel. I called Kate to tell her, expecting her to be thrilled. ‘A hotel?’ she exclaimed in an outraged voice, startlingly different from the sweet tones I’d heard in New York. ‘Are you crazy? Don’t you know how short life is? Why aren’t you coming to stay with me in my apartment?’ In these few words were contained impatient summons, spiritual rank-pulling and offended generosity. Quite a cocktail. But all I knew was that I had got it spectacularly wrong. I found myself spluttering, backtracking and agreeing to stay with her, apologising for my thoughtlessness and thanking her profusely for her gracious invitation. I was falling all right, not just in love but int
o Kate Lovecraft’s power.

  Four days in her own domain with Kate turned out to be a white-knuckle ride. We weren’t in a studio now, no longer potential client and director; we were would-be lovers, with distance and privacy removed and any prospect of our love affair progressing in a gentle or cautious manner utterly gone. And in the quiet studious atmosphere of Kate’s living room, with its African art and ceiling-high bookshelves, I realised something shocking: the gulf in power between us. Quite apart from our age difference and her confidence as an established world-class artist, Kate was like no other woman I’d known. She was supremely wilful: dramatic, intense and unpredictable. She changed moods from baby-voiced bunny to drama queen to frosty critic faster than the weather on a Scottish holiday. She coined a term, ‘Dreamboy’, an ideal she required me to live up to, and to which she consistently referred, as in ‘Dreamboy wouldn’t say that’ or ‘Dreamboy wouldn’t do that to me’. I was expected to upgrade my behaviour to ‘Dreamboy’ standards. This made me feel constantly inadequate, but so in thrall was I to the force of Kate’s personality and so glamoured by being her boyfriend that I kept trying to please her. What she probably needed was an older man with ice in his veins, a thick hide and bottomless wells of patience, and that wasn’t me. Still, it was exciting to wake with Kate in her wood-panelled bedroom, thrilling to walk with her late at night through the heady swirl of the East Village with its hipsters and hustlers and all the debris of the counterculture strewn across its Babylonian pavements. In such moments I imagined us as golden – destiny-crossed lovers from another world on our travels through this one.

  When I flew back to London we continued our affair by transatlantic phone calls. The safety of distance afforded me the illusion that the relationship could work and with renewed vigour I stepped back into the fast-moving river of Waterboys business: press interviews, record company meetings and auditions for new band members.

  I was becoming one of the world’s great audition experts, hosting a stream of bassists and drummers in our rehearsal room in North London. It had got so I knew within the first ten seconds of the first song whether a player was right or wrong. I’d welcome the guy, give him a minute to adjust the drums or amplifier, then crash into a Waterboys or Dylan number with a simple chord sequence so we could play without having to stop for instructions. ‘Be My Enemy’, with its recurring blues pattern, was a favourite and its breakneck tempo soon sorted out the contenders from the pretenders. If I wanted to really put a player through his paces, we’d play ‘Enemy’ for ten or fifteen relentless minutes, a serious test for drummers. One afternoon a cocky skin-basher showed up and commented that I looked worn out. This injudicious remark condemned him to a rip-snorting twenty-minute blast through ‘Be My Enemy’ till his arms and legs were bursting and his breath came in shuddering gasps. Despite all the effort expended, and all the faces that passed through the portals of our rehearsal room, a new rhythm section proved elusive, and all the time the clock was ticking and the first dates of our tour drew closer.

  Then like a gathering storm Kate came to London in the last days of August to stay with me for ten days. And her schemes left me standing. She’d decided we’d buy an apartment in London’s Docklands; she wanted us live together in New York; we were going to have children in a few years; I was to stop being friends with a top rock manager who’d supposedly snubbed her. She took over my little flat with her papers covering every surface and the ever-changing weather of her moods filling every space. I began to feel like an extra in the all-encompassing drama of Kate Lovecraft’s life and when I finally saw her back onto the New York plane at Heathrow, I felt as if I’d been dragged cross-country by a wild horse, one of my feet caught in its stirrups. After she left I wondered why she was with me. Was it my youth, or for the energy of potential rockstar glory? And why was I with her? I no longer knew. The attraction had given way to a weird defensive desperation: being with Kate made me feel deeply insufficient but only by her approval could I transcend this condition and feel good about myself.

  Yet my affair with Kate wasn’t compromising my work: the music was flourishing. I may have been feeling gauche and inadequate in the relationship but she dug my music and that meant a lot, and when Kate wanted to be, she was a great encourager. What’s more, having a New York heavyweight like Kate as my girlfriend did a lot for my artistic confidence. Being in her life felt like entering a higher, quickened echelon of popular culture. I stood a few inches taller when I strapped on my guitar.

  And the songs were coming too. In the first flush of love I’d written several romantic numbers with titles like ‘Higher In Time’ and ‘Born To Be Together’. And even now, as things became more difficult, a stream of edgy, perplexed songs like ‘We Will Not Be Lovers’ were tumbling out of my head. Even a doomed love affair was healthy for the muse. In September This Is The Sea came out, its songs indeed crackling across the American airwaves though not yet in enough volume for the breakthrough everybody wanted. I started to come under pressure to sign extensions to my recording and publishing deals, for as the prospect of success grew closer, the investors – Nigel and Chris’s label Ensign and their paymasters Island – wanted to ensure that if things went sky high they got the maximum payback. But different parties wanted different things and as the one person whose signature on a piece of paper determined how matters would resolve, I was caught in the crossfire. Gary Kurfirst would advise me one way, while Nigel and Chris would advise the opposite. I was constantly pulled, each camp trying to sour my view of the other. To Nigel and Chris, Gary Kurfirst was a shark, an opportunistic Johnny-come-lately who hadn’t done any of the hard work building up the Waterboys, while Gary thought Nigel and Chris were ‘small-time guys’, ‘scumbags’ without a classy idea in their heads.

  The murk deepened when I learned Island wouldn’t fund a proper advertising campaign in America unless Ensign guaranteed them more than the two further albums on my contract. I was loath to sign away more; I was fond of Nigel and Chris and appreciated all they’d done for me, but they were like a suit that had grown too small. I didn’t want to be making records with them five or seven years down the line. A solution was to move directly to Island but, close to a commercial breakthrough after years of financing, there was no way Ensign would let me go. The arguments ran for months. And because people in the music business usually tell artists no more than what they want them to hear, I probably knew only the half of it. Yet what all this meant was that there was little prospect of a major campaign with the cash support for extended touring that would give This Is The Sea its shot at success. If my instincts had been attuned to the pursuit of success at all costs, I’d have signed whatever I needed to guarantee the push for my record, and hang the consequences. But my instincts were for the courses of action that would let me keep making the music I chose, to continue following my ‘instructions’. That’s what I trusted and Faustian bargains weren’t on the menu.

  There was conflict around the choice of singles too. Everyone knew ‘The Whole Of The Moon’ was the potential hit on the album. But this was a demanding song and the lyric was crucial to people’s appreciation of it. The Waterboys weren’t yet an established band and we couldn’t expect our singles to automatically chart, so I suggested we release a rocker like ‘Don’t Bang The Drum’ or ‘Medicine Bow’ first, then follow up with ‘Moon’ when the public’s attention was aroused. But no one agreed. ‘Moon’ was thrown away sacrificially as the first single and sputtered like a damp squib. I’d made the right record but almost as soon as it was out, it seemed, its stars were crossed. All I could do was hope the pieces would somehow shift themselves on the chess table and set off into the maelstrom of our three-month concert tour of Britain, America and Europe.

  On stage, at least, the music was exploding. The addition of Steve Wickham was as great as I’d hoped: a one-man artillery battalion. He played rock and blues on his fiddle, all bendy notes and gravity-defying harmonics, and these were the product of his fingers,
not added effects. But he had effects too: echo, fuzz, and a gizmo that made his fiddle sound like three or four Steves playing at once. He linked up with the Human Saxophone, Anthony, whom he nicknamed ‘Anto’ after the Irish fashion, to create a two-man orchestral section that made a monumental banshee roar. And best of all Steve was the perfect onstage foil for me, dancing across the stage with rubber legs in baggy trousers, a good-natured Elvis sneer on his lips and strands of gypsy-black hair sticking out through the top of his holey hat, star quality bursting from him like a thousand sparks of lightning.

  After the summer auditions we’d settled on a bass and drum combo, Sara Lee, lately of the British post-punk band Gang Of Four, who would have been the first Watergirl, and a drummer called Mike Osborne. But at the last minute they threatened to walk out unless they got higher wages and were fired, not unreasonably, by Gary Kurfirst. Coming on the eve of the tour, though, this was a disaster. So doleful drummer Chris Whitten was recalled, while Kate Lovecraft suggested a bassist from New York. Marco Sin was a gentle-hearted, roly-poly man, and the best bass player I’d ever worked with. He was also an alcoholic and former heroin addict, which, if she knew, Kate neglected to tell me, with near fatal consequences a few months later.