by Mike Scott
We were still dizzy with this sense of achievement when drama struck. Dunford had hired a local Peter Lorre lookalike called Bandy Donovan as our cook and caretaker. At first the arrangement worked well. When the crew were setting up, Bandy was a flash of local colour, handsomely praised for his cooking and made to feel like one of the team. But when recording began, meals became a pit stop and no one had any spare attention to spend on Bandy. Which was a shame because he was gay, not an easy gig in rural Ireland. And being cooped up in the grandest house for miles with a gang of good-looking young men, some of them wearing leather trousers, none of them evincing any romantic interest in him whatsoever, became too much for Bandy’s sensitivities.
In the beginning this manifested in odd but harmless behaviour. First he gave us pottery mugs with our names inscribed on them, which we received with bemusement; then he morphed into a kind of loopy butler, emerging suddenly through the studio door holding aloft trays laden with glasses of sherry, a slightly creepy phrase on his lips such as ‘I thought you would appreciate some refreshment, boys.’ But we never drank alcohol while recording, let alone sherry, and our refusals, however diplomatically given, only increased Bandy’s sense of isolation. On the day he got his first week’s wages he compensated for his sorrows by downing some sherry himself, followed by several other libations and finally a dose of anti-depressant pills. Then he went and got a double-barrelled shotgun and marched on the house.
The first person he found was Jimmy Hickey. The World’s Greatest Roadie was in the kitchen dreaming of spark plugs and gaffer tape when his reverie was interrupted by an agitated Bandy brandishing a shotgun and shouting. ‘I’m going to kill you!’ Terrified, Jimmy backed himself out of the kitchen into the yard. Bandy followed him, firing a shot in the air. Realising there was no way out of the yard, Jimmy panicked and pushed past Bandy back into the house. He ran to the jamming room where John Dunford was on the floor fixing a broken tape recorder. John looked up to see a Jimmy bursting into the room followed by the gun-waving Bandy, eyes darting in his head, a stream of curses on his tongue. When Bandy spotted Dunford, the man who’d hired him in the first place and caused all his troubles, he forgot about Jimmy and advanced on the author of his misfortunes with gun pointed. But Jimmy, regaining his composure (and courage) crept up behind as if to grab Bandy. Hearing Jimmy’s movement, Bandy turned, averting his eyes long enough for Dunford to take his chance, grab the gun and smash its barrel on his knee. When he opened it and found live ammunition Dunford’s nerve snapped and he grabbed the luckless Bandy by the throat and dragged him out of the house.
All this time I’d been under headphones in the studio recording a cheery version of ‘Spring Comes To Spiddal’, oblivious to the unfolding drama. When the song finished I emerged to hear a fracas at the front steps. I ran to the door to find a shaken and very angry John Dunford yelling, ‘Just fuck off!’ at a squirming Bandy who, perhaps not quite grasping the import of what had just happened, was asking whether he should ‘go in and make the dinner now?’
As a reciprocal courtesy for recommending Spiddal House we invited Alec Finn to come and play, and on a Saturday afternoon he arrived with two fiddlers, his De Dannan colleague Frankie Gavin and my landlord Charlie Lennon, to record an ancient Irish air called ‘Carolan’s Welcome’. The track was completed quickly and, though no other song was planned, everyone wanted to keep playing. So I went upstairs to one of the house’s several ghostly bedrooms and restructured a song we’d done at Windmill Lane called ‘Killing My Heart’, giving it a mazy new folk tune and retitling it ‘When Ye Go Away’.
Downstairs I played it to the assembled musicians and an arrangement quickly came together, graced by Alec’s stream-like bouzouki and Anto’s bluesy mandolin. All we needed was a fiddle solo to finish the song but there were three fiddlers in Spiddal House that day, and which should perform it? Like men in a fable each took a shot. First Steve Wickham played a high dreamlike solo, full of sonic swoops and psychedelic murmurings. Then Frankie Gavin overdubbed a robust reel with cunning twists and ornamentations, topped off at song’s close, while the tape was still rolling, with a cocky ‘How’s that!’ But if these two, respectively Ireland’s most famous rock and trad fiddlers, were the hares in the fable, and it was the tortoise, landlord Charlie, whose part made it to the record. While Steve and Frankie were recording their flashy solos, Charlie had been in the garden composing a tune on his fiddle. He cut a strange figure, standing amid spring blossoms, scraps of apparently tuneless melody floating periodically from his bow, his mournful face and white hair crowned by an ill-fitting blue baseball cap, an unlikely accessory which provided some mirth to the onlooking band and crew. But when his turn came Charlie walked in, heedless of our scrutiny, and played a sublime tune called ‘The River Road Reel’, which sat on top of the track like a jockey on a horse and blew everyone away.
Not every song came together so smoothly. The Waterboys were masters of the great first take but a country waltz called ‘In Search Of A Rose’ took a prodigious ninety-nine, possibly the greatest number of attempts at any song by any band ever. The recordings absorbed four days, and we still didn’t get the right version. We tried it slow, fast, with and without drums, with a full band and with nothing but mandolin and fiddle. We even tried the Brian Eno gambit, explained to us by Pat McCarthy, who’d worked on The Joshua Tree, which Eno had co-produced. It worked like this: at the end of a day spent unsuccessfully trying to nail a song, instead of simply ‘trying it again tomorrow’, the band commits to doing five takes first thing next morning then moving on to something else, regardless of how the five takes turn out. According to Pat this method not only focused the musicians but paradoxically defused the pressure on them, usually resulting in the elusive master being among the five morning performances. But while it may have broken whatever creative blocks U2 experienced, even this didn’t work for poor old ‘Rose’, and the song was filed away to be re-recorded for some future album.
Everything else we attempted was successful, and a factor in this was the unseen extra member of the band, the sense of place. When Steve’s multi-tracked fiddles blasted out the solo on ‘When Will We Be Married’, he was mimicking the Atlantic winds that barrelled down the Connemara roads. When Anto struck shards and glints from his slide mandolin on ‘When Ye Go Away’, he was conjuring the play of light that bewitched the gardens of Spiddal House and the glittering bay beyond. In other ways too location added colour to the work. When we needed extra musicians we sent to Galway for them, like button accordion maestro Máirtín O’Connor, summoned to add flourishes to ‘Bang On The Ear’. Or they turned up unexpectedly, like the day Brendan O’Regan materialised at the control room window, waving his bouzouki, and was pressed immediately into service, leading Steve through countless exacting takes of the fiddle jig ‘Dunford’s Fancy’. And when we couldn’t get the groove right on ‘Jimmy Hickey’s Waltz’, Dunford nipped down to Hughes’s bar to enlist some dancers. He returned fifteen minutes later with a gaggle of villagers who quickly told us we were playing too slow for them to waltz properly. We sped up and within minutes the master take was nailed, complete with sounds of the dancers’ feet and the rustling of their clothes. Likewise, when we needed a party atmosphere for a track late one afternoon Dunford went to the village crossroads and invited a bunch of school kids to come up to the big house and help with the recording. A noisy crowd arrived and we stuck them in the studio, plied them with sweets and soft drinks, blew up balloons, handed round pins to stick in them, then taped the uproar that ensued.
Any place that music happened, in or out the studio, was a recording opportunity. I used to sing my demos into an old-fashioned Nagra tape machine (the one Dunford had been fixing when Bandy Donovan tried to shoot him) and I left it running one night when a gang of Galway musicians came to my hilltop house for a party. Next day I played back the tape and found a joyously ramshackle version of Woody Guthrie’s ‘This Land Is Your Land’, which I half-remembered us doi
ng in the blur of the night before. One section, in which Wickham sang the famous chorus with Irish place names inserted instead of American ones, had a real power to it, and I placed this excerpt at the end of the finished album. If we needed a sound effect – a car driving off or the sound of waves – we went into the landscape and recorded it. And if we fancied playing outside we just did so. For one song I wanted the sound of a distant faery band so we set up on the roof, amid the branches of overhanging trees, and played our bodhráns and bouzoukis into the wind, capturing a hazy, far-off otherworldly music.
Working in a mansion in the charged atmosphere of Spiddal also had a deeper, more personal effect on band and crew. I watched them go through the seasoning I’d experienced a few months earlier, the withdrawal from TV, radio and telephones, the alignment with older ways of seeing and being. I saw my friends develop into archetypes of their own as if the atmosphere was drawing out their essential selves: Wickham a magical clown, Anto a roguish artful dodger, Dunford a merry court counsellor and Jimmy Hickey a warlike man at arms.
Doug D’Arcy came to check out our progress in late May. We played him the work as he sat in the control room, legs crossed, neck stretched forwards and eyes tight shut in an attitude of rapt listening so intent I couldn’t figure out whether he was joshing us or being serious. If Doug had come expecting a set of rock songs he didn’t let on. He digested our trad and country-rock sounds, pronounced himself happy and we took him off to Hughes’s for a celebration drink. In the dark noisy pub, standing squashed between late night revellers, I overheard Doug instructing John Dunford to organise a car to take him to Galway Airport in the morning. In that moment, as I noticed myself bristling and thinking, ‘Hey, that’s one of my men you’re ordering,’ I realised what tarot card I was playing: the Emperor.
As we approached the end of the sessions, spring gave way to summer and a spell of gorgeous weather enfolded the west of Ireland. This and the long light evenings impacted on us like a draught of magic and turned us what in older, more innocent times would have been termed fey. In this mood we embarked on our biggest project, the musical arrangement of W.B. Yeats’s faery poem ‘The Stolen Child’. The basis of the music was my rolling piano, over which Steve and Anto played long chords and wave-like swells. But for the lead instrument I invited a young Scottish musician to join us. We knew Colin Blakey as the flute and whistle player of We Free Kings, and I loved his Pan-like flute sound. I asked Colin to give ‘The Stolen Child’ an otherworldly quality and this he did, concocting an exquisite set of melodies that rang like a summons to an older world.
The sense of enchantment deepened when Galway drummer Padraig Stevens came to play percussion. Padraig was an earthy hippie in his early forties who wore hand-knitted pullovers and thick spectacles, lived in a place with the stone-age name of Ugool, and struck me as an Irish version of Stig Of The Dump – a crafty, capable fellow somehow displaced from ancient times into the modern age. Sitting behind drums in the bay window, the sun’s rays splitting against his stocky silhouetted frame, Padraig held a string of little brass bells in each upraised hand and at judicious points throughout the song shook a pealing from them like the rustle of tiny silken curtains being parted; the sound, I imagined, of the faeries ushering the stolen child into their kingdom.
Finally we needed a voice to recite the poem. I’d already sung the choruses, with their ‘Come away, human child’ refrain, but I didn’t like the way my voice sounded speaking the verses. In the Spiddal general store a few months earlier I’d bought a cassette by a local Gaelic singer called Tomás Mac Eoin. Tomás, whoever he was, had a Matterhorn of a voice, a sound hewn from rock yet full of a warm broken humanity. I could easily imagine him reciting ‘The Stolen Child’, and I loved the idea of engaging with the local tradition. According to the cassette inlay card Tomás lived in the village of Carraroe, twenty-five miles up the coast, and one evening Trevor and Anto drove there to seek him out. They tracked him to his cottage where, mystified by these hairy creatures and their talk of ‘vocal overdubs’ but recognising the famous name of W.B. Yeats, Tomas agreed to do whatever it was they were asking.
If Colin and Padraig brought a tantalising echo of an older time, this guy was the whole symphony. Tomás walked into Spiddal House like a punch line, six feet three inches of Dickensian magnificence, the kind of old world character that has long disappeared in Britain yet lingers in Ireland. He was handsome, with a long-brimmed blue cap, an ambling limp and a quavering high-pitched speaking voice in which he delivered self-mocking statements like, ‘I’m nothing but a nuisance’ or, running his hand ruefully over his balding head, ‘There used to be waves, now there’s only the shore!’ (This humour could also devastate and deflate. A year later I heard a loud-voiced American boast in a dressing room about how he could, ‘git in mah car in the morning, drive for twenty-four hours and still be in Texas!’ Tomás, overhearing this, interjected in tremulous tones, ‘Oh japers, I had a car like that once.’)
It wasn’t easy recording Tomás – getting his performance on tape was like squeezing the Matterhorn into a jiffy bag. He was willing, certainly, and had the awesome powers of concentration common to people raised in an oral tradition. But because he was a Sean-nós singer (a performer of unaccompanied slow airs) and a native Irish speaker for whom English was a second language, Tomás was far from comfortable reciting Yeats’s elegant, tongue-twisting lyrics in time to a piece of music.
The session was a spectacular failure. Tomás couldn’t find the beat within the music and his pronunciation was poor, with many amusingly mangled words. And he’d never worn headphones in his life. But our new friend was no quitter. He insisted on a second session a few days later and went back to Carraroe determined to practise the poem until he could speak it like a natural. When we tried again there was a huge difference. Tomás had probably been reading the poem aloud every waking moment since we’d last seen him, and he had his delivery nailed. But we still had the timing problem. Dunford and I were racking our brains wondering how to solve this when Tomás suggested a solution – would I sit with him in the studio and cue him for every phrase?
We went into the studio, the rock’n’roller and the Sean-nós singer, and sat facing each other across the gulf between our different worlds. I felt like a whippersnapper before this emissary of a venerable tradition, and didn’t relish the job of cueing him. But Tomás was putting himself in my hands and I realised that if I wanted to bridge the gulf and bring back the fruits of the older world, I had to stretch out a metaphorical hand and meet Tomás halfway; we had to be the bridge. So I bit the bullet and when the music started playing I gave Tomás a gentle signal with my hand a split-second in advance of where I imagined each line of the poem falling. And he responded, his giant of a voice rolling out the rich syllables on cue like an old god pouring wine down a mountainside. Verse by verse, line by line, signal by signal, Tomás delivered and soon we had the poem fastened snugly to the music, worlds merged and job well accomplished. After a celebratory cup of tea in the kitchen, Tomás, his blue cap tilted at a rakish angle, was chauffeured back to his cottage in Carraroe, a relieved and happy man.
The experience of listening to Tomás’s voice invoking the haunted islands of ‘The Stolen Child’, interwoven with Blakey’s enchanted flute, hour after hour, day upon day, increased the spell that descended on us that last week at Spiddal House. We seemed to need less sleep, time was slowed down and the playing of the band was shot through with sweet longing. The house itself seemed to have become charged with magic, and walking through its rooms and halls in the long evenings was like passing through gold light. But not everyone was affected benignly.
After eight weeks of being a tarot card in Spiddal Jimmy Hickey was close to snapping point anyway, but the oncoming midsummer madness tipped him over the edge. One night while we were working on ‘The Stolen Child’, Jimmy got dirtily drunk on whiskey, went into the jamming room, sat behind the spare drum kit and for the first time in his life be
gan to play. The noise was diabolical, like an army of orcs bouncing garbage bins on an iron roof. All work was impossible so our production manager, a mate of Dunford’s called Jake who’d been brought in to steady things after the shotgun incident, was despatched to stop it. Five minutes later the din was still going on, only now with schoolboy bass-playing added. I stepped into the room to find Jimmy looking like a distant caveman relation of himself, with bloodshot eyes and blue skin, viciously bludgeoning the drums. I knew Jimmy’s nickname among the Dublin roadie fraternity was ‘Captain Muck’ – muck being an Irish term for hedonism, high jinks and the robust consumption of alcohol – but this was Field Marshall Muck, all arms and gangly legs too big for the drum kit, spittle slithering down his chin. The World’s Greatest Roadie had reverted to a pre-civilised state. Backing him on bass was Jake, who feebly claimed, ‘I thought playing with him was the best way to calm him down.’ Only Dunford knew how to play Androcles to Captain Muck’s lion, and so he it was who gently coaxed Jimmy into coming out from behind the drums and convinced him to leave the studio. ‘He’s Spiddalled, man,’ was Dunford’s expert prognosis, and the next morning Jimmy was banished to Dublin, to the tender attentions of the one person who could soothe him, his patient wife Ceppi.
Two days later, with peace restored, ‘The Stolen Child’ was completed and on the last night of recording we invited friends for a jam session. There was a feeling in the air that something special would happen; perhaps one of those amazing sessions where the band was swept up in the moment and played one after another master-quality performances in first takes, snatching complete records out of the air. But in fact our last hurrah in Spiddal House was a quiet anti-climatic affair; our energy was spent and the magic, having dwelt among us, had moved on. We drank champagne then made gentle music all night. I remember Dylan’s ‘Buckets of Rain’, some Bo-Diddley-ised Irish reels and a Robbie The Pict composition called ‘The Pictish National Anthem’, until at 8 am a gang of brawny humpers from Galway arrived to pack up the gear. As they dismantled the mixing desk and hauled it onto their truck I stood in the garden, Artist-King of Spiddal House for a few last golden minutes while the sounds and shouts of working men filled the air and a morning breeze blew in from the sea. That night we had a wrap-up party which began in Hughes’s bar, moved to someone’s back garden and finally wound up at Steve and Anto’s bungalow. The last scene I remember before I went to bed was a chorus line of Waterboys and Spiddalfolk kicking their legs in the air in a kind of west of Ireland can-can, all of them shouting, smoking reefers and looking like they were in severe danger of being happy.