Adventures of a Waterboy

by Mike Scott

  As well as suggesting musicians, Kate had inevitably begun to advise me about my career. This advice, usually opposite to the counsel of my manager, was given with a dramatic spin of, ‘If you don’t do what I suggest, you’re insulting me and choosing Gary Kurfirst over me.’ This pressure did nothing to foster my ability to discern whether Kate was giving good advice or bad, and several times I went to Gary and robustly told him that Kate had suggested such-and-such and that I agreed with her. He would be pissed off, his street-fighter’s nose knocked out of joint, and the wheel of our artist-manager relationship would slip a few degrees further into the mud. I’d stumbled into a classic rock’n’roll trap: the powerful girlfriend who countermands the influence of the manager and so comes between manager and artist. At one point Gary’s assistant Andrea phoned me and said, ‘This is an important time for you. What are you doing with her? She’s a neurotic New York nut!’ This, of course, only made me more stubbornly loyal to Kate.

  Meanwhile the tectonic plates were shifting under the band. Karl Wallinger had grown resentful of my leadership and, perhaps, the attention I was getting. This came to a head at a soundcheck in Birmingham when I noticed Karl’s keyboards taking up approximately half the stage front, relegating poor Marco Sin to a shadowy rear corner. When I suggested we move his gear a few degrees westwards Karl erupted, accusing me bitterly of thinking I was Bruce Fucking Springsteen and that the musicians were my personal E Street Band. I may not have wanted to be Bruce, but this was my group and the vehicle for my songs, and if Karl, the veteran of one and a half albums, couldn’t deal with it, that was for him to work out. But I didn’t want one musician’s personal drama causing the stage to mutate into a fiefdom, and the keyboards were moved. I resisted the temptation to emulate Z’s right hook and Karl contained his impatience until after the show in Detroit, three weeks later, when he announced his departure to the rest of the band in a motel bedroom.

  Karl and I had been friends, often hanging out smoking reefers, listening to music and talking till dawn. He’d brought a lot to Waterboys recordings, especially This Is The Sea, but dealing with him in the daily life of the band had become a burden. Every time we came off the road I swore to myself I’d never tour with him again, but because he was such a good player – and because in a corner of my heart I loved the guy – I didn’t follow the promise through. Now Karl had made the decision for me and his news came as a mighty relief. That night I went for a long walk with Steve Wickham through the moonlit Detroit suburbs, past flat-roofed houses and the churches that stand like sentries on every corner of that city, enthusing about what we’d do with The Waterboys from here on in. For the way was clear for Steve, myself, and Anto to emerge as the three-man soul of the band.

  Karl stayed on till our final American concert in New York a week later, but as we burned the miles the vibes in the band were weird. Everything was splintered. Some people on their way in, others on the way out. Karl wasn’t the only one splitting: Chris Whitten would be leaving after New York too. When we returned to London we’d have to audition and rehearse new players all over again for the next leg of the tour starting ten days later. Between Chicago and Detroit we fired our tour manager, a hapless ex-pat Englishman called Biff, Kurfirst’s man, whose levels of ineptitude were matched only by his good nature. Biff was demoted to humble roadie, a position in which he seemed far happier, and our usual roadie, a taciturn Brixtonian called Jim Chapman, was elevated to tour manager. Kurfirst didn’t like it but, trying to keep my ramshackle tour rolling somewhere in the freezing Midwest of America, I was past caring whether my manager blew his top in the comfort of his Broadway office.

  In mid November we flew from the Midwestern snows into the mellow balm of California and in L.A. we stayed in a motel where oily-furred rats scurried round the bottom of a dried-up swimming pool. At night we played two sets at the famous Roxy club, a funky, dark neon-crusted shebeen of a shithole on Sunset Strip. The guest list was a roll call of L.A. scene-makers and punk rock aristocracy; someone told us Bob Dylan was coming and there was a seriously buzzing atmosphere in the joint. Our trumpet player, Roddy Lorimer, a wire-haired Glaswegian with the purest, most soaring sound in rock, had joined the tour and somehow all seven of us fitted on the egg-box-sized stage. Dylan didn’t show but his rumoured presence added an extra edge to the performance. We would encounter him for real, soon enough.

  After the show in Berkeley the band went sailing on San Francisco Bay with the crew of a Greenpeace boat, but I flew on ahead to New York, scene of our final American concert, to stay with Kate Lovecraft, a moth to the flame. Our love affair had been flickering on and off. We’d split up transatlantically a couple of times during The Waterboys’ British dates, then got back together in New York at the start of the American stint. We were ‘on’ now, but only just, and the final drama was about to play.

  On the early morning of the show, lying in Kate’s bed and drowsing in the hinterland between sleep and waking, I became aware of sounds penetrating my dream. Then I heard footsteps approaching, bare feet slapping on a wooden floor. The bedclothes were ripped off me. My skin felt the cold rush of air as Kate’s voice, in one of its high-pitched cartoon manifestations, burst on my consciousness: ‘Ha! I found it! I saw it in my mind! I knew it psychically and here’s the evidence!’ I rolled over and looked up. She was standing over the bed, an explosion, hair piled high on her head, holding something in her hand and waving it triumphantly. I squinted until the thing came into focus. A notepad. My notepad, from my inside jacket pocket. She started to quote from it in a singsong voice: ‘Do I love Kate or do I love Krista? I probably love neither.’

  I couldn’t remember writing these words, but as she thrust the notepad an inch in front of my face I saw them there in my own once private handwriting, incontrovertible evidence of ... what? Not infidelity, certainly, but of confusion and uncertainty, yes. Guilty as charged. I felt in my guts I didn’t love Kate but my desire to please her and hold onto my illusions wouldn’t let me admit it: the incriminating words had been written in a rare moment of self-awareness. Krista was my Canadian ex-girlfriend, the one who’d asked me if it was easy to write songs, sparking the writing of ‘The Whole Of The Moon’. She’d turned up backstage at the Berkeley show and had fatefully found her way into my journal musings. Before I could respond Kate threw the notepad at me, swivelled on her heels and vanished into the bathroom, slamming the door and locking it from inside with impeccable dramatic timing. Within seconds I heard the rush of water hissing from the shower and then another sound, her voice, now blithe and carefree, singing a familiar old song, ‘I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out Of My Hair’. I sat up, horribly awake. I had a drama-queen eruption of the first order to negotiate my way through but what really worried me, what shook me to the core, was that Kate Lovecraft appeared to have clairvoyantly seen something I’d written days ago in my notepad, something I’d even forgotten I’d written. How else could she have known to look for the evidence in my pocket?

  It didn’t occur to me, nor would it for some years, that she’d simply been snooping in my garments and when she found something incriminating, made up a story about being psychic in order to mask her actions. To my twenty-six-year-old self, it appeared alarmingly clear that this powerful, unpredictable woman who over the short months of our relationship had shattered every personal boundary I had, had just breached the last one. She could see into my mind! Kate eventually emerged from the bathroom and after apologies and self-abasements on my part we negotiated a truce. She came to the concert that night and all, briefly, was sweetness again. But I was desperate to get back to London to regroup my thoughts and emotions.

  I say she had broken all of my boundaries, but before I left New York the next day she made an assault on one more.

  In the late morning Kate and I went to a café on Columbus Avenue. Having seen The Waterboys perform for the first time the night before she had some feedback on the show for me. She took out a sketch pad covered with he
r handwriting and began reading aloud instructions regarding the songs that worked and the ones that didn’t, what I should say on stage and what I shouldn’t, the good moves I made and the bad ones, how I should have ordered my songs, and so on. She was telling me how to make my music and present it to the public. I sat and watched, as if from some great distance, as this woman pushed her way with absolute entitlement into the most intimate relationship of my life – the one between me and my music. I heard her once-devastating voice fall away like a murmur. I saw her face, pinched and sun-shrunken, and it held no more power over me. My authority over my music was one boundary she would not cross and in a moment of clear, crystalline certainty my mind and heart were made up. At last I had found the bedrock of my self-worth. There would be no scene – a phone call or letter from the removed calm of London would suffice – but Kate Lovecraft and I were indisputably over.

  I’d seen Gary Kurfirst in New York too but by now we were strangers to each other. He hadn’t been able to shift the business impasse between the record companies, and the promotion of This Is The Sea was still gridlocked. Though word of mouth would turn it into a gold record over the next few years, its campaign was stillborn. So, it seemed, was Kurfirst’s management of The Waterboys. I couldn’t figure out what the guy did for me at all. His dismal prognostications – ‘You have no touring prospects’ – offered no sign of light at the end of the chaotic tunnel, and when I boarded the British Airways flight out of JFK I knew that this relationship, too, was in terminal decline. I wanted out. Squeezed into seat 31F next to The Fellow Who Fiddles, I wrote down my feelings in verse on the back of my boarding pass, the beginnings of a new song called ‘Fisherman’s Blues’.

  In London I checked into a hotel in Bayswater – my landlord had sold my flat six weeks earlier – and began to get ready for the next round of auditions and our subsequent European tour. Then I got a call from an American lady I knew called Rovena Cardiel, a tenacious and pretty hustler who ran the London office of Geffen Records. She was buddies with Bob Dylan’s girlfriend and rang to tell me Bob was in town and that having heard and liked ‘The Whole Of The Moon’ he was inviting me to come and join in a recording session. I asked Rovena if I could bring Steve and Anto. She checked this out and the answer came back yes. So on a bleak November afternoon as the wind raced through the streets like a league of phantoms, the three of us jumped in a black cab with our instruments and headed up to north London.

  The studio was a converted church in Crouch End. We buzzed the doorbell and climbed a flight of stairs, emerging into what was once the vaulted nave of the church, now the studio’s live room. At the far end was a row of soundproofing screens and sticking up above one of them was a tousled head of curly hair. Yup, it was Bob, and as I crossed the floor this time there were no bouncers or Harvey Goldsmiths to block the way. We walked round the screens into an enclosure filled with enough instruments for a large band, and in the middle Bob was sitting on his own. His face, so familiar from film and photograph, looked more Eastern in real life, as if he were an inscrutable Chinaman or a Zen Master. He was dressed in jeans and red shirt with a blue scarf, and having shaken our hands (he seemed genuinely pleased to see us) he reverted to his afternoon’s pursuit, playing ceaseless lead guitar, coaxing burbling, bluesy sounds from a Fender Stratocaster.

  The rest of the band came out of a nearby control room and introduced themselves. The only ones I recognised were Clem Burke, the drummer from Blondie, and Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics, a gangly, nervous chap who functioned as ringmaster, cajoling everyone along and suggesting each next musical activity. We found spaces to sit and joined in on what turned out to be a slow, sexy instrumental. To our disappointment Bob didn’t sing, just kept playing that burbling guitar, even in the breaks between takes. In one such break Bob had a short word with each of us. He’d met Steve when In Tua Nua had played support to him in Ireland a year earlier and so he genially, if tactlessly, asked Steve, ‘How’s your band doing?’ For me he had some kind things to say about ‘The Whole Of The Moon’, and there was an encouraging word for Anto too.

  When we were all in the control room listening to the instrumental we’d recorded (except Bob, still in the studio playing lead guitar), Dave Stewart asked me if I had any tunes we could do. I scratched my head and went out to the piano. Bob stopped playing and came over. Several tunes came into my mind, but I had them all earmarked for new Waterboys songs and I wasn’t giving them away, Dylan or no Dylan. Then I remembered one that didn’t figure in my plans, a reggae-cum-jazz number called ‘Say You Will’ about my travails with Kate Lovecraft. Of all the songs I ever wrote it was not the most auspicious one to play as a demo for Bob Dylan. I sang a verse or two, the band joined in and Dylan played yet more burbling lead guitar. When the song finished he leaned over and said in a kindly tone, ‘You can keep that one.’

  There’s a legend that the day we jammed with Dylan we were meant to be performing ‘The Whole Of The Moon’ on the British TV show Top Of The Pops, the implication being that I’d sooner fool around on guitars with Bob than shoot for success by playing the biggest music show in the UK. It’s a great story, but it isn’t true. By the time we jammed with Bob, ‘Moon’ had already had its brief run in the lower echelons of the charts. It would return in greater style six years later.

  The Dylan session was followed by several more trips to North London for our latest auditions. These yielded a veteran punk drummer called Dave Ruffian and a young piano player, Guy Chambers. Thus re-constituted we flew to Rotterdam and began our final tour of 1985, a winding crawl through Holland, Belgium and France opening for Simple Minds. Halfway through the tour I started to notice Marco Sin taking whole bottles of vodka and whisky back to his hotel room after shows. I’d never been around an alcoholic and didn’t understand what this behaviour signified, but in the French town of Brest, a couple of days before tour’s end, things got serious.

  After the concert a French cocaine dealer came backstage and invited us to a nightclub. We went along, partook of his wares in the toilet, and felt jolly pleased with ourselves. Back at the hotel I was lying in bed when I heard a terrible coughing from the room next door. It was Marco. I thought to myself, ah he’ll be OK. He’d looked pretty stoned earlier but I didn’t think there was cause for alarm. And sure enough the coughing subsided. I fell asleep. Suddenly I was torn awake by urgent banging. I jumped out of bed and opened the door to find Anto and Steve, white-faced, frantically telling me that Marco had overdosed: apparently the dealer had had heroin with him and Marco had taken some. They’d bust down the door to his room. Dave Ruffian was crouched on the floor cradling Marco’s lolling head, its eyes two sightless white ovals. Anto, a fluent French speaker and the angel of the hour, had called an ambulance. We slapped Marco’s face, punched him, tried shouting at him then speaking in tender whispers, but nothing would bring our friend back from the far off zones where his consciousness was roaming, perhaps for good.

  The ambulance arrived and two medics put Marco on a stretcher, pronounced him stable and took him away. Luckily they’d got to him in time. When we visited Marco next morning he was lying sheepishly in his hospital bed, a black tube stuck down his throat. He couldn’t speak but wrote ‘I feel so foolish’ on a piece of card and held it up, the sweet, silly man. He was repatriated to New York a week later and never touched heroin again. Shell-shocked, we played our last couple of shows with Anthony deputising on bass, then broke for Christmas.

  As I didn’t have a flat in London anymore I went to Scotland to spend a week with my mother. How strange to be suddenly back in my teenage bedroom with its punk rock posters still on the wall. But the ground was moving here too. My mum had sold the house and would be leaving it in a few weeks’ time. My ties to both the recent and the deep past were being broken. Standing at this crossroads, scorched earth and the wreckage of my rock dreams behind me, the vague horizon of the unknown ahead, I took Jackie Leven’s advice and got on the bus. Except it wasn’t an Edinburg
h bus, it was a Dublin one.

  I flew into Ireland on the fourth of January 1986 to visit Steve Wickham for a weeklong trip that turned into six years. He was waiting for me in the arrivals lounge of Dublin airport, a purple scarf round his neck and a grin on his face. We hugged, picked up our non-stop conversation where we’d left off a few weeks earlier, stepped outside and got into a minicab. ‘Lennox Street, by the canal,’ Steve told the driver as we sped off. The radio was announcing the death of Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy. With sorrow in his voice the DJ was playing all Philo’s old songs: ‘Don’t Believe A Word’, ‘The Boys Are Back In Town’, and there was a fatefulness in the air as we hurtled through the winter’s evening past long avenues of old-fashioned shops and pubs. In Steve’s basement flat I was introduced to his wife Barbara and shown the guest room, a tiny chamber with a narrow single bed and a window onto a grimy backyard. Then we went out into the soul of the Dublin Saturday night, found a bar, Cassidy’s on Camden Street, and drank to Phil Lynott, friendship and new adventures.

  Finding myself in Dublin was like going through the back of a Narnian wardrobe. I was in a convivial parallel universe, led by The Fellow Who Fiddles down colourful streets into dusty cafes where roguish men with scarves and glass eyes said things to each other like, ‘I hear you’re playin’ chess for money these days.’ Or archaic newsagents’ shops with fifties décor, which sold Irish cigarettes – Major and Carroll’s Number One – and whose magazine shelves contained little songbooks with titles like A Collection Of Sea Ballads or Sing An Irish Song. I gathered this strange new world around me like a fog, quickly realising Dublin afforded me space and distance. The wilful voices of agents, managers and record companies were out of hearing. And after the shock of discovering, as I believed, that Kate Lovecraft could read my mind, Dublin was a safe haven. Even if Kate really was psychic the Irish cultural fabric was a hazy, mysterious domain of which she had no experience and couldn’t penetrate. She didn’t know where I was, didn’t have my phone number or a mental image of my whereabouts. I felt secure.