by Mike Scott
We were supported on these shows by a trad duo called Cooney & Begley. Begley was from an old Irish musical family, a box-playing cattle farmer with a back like a wardrobe and the most beautiful singing voice. Cooney was a dreadlocked Aussie warrior who smoked reefers, wore sandals, spoke in a hippie patois and played a battered old nylon string guitar like he was driving a tank. They made brilliant, fiery music: breakneck polkas as tough as punk rock and hypnotic hornpipes punctuated by Cooney’s Spanish guitar rallies and sudden dizzy runs of Broadway jazz chords. Then they would shift gear in a nanosecond for Begley to sing a song as elegant as an Elizabethan madrigal.
We loved them so much we brought them on our next three shows, all in England, and magic followed. For with Cooney, Begley and Sharon on board we achieved a critical mass of musicality and madness, exploding into a full-tilt never-ending session. We played anywhere and everywhere: on the tour bus, on boats, on planes, in hotel lobbies, bars and bedrooms, on the way to and from gigs, and backstage; breaking just long enough to play the Waterboys’ show, then jumping right back into the session. On the morning we set off for Glastonbury we played wild merry jigs and reels with the sliding door of our van wide open as the tunes floated out over the roads and fields. We continued as the van negotiated the torturously slow approach to the Festival itself, through checkpoints and streams of revellers, until finally we trundled to a halt in the artists’ area behind the Pyramid Stage. There was a bonfire ablaze with people sitting round it, but we just stayed where we were in the van, unwilling to break the spell, and kept playing for several more hours.
It was three years since we’d played Glastonbury. In 1986 we’d been a rock group. Now we were a band of friends and troubadours playing a golden, flowing tumbleweed of sound, with a complement of trad alchemists who made the sweet, wild music of the ages. When we eventually alighted from the van and joined the people round the fire, keeping right on playing and sweeping the cloak of our music, our brotherhood and our bonhomie around them, I felt like I was returning with the Key.
Our set had changed too, and when we played our festival slot the next evening some people were dismayed by the absence of rock ballast and by how few early Waterboys songs were played. But we had an appointment with our evolution and were stopping for nobody. Standing on stage between Sharon Shannon and The Fellow Who Fiddles, learning to fill my suit, I was abdicating from the roles that had been mapped out for me, both by others and by my younger self. I was a singer and musician, not a rock star. Our music still expressed wonder, but now it expressed community too. We still had power, but the power had gentleness in it, and I wasn’t a ladder-climbing boy anymore. I was a man. After the show we left for Bristol Airport and on the way stopped to climb Glastonbury Tor. Standing on its high crest gazing over the panorama of the West Country, all that strange ancient tract of England with its church spires, water-cuts and queer-shaped hills, I realised this line-up of The Waterboys was the fulfilment of the ‘colourful travelling musical explosion’ vision I’d had on the plane from Edinburgh to Dublin two years before, and I resolved to ask Sharon, Colin and Noel to join the band full time.
Back in Dublin I sounded out the three permanent members. Steve and Trevor were in agreement but the Human Saxophone had misgivings. It might work for a while, was his viewpoint, but the musical winds will change. Anto knew me well, but he said he’d swing with it if it was what I really wanted to do. So the week after Glastonbury, during a four-night run of shows at Dublin’s Olympia Theatre, I made my approach to first Noel, then Colin, then Sharon, and each said yes.
The shows at the Olympia marked a peak. A spirit of camaraderie reigned over the newly constituted band, guests and friends played onstage with us, and after each show there were long sessions in the artists’ bar. The country, trad and roots influences were now fully integrated into our sound and we’d blurred the boundaries – no longer rock or folk, it was all just music. The Dublin rock and trad communities turned up in force as well as R.E.M., in town for their own shows, and halfway through the week our single ‘And A Bang On The Ear’, itself a blending of musical worlds, hit number one in Ireland. It felt like the pagan wedding of rock’n’roll and traditional music, with Wickham as best man, Sharon Shannon the bridesmaid, and me the handfaster.
This was the high summer of the Celtic Waterboys. In July we headed out on a swing through Europe with Cooney and Begley. Sharon, Blakey and Begley each brought huge repertoires of tunes with them, while Wickham, Cooney and I were composing our own. Writing music was as natural as breathing in rock’n’roll but less common in Irish trad, where most musicians didn’t write, but the bug spread through the entourage with Sharon contributing to several tunes and even the conservative Begley inventing a reel in honour of his new-born daughter. I was carrying around books of Irish poetry, American folk music and long-forgotten Victorian novels, trawling them for lyrics to set to music, putting words to melodies from Sharon’s repertoire and turning them into songs. And as we progressed through Copenhagen, Helsinki, Lisbon, Madrid and Valencia, each of us growing wilder, madder and more drunk on pure music, The Waterboys morphed into a travelling school of tune writers, collectors and folklorists.
And there was mischief. After the Turku Festival in Finland a gang of us drunkenly boarded a bus parked outside our hotel, not knowing where it was going. John Dunford and I engaged the occupants, two or three dozen broad-faced beaming Finns, all men, in a sing-song of the Dublin roadies’ sin-phrase, ‘How’s your gee?’ (the third word being the old Irish word for vagina) to the tune of ‘Here we go, Here we go’. Off we sped into the Finnish night, destination unknown, thirty lusty Nordic voices roaring ‘Howsagee! Howsagee!’ without a clue what it meant.
It was the season of the midnight sun, a flickering hallucinatory daylight even in the small hours of the morning, and as the Finnish voices echoed round my head and the scenery whizzed by I felt like I was in a surreal dream. This impression was heightened when the bus stopped half an hour later in a wooded clearing close to a broad peaceful river. As the engines cut I heard the funky silken sounds of distant soul music floating through the trees. Was this heaven? Everyone got out and we followed the Finns down a winding path, the music growing louder, till finally we came to a long wooden clubhouse. We went inside and everyone started taking off their clothes, so we did the same. Then, still following our fellow passengers, we went through a thick wooden door into a long, low-ceilinged room, which was scorching hot and packed with men and women all buck naked except for the five of us – Dunford, Anto, Trevor, Noel Bridgeman and me – in our underpants.
We’d landed in some kind of secret Finnish super-sauna, and sat down, delighted with ourselves at having penetrated the esoteric nightlife of the natives. We were a little self-conscious but no one paid any attention to us. They were all too busy getting up and running outside, jumping into the river to cool off, running back into the sauna to get hot then doing it all over again. So that’s what we did too. And when we got into the water for the first time (it was deliciously, skin-poppingly cold) we discovered it wasn’t a river at all but a long inlet of the sea, with the line of the ocean visible between distant woodlands. We were chest deep in the Baltic! Delighted with this discovery, John Dunford announced ‘I’m taking off my keks!’ And following his solemn example we each took off our underpants and left them in the water, an offering to the beneficent gods of the north.
On our return to Ireland we decamped to my old haunting ground, the Aran Islands, to play a benefit for the local Lifeboat. We landed off the ferry the evening before the show and wound up in a hillside pub called Joe Watty’s. The island was abuzz with the coming concert and the atmosphere in Watty’s was electric, with a session centred around a leprechaun-like islander called Mattie Mullen. Mattie was built like Popeye, with the same muscular arms and sailor’s cap, and played a bodhrán with his elbows sticking out while making eyes at the girls and winking at the boys.
We fell in with Mattie and whe
n the pub closed he brought us to a birthday party for a lady called Nanny Quinn. Nanny, newly seventy-six and grand as a queen in lace blouse and beads, invited us into her cottage and boxed Mattie’s ears as if he was a naughty nephew. But this was like no old lady’s birthday party I’d ever imagined. Nanny’s son, a fisherman, was removing the claws from huge lobsters on the brine-wet kitchen table; fiddles were skirling in the parlour and bodhráns went thooom puckathoom while three girls danced wildly on the wood floor, laughing and yelling at each other in English and Gaelic. Proverbs flowed from the tongues of rough-faced neighbours who stood round the edges of the room scoffing slices of birthday cake. And Mattie Mullen had a bottle of potcheen, a fierce piss-coloured Irish moonshine. We threw down shots of this throat-burning, liquid in Nanny Quinn’s backyard under the western stars in the mad night of Aran and I felt the island sway beneath me like a giant surfboard. Mattie Mullen, his face a few inches from mine, looking like a goblin in the moonlight, cackled into my eyes and said, ‘You’re just like me!’
We played two shows the next night in the old village hall, feeling like pioneers as we gave the first-ever rock concerts on the island for a rowdy audience blighted by neither cynicism nor sophistication, their sense of wonder absolutely intact. Almost anything we did or played, we felt, would go straight into Aran island folklore, and this knowledge added extra layers of meaning to the performance.
Next morning we sailed to Galway City, where with and without the band I played nine times in a weekend: two Waterboys shows (sports hall and circus tent), Sharon Shannon’s solo gig, a guest slot with The Saw Doctors, impromptu sessions in several pubs with assorted friends and strangers, a couple of Hank Williams numbers in a rebel bar with a middle-aged country and western duo, and even a stint on the main street, blasting through ‘Back In The USSR’ with a band of pimply teenage buskers.
Sharon’s concert was a lunchtime show in a tiny packed theatre. All of the Waterboys guested, as well as Cooney and Begley plus several of Sharon’s pals and her younger sister, a freckled banjo-playing sprite called Mary. When Sharon got paid she insisted on sharing the money with us all and, despite our protests, divvied it up equally to the last penny. Each of the fifteen musicians came away with twenty-seven Irish punts and forty-eight pence. We played one more show that summer at the Interceltique Festival in Lorient, Brittany, a bustling French seaside town where massed bands of bagpipers and bombardists paraded the streets making a noise as loud as war. And then we had six weeks off to draw breath.
Perhaps because I’d done something wicked in a previous life I spent most of this break producing an album for Cooney & Begley. The owners of the English label Cooking Vinyl had clocked the duo’s set at Glastonbury and talked them into making an album. I was thrilled. I figured a record of Cooney & Begley’s incendiary music would be a sensation in both the trad and rock worlds, a real boundary buster, so I quickly offered to produce. Cooking Vinyl agreed, happy to have a Waterboy’s name on the package. And so on a mid-August day, only dimly aware of the travails that awaited me, I took the train from Dublin to Tralee in the County Kerry, to be collected at the station by Begley in his mud-splattered farmer’s car.
Cooney and Begley were two of the greatest musicians I ever knew but they were men too, subject to the foibles and idiosyncrasies of the species. Cooney was a fascinating cocktail of fierce emotion, esoteric knowledge and imagined grievances. Begley, solid as the land he grew up on, was nevertheless shy and cautious, with a countryman’s mistrust of the modern media and the music business. The prospect of making a record that would actually be heard around the world turned them both slightly crazy.
They lived under a mountain on the Dingle peninsula: Seamus and family in a farmhouse, Cooney in their basement. The name Dingle sounds cutesy, but the place is anything but – it is a vast domain of sea-torn cliffs and wild promontories, cloud-capped mountains, and strange ragged islands that lay scattered like buckshot in the western ocean. The mountains were the ones I’d spied curling like smoke on the horizon from the cliff-top fort on the Aran Islands a year before, the ‘lair of poetry and wizards’, which was all very inspiring but not a lot of help when we got to the house and I discovered Cooney and Begley weren’t talking to each other, plus Begley had a head cold and couldn’t sing. Worst of all, Cooney, terrified and conflicted about whether to make the album or not, was lying in wait for me with a thousand obstructions and reasons why the record couldn’t be made.
During those waning days of summer beneath the misty flanks of Mount Brandon I discovered wells of diplomacy I didn’t know I had in me. I negotiated to patch up the real and imagined differences between my two charges, made Lemsip for Begley’s cold, patiently fielded Cooney’s infinitely creative obstructions, and finally started working with them on the selection of songs and tunes – polkas, Kerry slides and a battery of jigs, reels and hornpipes – that would comprise the album.
Guessing that if we worked on multi-track Cooney would use the subsequent mixing sessions as an opportunity for perpetual delaying tactics, I decided to record the music direct to stereo, which meant it went down on tape exactly as the punter would hear it. The recordings were to be made in the largest room of Cooney’s basement, so I set out to dispose of the thousands of horseflies that inhabited his feral bachelor pad. I got a dozen old copies of The Kerryman newspaper from Begley’s wife Mary, which I rolled into swatting shapes, and spent a morning and afternoon killing them one by one.
That night John Dunford arrived from Dublin with the recording gear, and Begley, his cold shaken off and voice restored, now rallied to the project. But Cooney continued to erect obstructions, complaining bitterly about the choice of recording space, challenging the selection of equipment and questioning my and Dunford’s qualifications. And once even these assaults had been parried and it was clear he could no longer delay the onset of actual recordings, the villain cunningly shifted mode. Instead of an attitude of I don’t want this to happen and I’m going to do all I can to obstruct it, he switched to OK, you want to produce me? I’m going to make you work harder than you’ve ever worked in your fucking life.
And he did. I had to wake Cooney each morning, tenderly easing him out of the deep funk of his sleep, roll him a reefer while he lay in bed muttering and fussing over himself and the trials that were visited upon him, light the reefer and hand it to him (not, mercifully, having to place it between his lips). When he eventually picked up his guitar and pointed it towards a microphone, he would demand I tell him whether it was in tune, though he could tell full well himself. Variations on these processes, all along the lines of producer-as-servant, continued throughout the day as Dunford and I torturously, painfully, produced the bugger’s album for him, despite his every sabotaging effort.
Why was it like this? Perhaps Cooney was afraid of being tested in the world, of standing up and saying ‘this is me, this is my music.’ I could understand that one. Making Fisherman’s Blues I’d been confounded by which ‘me’ or which Waterboys to represent in the form of the finished product. I’d bought into the illusion that the record would define us. Cooney seemed to have a similar difficulty. Deep down he wanted his music to be heard and loved, which was why he’d agreed to make the album in the first place, but now it seemed he was frozen in the headlights lest it actually come out and sum him up with all its, and his, imperfections.
But we persevered, and day by day the tally of completed songs and sets of tunes grew until we had almost enough for an album. Then, because Kerry music is dance music, Cooney & Begley requested we record the last tracks with live dancers, so for the final night Dunford and I recorded them in the local pub. It was like a re-run of Sharon’s Winkles Hotel scene, but with punters who came out in numbers to support the two local heroes. Restored to their natural habitat and spurred by the crowd, the duo played to the height of their brilliance, firing out explosive polkas while four rustic couples step-danced on the floor, their stamping adding organic percussion to the music.
The guys from Cooking Vinyl arrived with a journalist from the NME called Stuart Bailie. Wickham and Blakey, holidaying nearby, also turned up, and when the pub closed we had the inevitable after-hours session. Cooking Vinyl boss Pete Lawrence was eager for Stuart to get an interview with Cooney but hadn’t reckoned on Cooney’s resistance. There followed a wonderfully farcical game of hide and seek throughout the bar as Cooney strove to escape Pete’s clutches, slipping out this door or that, ducking into the men’s room or secreting himself in the kitchen. Pete, at the limits of his endurance, finally caught up with his prey at the bar and hastily pleaded with a distraught Cooney, now doing his best persecuted genius impression, to do the interview. ‘John,’ Cooney cried petulantly to the ever-patient Dunford, ‘can you get this guy off my back?’ Underneath his tortured artist hippie act, what Cooney really wanted more than anything was to be interviewed, as the gifted artist he was, by the man from the NME. And shortly afterwards I noticed him sitting happily in rapt discussion with a tape recorder-toting Stuart, all persecutions forgotten.
But the villain had the last laugh – he didn’t let the album come out. Though we’d got it finished against all the odds, Cooney never signed the contract, and the music he and Begley recorded that September – as raw, majestic and magnificent as the landscape in which it was made, remains unheard.
Chapter 12: Like A House Of Cards Collapsing
San Diego, the last night of our American tour, and we’re performing an odd new song called ‘Room To Roam’. Wickham plays slithering fairground arpeggios while the band lays down a Bavarian waltz groove with baritone sax parps and a militaristic drum beat. We’re midway through the first verse when I notice three of our crew members at the side of the stage bending their knees in time to the music, going comedically up and down like pantomime policemen. Well, these things happen on the last nights of tours. I’m chuckling to myself between vocal lines when I see a few people in the middle of the front row of the audience pointing at the crew members and laughing. Then they start copying the dance, bobbing up and down themselves. As the second verse starts the people on either side of them start doing it too, and soon the move is spreading along the whole front row. I’m still singing and trying with diminishing success to keep a straight face when the second row starts copying them, and then the third, until soon, as the dance spreads organically, the whole audience from front row to back of the hall is doing an up and down knee-bendy dance like a silly policemen’s convention in a Monty Python sketch. And some of the audience are bending on the beat while the rest are off the beat, so that when half the crowd are going down the other half are going up. They’re all laughing at themselves too, and as the realisation spreads from the rear of the audience forwards that everyone’s doing the same thing, a giddy delight fills the hall. We’re all one, band and crowd united in a gorgeous, golden silliness.