by Mike Scott
All musicians take this risk at least once in their early careers, and the traditional way of avoiding disaster is for a band member to sit up front with the driver and keep him talking, and therefore conscious. I remember it myself, Johnny Waller dozing at the wheel on the way back from a 1979 gig in Aberdeen, the van veering alarmingly close to the barrier as we crossed the Forth Road Bridge at five in the morning. Most bands, wishing to stay alive, evolve swiftly past this state of affairs and develop the habit of booking hotels. Not so The Texas Kellys, still riding their luck after years on the road.
Steve may have given up on stardom but he still valued his skin. After one too many hair-raising drives he laid down the law: a hotel or guesthouse on the next trip or he was out. Halfway to the next show he asked the bandleader, a banjo-bothering Dublin cowboy called Jimmy Kelly, where they’d be staying that night. ‘Ah, don’t worry,’ said Jim, ‘sure, we’ll sort somethin’ out!’ ‘Stop the van!’ retorted Steve, and when it wheezed to a halt on the outskirts of a midlands town he jumped out with a parting shot of ‘Call yourselves cowboys? You couldn’t even catch an Indian!’ and hitched a lift back to Dublin. And that was the end of Mr Wickham’s career as a Texas Kelly.
Next Steve moved to Sligo, an old market town eighty miles north of Galway, where he lived with his second wife Annie and their baby daughter in a Methodist church hall Annie had inherited from her grandmother. The building was under the shadow of Ben Bulben, the strange flat mountain that looms over Sligo and provides the dramatic backdrop to several weighty W.B. Yeats poems. And now Ben Bulben formed the backdrop to the unravelling drama of Steve’s life. For when the marriage came unstuck in late 1993, Annie changed the locks and Steve found himself out on his ear, walking the roads of the world.
Steve and I sat at the kitchen table, his little dog scurrying and snapping at our ankles, and I got the story. He had indeed been kicked out by his wife, for reasons too arcane to untangle, but the accounts of him sleeping rough were an Irish exaggeration. Steve was in fact working mornings at a local youth club, teaching kids to play football, and just about keeping body and soul together. Well, body anyway. It was alarming to see my old friend so wounded. Looking into his once-merry face was like intruding on a private tragedy. He was like one of those characters in a comic strip with a personal black raincloud following them around. I tried to get him to open up about what had happened to him, and what he could do about it, but it was like trying to draw water from a stone. Steve was deeply troubled, close to his personal rock bottom. Only time and love might cure what ailed him.
We wandered the fringes of Sligo together, rambled by the seashore and poked around country lanes, and even played a few old Hank Williams songs together back at the house. But Steve’s fiddle had a curdled sound to it, as if it had been in the fridge too long, and Steve played like what he was, a distressed man lost in a thicket he couldn’t yet find a way out of. Still, I perceived something gnarly at work in him, some instinctive self-preservation under the surface that would have its say in his destiny, and I got the feeling that the next time I saw him he’d be in better shape. And he was. On an August day eight months later he turned up out of the blue, on a bicycle, at the bay-side cottage in Findhorn where I was now living with Janette.
Janette answered the door and called me. ‘It’s Steve, the friend you told me all about.’ And as I greeted him I felt like Dean Moriarty in On The Road, the time Sal Paradise visits him, and Dean, gobsmacked, says, ‘Sal! You’ve finally come to me!’
Steve had cycled across Ireland and up the whole length of Scotland to find me. He was still bearded, somewhat hunched at the shoulders, and the eye contact wasn’t great, but otherwise he was fit and sharp, with the faintest hint of his old humour about him. We spent the day walking the shoreline of Findhorn Bay, among the pine trees and eco-houses of the community. The conversation was clear and open, our friendship intact, and I knew my friend was on the mend. I saw him a few more times over the next couple of years and every time he was a little more returned to his old self: clearer-eyed, clean-shaven, standing more upright. In the spring of 1995 he came to my one-man show in Galway and hung out backstage. Six months later his new folk trio, The Connacht Ramblers, supported me at Dublin’s Olympia Theatre; and in 1997 he made a brief visit to London for a Ramblers’ gig and stayed with Janette and me in the pink house on Lansdowne Road.
The Connacht Ramblers, like the Texas Kellys, played around the pubs and shebeens of Ireland. They flourished, after a fashion, from 1994 to 1998, playing a repertoire of Woody Guthrie covers, fiddly instrumentals and quirky original songs. The vocals were by Steve or his mate, an Irish poet/guitarist called Peter Brabazon. I asked Steve about their life on the road, and he regaled me with woeful but funny tales of mildewed boarding houses and crooked rustic pub-owners, the indignities of being upstaged in Killarney by a magician who puked up live fish, or being misbooked to play in a rebel bar in front of an audience of hardcore Irish republicans. The diehards, unimpressed by the Ramblers’ cheery fare, requested throughout that they ‘Play a fuckin’ rebel song, boys!’ and when Steve declined with a spirited, if inadvisable, riposte of ‘Rebel songs are shite!’ someone punched him in the face, knocking him out cold.
Or the time they were booked to play at Puck Fair, a semi-medieval travellers’ shindig in a hilly crossroads town called Killorglin. Atop a narrow twenty-foot-high platform in the village square a wild Billy goat, captured a few days earlier in the local mountains, and with a metal crown stuck rudely on his hairy head, presides over the festivities. This is King Puck, after whom the fair is named. Steve and his mates played on a makeshift stage on the square during the afternoon, and at one point Steve thought it had started raining. He could feel the drips going down his neck, yet when he looked at the audience it didn’t seem to be raining on them. He looked up and with horror realised he was standing under King Puck, who was majestically relieving himself.
At their London gig I saw the Ramblers for myself. The show was at the Weavers, a folk music bar with photos from ancient gigs lining the walls and a proper stage in the back room. A perfect setting, therefore, except no one turned up and the band had to play their two sets to an audience of seven. This they did with a dogged, self-deprecating resilience which suggested they were used to this kind of occurrence. Steve had invited me to join them on stage but sensing disaster, and with the moral rectitude of a rat on a doomed ship, I declined and let the Ramblers die their own death of a thousand silences. They battled gallantly and Steve was a cheerful frontman, making hopelessly bad jokes and giving charming explanations of the songs, but he was no lead singer and nor was Peter Brabazon. It was nearly amateur – not the worst gig I’d ever seen, but not by any stretch worthy of Wickham’s talent.
Nor were the various summer jobs Steve told me about, which he got via the Sligo Tourist Board to make some cash when gigs were scarce. Yet there was a certain magic about the thought of him being a ‘fiddling tour guide’ at a local castle, or a ‘ghost fiddler’ hiding on an island on picturesque Lough Gill and playing tunes from the trees as tourists took their lunch in a ruined abbey, or acting the part of W.B. Yeats’s ‘Fiddler Of Dooney’ at a fair in the town of Dooney Rock while people danced, as the poem said, ‘like the wave of the sea’. And there was something noble about it too – a man doing work beneath his station in order to feed a family. For as well as providing for daughter Amy, who lived with his estranged second wife, Steve had married again and he and third wife Heidi now had a baby son.
In the summer of 1998 I played a solo show at the Galway Arts Festival. Steve and Anto Thistlethwaite were in the audience and joined me for the encore, and I heard the old magic in Steve’s playing. In fact, it was as if he wanted me to hear it. On ‘Fisherman’s Blues’ and Hank Williams’s ‘Honky Tonkin’’ he reprised all my favourite Fellow Who Fiddles tricks: dizzying harmonic swirls, bright bursts of happy melody, lazy country double stops. It was as if I was being musically seduced.
As things turned out, Steve came to me first. In the autumn of 1999 he rang me out of the blue and said, ‘How about doin’ a gig in Sligo? I’ll put together a band to back you.’ I thought for a few seconds then replied, ‘Forget the band – let’s do a two-man show, just you and me together.’ And so it was that in the last weeks of the twentieth century I returned to the west of Ireland to restore my creative partnership with The Fellow Who Fiddles. Steve was well recovered by now from his Rathbraughan doldrums. Time and the self-healing power of the human heart had done their work. But when I arrived in Sligo and visited him at his new house I began to see there was another reason: new wife Heidi, a bustling, no-nonsense blonde English dynamo. Heidi ran the place, boxed Steve’s ears, looked after three-year-old Tom, designed stage sets for local theatrical events, and produced countless paintings of inquisitive ducks which festooned the walls of their home, Harebell House, which Steve and she had built a few years earlier.
Harebell House was a pale blue cottage on a plot of rough land under a hill four miles from Sligo. Mimicking the style of old Irish cottages it had one main room, running almost the length of the house, with a small bedchamber at each end. But there the traditional similarities ended. For stepping into Harebell House was to enter a wonderland. The walls were bright green with orange skirting, the windows were set in scarlet wooden frames, hanging from the rafters were strings of bells, bright ribbons and spider plants with heart-shaped leaves and curling tendrils. On the window ledges stood tattered piles of dictionaries, cookbooks, music folios and picture books. Cats slept on high shelves. The mantelpiece was a wooden railway sleeper Steve had found by the side of a road. A huge carved leaping hare, the totem animal of the establishment, was fixed majestically to the wall above a cheerful roaring fireplace. And at one end the room was overlooked by a minstrel’s gallery stuffed with boxes, theatre costumes and Steve’s musical instruments. It was a magical mad delightful place, the product of Steve’s and Heidi’s personalities, and the absolute opposite of the dump I’d found him in during his soul’s dark night at Rathbraughan.
Our concert was booked a week later at The Hawk’s Well Theatre in Sligo, and I was billeted in a guesthouse half a mile away on the shores of Lough Gill, opposite the island where Steve had been a ‘ghost fiddler’. Each day he picked me up in his ancient banger of a car which shunted and chuntered (often giving up till Steve performed some unknown rustic alchemy on it) back to Harebell House where we rehearsed. Or tried to. For it was tough pinning Steve down to rehearsal. Every time we started work we’d get an hour of playing done before he would lay down his fiddle and announce he had to go into Sligo to see a man about a dog, or some other dubious business, leaving me to gaze at the bright walls of Harebell House or moulder in my B&B.
After three days of stop-start, stop-start I exploded and told Steve in exasperated tones that I was used to rehearsing professionally, that it was arrogant of him to attend to all this other business on my time when I’d come from London to work with him, and that he couldn’t ‘just keep walking out’. ‘If you don’t work a bit fucking harder,’ I said furiously, ‘we’ll be shite on stage on Thursday night.’ All of which, while pertinent to the work in hand, was also a coded way of saying I’m still mad that you fucked off and left me in the shit with a world tour to play back in 1990!
As if opening a floodgate, my outburst had the effect of unleashing a wild reciprocal rant from Steve containing all manner of long-buttoned-down grievances, real and fantastical, climaxing in his passionate assertions that I’d forced him out of The Waterboys ten years before and that my royal arrogance quite equalled his own, with particularly emotive reference being made to my insistence that he sing no songs at our upcoming gig and leave all the vocals to me. With a sudden jolt to my guts I realised I’d muscled back into the role of Steve’s boss instead of being his colleague and partner, and that I must have done this so many times in the past that it was an old, acute wound for my friend.
I was stunned into silence. Both sets of words hung lividly in the air above our heads … and then evaporated. For while the eruption had exposed the unspoken undertows of our past, it had another more profound effect. As we sat facing each other, scoured and unburdened of our baggage, a deep recognition passed between us. Steve’s jet black eyes glittered at me and I knew who we were: two musical soulmates. And none of the other stuff – the who did what to who back when – mattered a jot. What mattered was the deep feeling of old comradeship and something that felt a lot like love. And the love was flowing both ways. Quietly and humbly we hugged each other and set about the business of rehearsing properly, with no more men to see about dogs, and a couple of Steve’s vocals included in the set.
The show was on Thursday 7 October, and as we soundchecked at the Hawk’s Well Steve was more nervous than I’d ever seen him, and not with excitement. The man was terrified. But when we walked out on stage in front of a packed audience his old performing nature kicked in, and though it took him a couple of songs to settle into his groove soon he was playing eloquently with a restrained version of the power and flair of old. We did songs from several Waterboys albums, mostly those Steve had played on, plus a version of ‘Bring ’Em All In’ with a local string quartet he’d assembled. We sweated, cruised, played off each other, negotiated a few tight musical corners and broke through to some high, power-driven uplands, and ninety minutes later it was all over. Or rather, it was beginning. The Fellow Who Fiddles and I had reclaimed our musical brotherhood from the wreckage of the past, and the fire was burning again.
Chapter 19: Hoop Dancing
On a summer’s evening in the early nineties I’m at a theatre on Seventh Avenue, watching a troupe of Native Americans perform a modern take on traditional American Indian dance. Towards the end a young man in feathered costume and headband walks onto the stage alone, carrying a set of thin white wooden hoops, which he lays at his feet.
As the music begins he flicks one of the hoops into the air with a movement of his foot. He catches it deftly and begins to dance, twirling the hoop, slipping inside it, spinning it around his hips and shoulders. Then he gathers another, then another and another, integrating each successive hoop in an increasingly complex dance, forming them into the shapes of wings, tails and perfect spheres. He adds hoops until he’s dancing with thirty of them in a dizzying, blurred myriad of patterns, never falling out of graceful movement and symmetry. The performance is visually stunning, but has a deeper significance: the hoops symbolise the different parts of the dancer’s life and culture, the threads of his world, and the dance is a celebration of his having learned to move between them with balance and mastery. As the Hoop Dancer spins he is demonstrating not only his power over the tools of the dance, but his mastery of himself. Watching from my balcony seat, I want this mastery too.
Finding myself in suburban Kew in the spring of 1998 felt like a banishment, as if I’d been spat out by the machinery of pop and left to fester in a snoozy hinterland. To my mind Kew was a way station, nothing more, an impression heightened by the railway line at the end of the garden and by our location directly under the Heathrow flight paths. Planes flew over the street every forty-five seconds, while Concorde, loudest of all created beings, went by twice daily, renting the fabric of reality with an ear and earth-splitting roar.
This was not a landscape designed to hold me, and within weeks of arriving in Kew I felt the familiar wanderlust. As if on cue an old haunt soon beckoned. That May I returned to Spiddal to
film a performance for Irish television, and was stirred all over again by the beauty and wild charm of the place. On the three days of my visit the Connemara coast was windless and sun-sharpened, its crazy fields and rocky slopes shining silver green in the Atlantic light, appearing to my hungry eyes like nothing less than the primordial paradise of the philosophers’ golden age. What’s more, though I was yesterday’s man on the British rock scene, I was a folk legend in the West of Ireland. Everywhere I went people I didn’t know said hello to me, nodded or said things like, ‘I was at The Waterboys’ show in Ennistymon in 1989, ’twas mighty!’ And when the television filming was completed everyone went to Hughes’s bar, where I was feted like the long-lost prodigal son and a giant music session ensued. I flew back to Kew ready to up sticks and move once and for all to County Galway, and cajoled Janette to come with me on a fortnight’s exploratory trip.
We rented the same rural bungalow I’d stayed in during the making of Room To Roam, but while Janette liked the place for a visit and could see why I adored it she didn’t want to live in Spiddal. I had to decide between two of the great loves of my life: my wife and the west of Ireland. No contest. I sacrificed the dream of moving to Spiddal and we returned to Kew. But after every sacrifice comes a gift of grace, and Kew had some unexpected gifts in store for me, starting with a revelation. For twenty years I’d moved from place to place, immersing myself in the atmosphere and character of each new location. Edinburgh, Notting Hill, Dublin, Spiddal, New York and Findhorn had all impacted on my imagination, my music, and my sense of identity. But somewhere along the line I’d fooled myself into believing that where I was defined me and my work. Now, exiled amid the strait-laced terraces of Kew in a location that said little to my soul, this illusion was unravelled. For instead of finding inspiration in my physical or cultural surroundings I had to find it inside myself. As I prowled Kew’s leafy streets that first year I heard the music in my head still rolling, unfurling itself into new shapes and forms, and I became aware of an internal battery located in my guts, a kind of growling Mike-Scott-ness like the steady roar of an engine, still full of drive and ambition. Denuded of a magical environment in which to dream, I dreamed anyway and finally learned how to embody a line in one of my old songs: Home is in me wherever I roam.