Adventures of a Waterboy

by Mike Scott

  I was expected to say hello to Karl afterwards and this meant I’d have to meet Kate. I thought about leaving but I was damned if I was going to give her power over me again by running. I could and would face her – and face her down if I had to. So when the set ended I walked to the backstage entrance and showed my pass to the security guard. Karl seemed unaware of the drama that had played out before the start of his show, and stood with his band outside the dressing room tents, cheerful after their successful concert. And there behind them, watching for me, was Kate. Fear ran through me as I approached. The power she’d once wielded over me still had a grip. I decided to try to defuse this power by being bland, revealing nothing of myself and letting her attitude, whatever it was going to be, wash off me; an improvised form of self-protection. I walked up to her, proffered my hand in customary fashion and said, ‘Kate. How nice to see you again,’ in a colourless voice.

  She looked me up and down deliberately, as if summing me up, with an air that suggested I was lower than the worms in the ground.

  ‘You haven’t changed,’ she said witheringly, and I felt her painting me back into the dynamics of our old relationship. Then she added, ‘People keep telling me I shouldn’t turn up for this or that event around town. Why is that?’

  There was truth in this. When The Waterboys had played in New York in 1989 and 1990 I’d given strict instructions to my agents not to give Kate guest access, should she come asking.

  ‘I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about,’ I lied, bland-voiced, looking her in the eye. ‘Good,’ she said, trying to score the point. But my boundary had held and there was nowhere else for her to take the matter, or the interaction. Not yet powerful enough in myself to call her out, or to meet fire with fire, at least I could deal with her while keeping my cool. I left, heart beating like an army of drummers, but as I returned home the emotion turned from fear into a delayed rage. How dare she look me up and down and judge me! How dare she walk out on someone’s fucking stage and point a camera at me and my wife! Rage can be the most useful and healthy of emotions. A cathartic transforming fire burned in my guts for a week. If I ever met Kate Lovecraft again she’d have no more power over me.

  Then, when I’d just about cooled down, the edit of the ‘Glastonbury Song’ video dropped through the mailbox at Hudson Street. I unpacked it, stuck the tape in the player and sat back to watch. A clock appeared on screen ticking down the seconds to zero. The song began. As the intro guitars played I lay on a standing stone in the mist, looking like a sixties pop star who’d stumbled on the set of a low-budget remake of Wuthering Heights and fallen asleep on the scenery. And it didn’t get better. The video was a load of cleverly filmed nonsensical tosh. Worst of all, every time the chorus came round the dry ice footage showed me portentously sticking my head, Jehovah-like, from a cloud high above Glastonbury Tor. And because viewers assume artists to be complicit in their videos, it made me look like an egotist with a messiah complex who thought I was god. The horror! There was only one thing to do: I pulled the fucker.

  When I told Dick Lackaday and Geffen’s video people that on no account was the promo to be shown, they accepted it in a resigned sort of way. It was just the latest example of ‘difficult Mike’. But when John Downer heard he blew his nut, phoned me at home, and ranted bitterly at me for cancelling his film and destroying all his work ‘on a whim.’ I was unmoved; it wasn’t his public image that was on the line, nor his song buried neck-deep in baloney. The top brass at Geffen were understandably perplexed, though, and when the company boss, an old-school American gentleman called Ed Rosenblatt, called to persuade me to let the video be shown, I could sense the frustration behind his measured tones. The implied choice was clear: release the video and save my relationship with the company, or pull it and suffer that most dreaded of music business shutdowns, record company demotivation.

  But whichever way I weighed it, the video was unacceptable. I stood my ground and put my hopes in ‘Glastonbury Song’ being a hit in Britain; if that happened Geffen would be motivated again soon enough. And for a moment it looked like the gamble would pay off. The single entered the top thirty and I flew to London to perform on BBC’s Top Of The Pops with a one-off Waterboys featuring Carla, Scott and Chris Bruce. But the following week ‘Glastonbury Song’ stalled in the lower twenties, just as ‘The Return of Pan’ had done three months before. The gamble had failed.

  The only way to promote Dream Harder now was a tour. But I still had no band; further auditions had drawn another blank and I’d begun to accept I was flogging a dead horse. The Waterboys had stood for a shared vision, a band of musical friends and soulmates, and no combination I’d found in America had come close to living up to this. I didn’t want to sully my band’s reputation by heading out on the road now with an ill-matched set of hired hands. I was caught between a colourful past and a dysfunctional present and could find no way forwards. The game was up and this campaign was over.

  So was Dick Lackaday. After two years his charm had expired. He’d made an art form of gilding his image as the man people liked to do business with, even when it meant isolating his artist as the bad guy. When disagreements with Geffen arose, instead of saying, ‘We don’t want such-and-such to happen,’ Dick would say, ‘Mike doesn’t want to do this. I’ve tried to persuade him but it’s no use.’ I could be wrong as often as anyone, and I’d probably made more daft decisions in the last two years of my career than in the first ten combined, but for his twenty per cent I required a manager who’d call me out in private and present a united front in public. After one backslide too many I visited Dick on a hot August day in his Upper West Side office and uttered the overdue words: you’re fired.

  I had one more album to make for Geffen but with no band and no manager there wasn’t a whole lot of anything keeping me in New York. Nor could anything have kept me now, for a new and profoundly different adventure was already calling.

  Chapter 15: The Philosophy Room

  On a spring day in 1983 a taxi speeds along Oxford Street, hangs a right at Centrepoint and drops a twenty-four-year-old me on Charing Cross Road. I slip through the hordes of shoppers and enter Foyles, the largest bookshop in London. Looking round for an assistant, I spot a guy placing books on the shelves. ‘Excuse me,’ I say to him, ‘where will I find The History Of Magic by Eliphas Levi?’ He thinks for a moment then replies, ‘Anything like that would be in the Philosophy Room on the top floor. Take the lift over there.’

  The lift is ancient, looks like it hasn’t been upgraded since Albert was the Prince Consort, and it takes forever, wheezing and rattling all the way up. Finally it shudders to a stop. I pull the heavy iron grille open and emerge onto a quiet floor with an air of academia and shelves full of music books, manuscripts of Broadway shows, and sheafs of folk songs and jazz standards. I ask another assistant where the Philosophy Room is and she points to a small archway in the far corner.

  I cross the room, go through the arch and down some steps which lead into a small antechamber. Here the atmosphere is different, less fusty than the music department I’ve just left, more rarefied. As I scan the category signs on the shelves my eye takes in Buddhism, Tao, Zen, Hinduism, Christianity and Judaism and I realise the Philosophy Room is really the religion or spirituality room. There are philosophers here too, though, from Socrates on the lowest shelf to Bertrand Russell at the top. And some weirder subjects: Paganism, Witchcraft, Rosicrucianism, Western Mysteries. I didn’t know there were books about things like Paganism, and as for the Western Mysteries, I haven’t the faintest idea what those are. But the titles are intriguing: The Esoteric Orders and Their Work, The Training and Work of an Initiate. What’s all that about?

  Magic is next to them. And yes, here’s Eliphas Levi’s History Of Magic, a thick black paperback with a strange diagram on the cover. I scan through the pages. My God, there’s a whole world in here. The chapters include Hermetic Magic, The Mathematical Magic Of Pythagoras, Mystics, The Occult Scienc
es, Rosicrucians … that word again. It’s all wonderfully archaic and fascinating and I want to read every page at once. I stick the book under my arm but I’m not quite ready for the checkout desk. I’m going to root through all the other mysterious wonders on these shelves, for I’ve the queerest feeling that in this tiny room at the top of Foyles I’ll find something I didn’t know I was even looking for, but which I’ve been seeking my whole life.

  When I lived near the Portobello Road in the eighties I used to frequent Elgin Books, a quiet cerebral bookstore of the kind that stops time and casts a spell. One day, browsing in its poetry section, I embarked on an unexpected journey that was to run parallel with my music, sometimes informing it, sometimes wholly separate, and which ten years later would summon me from exile in New York to the most unlikely circumstances I could have imagined.

  For that day in the sweet silence of Elgin Books I came upon a scarlet-covered volume of A Season In Hell and The Illuminations by Arthur Rimbaud, the teenage French poet of the late 1800s. I knew Rimbaud’s name because my old heroine Patti Smith was always raving about him in interviews and dropping him into song lyrics, but I’d never been tempted to check him out. Perhaps Patti made Rimbaud sound too ineffably hip and arty, a concept better left unexplored, its glamour and mystery intact. Or perhaps I just hadn’t been ready. But here was the real thing within my grasp. I bought the book and read it that night by the light of a table lamp in my basement flat.

  It was spectacular: a storm of philosophical and visionary imaginings and dramatic self-histories expressed with boldness, passion and a wickedly grotesque humour. I found it absolutely compelling and immediately saw where Patti had got a truckload of her ideas. Rimbaud’s writing had a fire and edge that bypassed the tyrants of my mind and spoke directly to my imagination. My fascination was particularly gripped by a letter of his quoted in the introduction, an apparently famous item called the ‘Lettre Du Voyant’, in which the sixteen-year-old Arthur, writing to a friend, expresses his belief in the poet as a voyant, a visionary whose work will one day lead to the discovery of the ‘universal language of the soul.’

  I was fascinated by this idea, which suggested the existence of a state of consciousness, a wavelength, on which all human beings could be connected. If there was such a thing, and if the amazing Rimbaud had gone on to find it, I wanted to know. So next day I returned to the bookshop to buy Rimbaud’s Complete Works and a biography of him written by an Irish scholar called Enid Starkie. The Complete Works yielded another motherlode of charismatic poetry, though no further clues about any universal language. But in the biography I read that Rimbaud’s ideas had been influenced by a contemporary Frenchman called Eliphas Levi, author of something called The History Of Magic. I didn’t know what this magic was, but clearly Eliphas wasn’t talking conjuring tricks. Starkie summed up the core of Levi’s teachings:

  If man can slough off human egoism and human personality and learn to use his faculties, he can illuminate the darkness with light and seize possession of the treasures of the universe. Nothing will be able to withstand the power of his will when he has learnt to move it in harmony with the force of divine love. He will become an illuminist, one who enjoys and possesses light. By continued effort at self-culture and the eradication of human egoism the soul becomes worthy of receiving this light, of becoming the conductor of this radiance. When he has placed his own frail will into direct communication with the eternal will, he will be able to direct that will like the point of an arrow, and to send peace or turmoil into the souls of other men.

  Wow! I had to find out more about this Eliphas Levi, so I went back again to Elgin Books. The store was run by a quiet, courteous and soulful lady with short greying hair. I asked her if she stocked Levi’s History of Magic. Playing her appointed role in the unfolding drama of a young man’s life, she replied no, but told me where I’d find it. I thanked her, strode down the street, hailed a taxi on Ladbroke Grove and instructed the driver, ‘Foyles bookshop, please.’

  From the dozen books I purchased at Foyles that day I learned there existed infinitely more types of spirituality than those I’d heard of – that there were indeed more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than were dreamt of in my philosophy. Hindu god-men, Persian mystic poets, techniques for expanding consciousness, nature-worshipping pagans, energy centres called chakras in the human body, levels of existence beyond normal perception … it was dizzying. Once I’d adjusted to the onslaught of information I began to grasp that the different spiritual systems shared a belief in a transcendent, attainable reality to which all the world’s religions pointed: that all is one, that our sense of separation is an illusion and that the entity or force we call God is actually inside all things, including us.

  The great religions themselves, I learned, had begun as the methods by which different cultures, races and times addressed and approached this reality, and that there was a tradition of reserved or hidden teachings behind the public faces of the religions, comprising deeper wisdom attainable only through prolonged dedication and discipline. These teachings, called The Perennial Wisdom, The Perennial Philosophy or simply The Mysteries, had been the preserve of closed religious orders and discreet groups, sometimes known as Mystery Schools, but in the twentieth century were increasingly being made public through books and spiritual workshops. They included now-commonplace subjects like meditation and yoga, and were gathered under fabulous names like Anthroposophy, Gnosticism, Sufism and the mysterious Rosicrucianism. I stood before this new world like an explorer in the foothills of a great mountain range. I had a long way to go before my crude mental grasping of spiritual principles turned into experiential understanding, but the discovery, while challenging, was a huge relief. I’d always found British church Christianity a depressing, soul-numbing enterprise, which spoke to me about neither the mysteries of life nor the content of my heart. That I could now explore forms of spirituality that did was thrilling.

  I read and I read. My favourite book was Peter Russell’s The Awakening Earth, a mighty treatise on the evolution of consciousness, which confirmed all my heart had ever told me about the adventure of being human; and my favourite writer was Dion Fortune, a Welsh mystic of the thirties and forties whose books, written in a sturdy, powerfully poetic voice, provided me with my preferred font of spiritual knowledge. By the end of 1983, six or seven months after my epiphany in Foyles, I knew my way pretty well around the basics of esoteric and new age literature. These included karma – the law of cause and effect – and the universal principle that energy follows thought, a process to which every enterprise and intrigue in history attests. I had countless opportunities to observe the action of both in my own life.

  I tried using ‘energy follows thought’ as a home-made spiritual practice, and developed over a period of several years a daily discipline of visualising trouble spots in the world (Iran and Iraq, then at war with each other, for example) surrounded by energies of peace and lovingness, and holding this image in my mind. There was no way of knowing the effectiveness of this, and for all I knew I was wasting my time, but I kept doing it, hoping my efforts would merge with similar intentions on the part of others, whoever and wherever they might be. I used the same principle with my music: like any ambitious rock’n’roller worth the leather trousers he walked around in, I deliberately envisioned my songwriting exploding into greatness and my band being successful.

  I learned discernment, too: how to identify and avoid dubious information, charlatans, self-glorifiers and fools, for there were plenty of those in the spirituality business. And by trial and error I learned my way through the maze of ideas, which meant not simply cramming my head with information but recognising which books were dodgy, which were too impossibly advanced, and which were just right for me at that moment. Once I came across The Perennial Wisdom my ambitions began to shift. I still wanted to be the best songwriter and rock’n’roller in the world, but overruling that was the growing desire to increase my awareness. I lost all i
nterest in the lyrics of rock musicians unless they addressed or contained something of The Mysteries. Van Morrison’s ‘Haunts Of Ancient Peace’ (a sublime Perennial Wisdom song), Little Richard’s ‘Tutti Frutti’ (pure energy) and Hank Williams’s ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart’ (an elegant discourse on the law of karma, filtered through the vernacular of rural American folk-wisdom) were food for my soul, but the intellectual ruminations of most adult rock singers now held no attraction whatsoever.

  My own writing was hugely affected. I’d addressed spiritual matters in my songs before but it had been like fumbling in the dark, not even knowing what I was looking for. Suddenly someone had switched the light on. ‘The Big Music’, with its lyric about discovering The Mysteries, was the first number I wrote after the expedition to Foyles, and every song on This Is The Sea was full of my new discoveries. Sometimes the influence was direct, like on ‘The Pan Within’, an occult love song, the premise and title of which came from Dion Fortune’s writings; and sometimes more general, as on ‘Trumpets’, a kind of gnostic devotional addressed to a being who was part God, part lover. The Perennial Wisdom fired my imagination and emotions and without its inspiration songs like ‘The Whole Of The Moon’, ‘Medicine Bow’ and ‘This Is The Sea’ wouldn’t have been written. One of Dion Fortune’s maxims was when the student is ready the teacher will appear, and figuring that I must be ready (after all, I’d followed a trail and found The Perennial Wisdom for myself) I cocked an eye and an ear for my teacher. But no one appeared. I didn’t coincidentally meet a wiser older person who took me under their wing; I didn’t stumble upon a Mystery School.