Adventures of a Waterboy

by Mike Scott

  Back in Dublin the events of our Edinburgh jaunt receded into the background as we re-immersed ourselves in recording. The first opportunities to develop this new vision came soon enough. Six weeks later the Greenpeace boat Sirius docked on the Liffey, a few hundred yards from Windmill Lane. All the band were Greenpeace members or supporters and Robert Hunter’s book The Greenpeace Chronicle had been a Waterboys bible, passed around on tour from bandmate to bandmate till it was falling apart. The idea struck several of us at once – why not play a free gig on the ship’s deck to an audience on the quayside? We could drum up a crowd by word of mouth and create some Irish publicity for Greenpeace. We sent a diplomatic delegation to the ship. Anto, frock-coated and skinny-legged like the footman in Tenniel’s illustrations for Alice In Wonderland, and Jimmy Hickey, as red bearded and broad-chested as a Viking chieftain, presented our compliments and the offer of a free gig to the captain. This was a gaunt Dutchman, with a face out of a Rubens painting, called Willem, who accepted the offer and proposed to repay us with a meal in the ship’s cabin after the concert. The next afternoon our crew drove to where the ship was anchored on the quays and hauled the band’s gear on board.

  Someone phoned the national radio station and a DJ announced the show. By five o’clock a crowd of several hundred had converged on the docks, including every busker in Dublin and the ever-alert Bono. What they found was a gaily-coloured ship resplendent in the late afternoon sun, a black-and-silver whale painted on the forecastle, and amps, microphone stands and drum kit set up on deck. From the PA system Hank Williams music floated sweetly across the quays, warm and rustic, a startling sound in those dog days of drum machines and arena rock.

  At five-thirty we walked up the rear gangway, plugged in and blasted into an hour’s worth of songs, including nautical-themed numbers like ‘Fisherman’s Blues’ and ‘Strange Boat’. The band was augmented by two new Waterboys: a Dublin drummer called Fran Breen with a Yosser Hughes moustache and a habit of jerking his head side to side with every beat like a robot, and a young Irish piper called Vinnie Kilduff, a friend of Wickham’s. Vinnie was that rare beast, a trad musician who could play rock’n’roll. And when the wild bluesy howl of his pipes, with all their evocation of the Irish soul, merged with the swoop and staccato of Steve’s fiddle, the music hit a whole new level.

  And there was a mighty thrill to playing on the ship. Partly this was the novelty of discovering that its deck, raised in the water a few feet higher than the audience on the quayside, provided an ideal stage. And partly it was the pleasure of playing on sloping wood among the capstans and hatches, the smell of the river in our nostrils, teenage fans sitting crowded on the quay’s edge, legs dangling over the water. But the biggest thrill was that we were playing for Greenpeace, connected to a world-spanning cause we felt was a wave of the future, and this put fire in our bellies. It put helium in our dreaming too; for weeks afterwards we mused on the possibilities of a Waterboys and Greenpeace tour of Ireland, sailing the circumference of the country, playing shows in all the harbours; Belfast, Derry, Galway, Cork, Waterford. And if we could do it in Ireland, why not Britain? But we didn’t have the resources to realise this dream, and the crew of the Sirius had more pressing matters than jollying round Irish ports in search of good vibes. Still, the concert achieved what we wanted; as we’d hoped, the press were lured to the scene and next morning we saw photos of ourselves and the boat on the cover of the Irish Independent. We’d done it – Greenpeace was front-page news in Ireland.

  A few days later the ship sailed off to keep appointments with whalers in the North Atlantic. And we were travelling too, by plane to Scotland to play at something called The Pictish Festival. This was run by a friend of We Free Kings called Robbie The Pict, a tall sandy-haired Scotsman, a principled activist and scurrilous hustler with a dash of wizard thrown in. He’d founded a ‘Pictish Free State’ on an acre of land he owned, and spent his time campaigning for independence from the British crown. I liked Robbie and loved how he always responded to the question ‘How are you?’ with the reply ‘Brand new!’ The Festival was his annual hoolie, held on the anniversary of an obscure seventh-century battle between Picts and Teutons.

  We arrived at our hotel, an ancient commercial travellers’ stopover in Forfar called The Salutation, to be greeted in the foyer by a grinning Robbie and sidekick in homespun Scottish revolutionary kit: ‘Pictish Free State’ t-shirts, leather flying jackets, paratroop boots and kilts. They piled us into a Land Rover festooned with Pict logos and whisked us off to the venue, five miles away. Letham Village Hall was a lonesome-looking redbrick building on a hill overlooking a tiny hamlet, not much more than a crossroads. A gaggle of rural punk rockers festered round the entrance while inside was a spartan auditorium, like a school gym, filled with feral highlanders out of their skulls on a homebrew administered by Robbie and his minions, plus a smattering of intrepid Waterboys fans who’d made the trek from Edinburgh or Aberdeen. At one end was a stage, and for a backdrop someone had improvised a Scottish flag out of a wodge of blue cloth with strips of white gaffer tape stuck diagonally across it.

  The concert had been going all day and was running hopelessly late. We Free Kings were on before us and when their fiddler didn’t turn up, Wickham stepped into the breach and played their whole set. The Waterboys finally took the stage shortly before one in the morning and the atmosphere was dense; thick with drunkenness and excitement, a wild tartan bacchanalia. We poured our music into this atmosphere, playing till almost 4am. We closed with ‘A Pagan Place’ and during its extended outro, with Roddy Lorimer’s trumpet soaring and Vinnie’s pipes wailing, several members of other bands on stage with us, and a freight-train mother groove roaring around our heads, a critical mass of musical wildness was achieved. With a sudden ‘Pop!’ I felt us come into alignment with a down-flow of power, some bright shard of the Celtic soul, wild and ecstatic, that flowed through us and into the audience like a rite.

  When we stumbled outside for air, dawn was softening the sky and the birds were singing. I stood, ears ringing, feeling the breeze on my skin. Something had just happened, some piece of the new Waterboys vision had slotted into place and it had to do with the Celtic. I was Celtic, and so were most of my band. But it was something I’d never consciously thought about before. What did it mean to be Celtic? I would find out soon enough, in a new and magical landscape that was about to open up before me: the West of Ireland. The West of Ireland means Ireland’s great Atlantic seaboard: from County Donegal in the north, southwards through Sligo, Mayo, Galway, Clare and Kerry to the western parts of County Cork. I’d been there a few times: a childhood holiday in Sligo, a couple of concerts in Galway and some brief trips with The Fellow Who Fiddles or my girlfriend Irene. But it was during a trip to County Kerry a week after the Pictish Festival that I began to comprehend what was special about the west.

  B.P. Fallon had been raving about an upcoming festival called the Cibeal, held in Kenmare, close to the Cork and Kerry border. It sounded magical indeed; a little market town taken over for the weekend by music and high spirits, with festivities in the street and an influx of trad players, gypsies and rock bands. ‘It’ll be shaking, man!’ said B.P. in his hushed, intense voice. Anto and I decided to go down with him.

  The drive from Dublin was a hundred and eighty miles southwest across Ireland, and when we came into County Kerry the fields and low hills of the midlands gave way to sharp noble mountains and blue lakes, a landscape of the gods. Kenmare was in a lush valley, resplendent in late spring abundance, and as we drove through the toy-like streets of brightly coloured houses to the town square all my expectations were realised. It was like a frontier town in the Wild West or an olden gypsy fair. Covered stalls and marquees occupied the pavements while festive strings of bunting hung from one side of the town’s broad main street to the other. The pubs spilled clouds of revellers onto the sidewalk and convivial music, a bright mosaic of whistles and fiddles, flavoured the air. Dark-eyed black-bearded
men and thin lawless women who looked like they’d come down from the mountains hung out in every doorway, smoking, drinking and dancing. A long flat truck with a stage set up on it stood ready for action on the square. High trees and church spires shaded the scene while a backdrop of mountains brooded in the distance. It was like stumbling on a hedonistic Shangri-La. I wanted to be in every part of it at once.

  There were concerts and events all round town, in school halls, hotels, even churches, and B.P. quickly vanished in pursuit of some scene or other. Anto and I rambled around the town square and somebody told us that a band we knew, a Dublin country-rock combo called the Fleadh Cowboys, were playing right now in a hotel on the outskirts of town. I had my guitar and Anto had his sax, so as we walked to the gig through the cheerful streets we started playing. A small crowd gathered round us and we made our procession through town. Finding myself in the role of pied piper, I made a medley of songs last for the twenty minutes of our march while the Human Saxophone blew loud solos that reverberated off the stone fronts of the houses. Finally we came to the edge of town where the stately pile of the Park Hotel stood amid trees and meadows. There we found the Fleadh Cowboys hanging around, smoking and talking on a patio outside the ballroom, their performance just finished. The Cowboys were led by two Stetson-wearing Dublin characters: Pete Cummins (tall, rangy, always looked like he’d just climbed down off a horse, nasal singing style) and Frank Lane (charismatic, testy, with a Hank Williams fixation and a helium voice). We’d guested with them a few times before and they invited us to form a one-off band to play that evening on the truck I’d noticed in the town square. Bingo! We’d scored ourselves a gig in paradise.

  Down at the square an hour or so later word had spread and a rowdy audience was gathered. We climbed onto the truck and soundchecked in twenty seconds flat. B.P. Fallon appeared bang on cue with The Pogues’ accordion player, James Fearnley, who was quickly hauled up to join us. We struck up a boxcar-train groove and lit into a set of country songs, all rattling Tennessee Three drums and slide guitar licks punctuated by Anto’s rasping sax breaks, while I traded lead vocals with the two Stetsoned Cowboys. Between numbers I heard the unmistakeable sound of someone shouting for ‘Red Army Bluuuuuues’. This plaintive holler, a plea for the least-played, most-requested Waterboys song, our own personal ‘Freeeeeebiiiiiird’, had followed us on tour from L.A. to Tel Aviv and someone was even shouting for it in this mad Irish mountain fastness. Halfway through the gig I noticed Liam Ó Maonlai, the young singer from The Hothouse Flowers, in the crowd. I loved his bluesy swagger and deep voice, and with his floppy fringe and piano antics he was like an Irish Jerry Lee Lewis. I reached down and pulled him up from the crowd and asked if he’d sing a song I’d heard him do a couple of times. He agreed, I gave the band a signal, and we smashed into Iggy Pop’s mighty ‘Cock In My Pocket’, with its all-time great lyric, ‘I’ve got my cock in my pocket and I’m rootin’ down the old highway!’

  ‘Rootin’ … I loved that! It conjured up an image of Iggy or Liam slouching down the road, fist in the air, on the scout for mischief, sex and trouble, and it was a perfect punk rock note to sound on a truck in Kenmare to an audience of wild Kerrymen and lawless women. Except for one thing: the Fleadh Cowboys couldn’t play punk rock, so our rendition of ‘Cock’ was closer to an Allman Brothers’ Southern-fried boogie than the metal mayhem of The Stooges. His song well sung, Liam jumped back into the audience, and a few numbers later we finished our set. We wrestled our way through the crowd, crossed the square and ate a quick meal in a teeming bar. And there was no time to waste, for the musical worlds weren’t done colliding yet.

  My girlfriend Irene, who’d come with us, wanted to take me to the late-night show at the Park Hotel to see a hot trad music supergroup called Patrick Street. Their accordion player Jackie Daly was local and as dusk descended on the festive town a heavily accented male voice crackled through the tannoy speakers that hung from every lamppost, cajoling all and sundry to ‘coom and hear Jackie Daly an’ his friends oop at the Perk’.

  Oop at the Perk the atmosphere was electric and the grand ballroom was packed. I’d heard a lot of trad music on tape and record and I’d gamely played along with The Fellow Who Fiddles when he cracked into jigs at rehearsals, but I’d never seen trad played live by master musicians or heard it amplified through a PA system. A revelation was in store.

  Patrick Street looked like the archetype of a folk band: beards, waistcoats, brown tweed jackets and flared jeans, fiddle, accordion, bouzouki, guitar. And when they started playing their nimble jigs and reels it sounded pretty much like all the other traditional Irish music I’d heard, sweet on the ear but likely to leave me as it found me. Then I looked at Irene: standing beside me on the ballroom floor, she was rapt. I watched her and began to see she wasn’t listening so much to the tunes, the melodies. She was connected to the energy of the music, its rhythm and spirit. And as I observed my lovely Irish girlfriend responding to the sound, whooping spontaneously at a moment of emphasis, swaying like a willow in the wind as the tune picked up rhythm, lifting her arms high over her head in joy when the music revved up a gear, I began to understand and to feel the energy myself. At one point she turned to me with a quizzical look as if to say, ‘now do you see?’ And by God, I did. I looked at the crowd and they were all plugged into the music like Irene, receiving its pulse and force in the same way as a rock audience, except this transmission was on a different, finer wavelength. And it had balls – amped up loud through a sound system, trad music packed a serious visceral punch.

  After the concert we hooked up with Anto, B.P. and Liam and played music in someone’s hotel suite, making up strange songs that were sung once and never heard of again. In the small hours of the morning Irene and I drove twenty miles over the mountains to Killarney where we’d booked a room. As we journeyed the empty road in sweet silence, the events of the day buzzed in my memory and the sounds of trad music echoed ecstatically in my mind. And all around us a mighty Celtic dawn was breaking. The clouds and the high faces of the mountains were burnt scarlet by the rising sun and the landscape on either side of the narrow road looked prehistoric and wild. Nothing would be the same again: I had left one world and entered another.

  Chapter 9: Go Slowly And You Might See Something

  It’s a blustery day at sea and the fishing boat rocks as we cross the choppy waters of Galway Bay. Anto and I are strumming mandolins on deck, sending up peals of bright music that evaporate like sea spray in the March air while the dreaming hulks of the Aran Islands recede behind us and seagulls chase the boat making their wild cries. The Human Saxophone and I are a long way from anywhere, not just geographically but mentally and spiritually. We have become walkers between the worlds, two of Rimbaud’s ‘horrible workers’ of the future. We have breached the veils of an ancient realm and now, returning, bring with us news and visions.

  But for all that, I need a piss. So I lay down the mando, its strings still vibrating, and step down into the shaded hold of the boat. There I find a rough little cubicle with a swinging, creaking door and a toilet. I step in and make my peace with nature. As I’m heading back up the steps to the sunlit world, I notice an old wood-framed mirror on my left. Casually I look into it and to my amazement see a creature who is not me. The god Pan is looking back. How do I know? No one’s ever seen a photo of Pan, but the inscrutable goat-like face in the mirror is unmistakeable, a face I’ve known forever. And yet it’s my face too, Pan and myself sharing skin and bone. By what alchemy is this happening? I look into the reflected eyes and with a slow thrill realise (though it will take me years to frame this realisation in words) that Pan is an archetypal power deep inside all human beings, and my experiences in the primeval atmosphere of Aran have called forth this power in me and laid its mark on my face. I stand gazing at the mirror contemplating this mystery, my ears filled with the roar of the ship’s engines and the crying of the gulls.

  Snapping back to the here and now I feel the boat turni
ng as it comes within the lee of the Connemara coast, and Pan or man, or both, I climb back on deck, stand beside Anto, and turn my eyes to the fast approaching land.

  Back in the summer of 1986, around the time I was playing the Hank Williams piano in Bob Johnston’s house, my old mentor Nigel Grainge sold Ensign Records and The Waterboys’ contract with it. But the decision who to sell to was made by me. Chris Blackwell, the owner of Island, who licensed and released Ensign’s output, phoned to tell me Nigel was on the cusp of selling Ensign to Virgin Records. Blackwell explained, however, that neither Virgin nor the other company bidding for the deal, Chrysalis, would buy Ensign if they couldn’t also secure the rights to the first three Waterboys albums, which Island controlled. Consequently Blackwell was positioned to decide the outcome of the deal by his choice of which company to sell the three albums to.

  ‘So,’ he asked me, ‘do you want me to sell them to Virgin or Chrysalis?’

  Blackwell was giving me the power to decide my own future, and I was damn grateful. I didn’t have to think long about the answer either. I remembered my liaison with Virgin seven years earlier and didn’t want to go back there – nor did it escape me that Nigel, doing a deal on the strength of The Waterboys’ then sky-high stock, hadn’t asked my opinion. I told Blackwell to sell the albums to Chrysalis.

  Exactly as he’d forecast, Virgin dropped out and Chrysalis bought Ensign. And because Chrysalis knew they’d sealed the deal through my casting vote, I was in a strong position to have my lawyer John Kennedy renegotiate my contract. Kennedy was a whip-sharp English son of Irish parents. He looked like the sixties pop star Joe Brown, and played the legal side of the music business like a splendid principled game. He took to the negotiations, his first big job on my behalf, with lip-smacking relish, a hound to the hunt, and quickly convinced Chrysalis to flip my royalty rates dramatically upwards from the meagre cut I’d got when I signed as an unknown to Ensign, and to grant me the holy grail of artistic freedom, final approval over my records.