Adventures of a Waterboy

by Mike Scott

  Chapter 3: Where’s That Scottish Boy?

  A pen pal in Wales. His name was David Thomas.

  Unlikely song titles. Very unlikely indeed: several, presumably guessed at by whoever issued the bootleg album, were wrong. ‘Strained On Strange’ was a mishearing of ‘Ain’t It Strange’ and ‘The Smooth Stone Beyond’ was a mistitling of ‘Pumpin’ (My Heart)’.

  Chapter 4: A Friend Called Z

  Tull-head. A follower of the band Jethro Tull.

  We hitchhiked to concerts in Glasgow and St Andrews. Z and I hitched to see The Jam at St Andrews University and spotted Paul Weller drinking in the bar of his hotel. We talked to him and I asked him to autograph a cigarette for my mod drummer mate, Crigg, a devoted Jam fan. Weller kindly obliged, etching his name ultra-carefully along the side of the cigarette. Crigg received this artefact with great solemnity and Blu-Tacked it to his bedroom wall, where it remained for some months until one night, desperate for a fag, he smoked it. In the late nineties I was working in a London rehearsal studio at the same time as Weller. We co-existed in daily proximity but hadn’t bumped into each other till one day I was standing behind him in the queue at the studio’s café. He turned round and said, ‘’Scuse me, Mike, did I sign a fag for your mate in St Andrews twenty years ago?’

  Richard Hell. Inventor of spiked hair, ripped t-shirt and clothes held together with safety pins, founder member of Television, short-term colleague of Johnny Thunders in The Heartbreakers, and leader of Richard Hell & The Voidoids. Richard was also the writer of ‘The Blank Generation’, a song I loved so much that I proclaimed ‘Hell is a Genius’ on the cover of my fanzine Jungleland. Richard, spotting the fanzine on the counter of Hot Licks record shop in Edinburgh during his 1977 tour, was so gratified with this accolade he bought every copy.

  ‘All The Boys Love Carrie’. Produced by Ali Donaldson, better known around Edinburgh in those days as William Mysterious, bassist with The Rezillos.

  A&R stands for ‘artiste & repertoire’. The duties of A&R men vary, depending on the individual and the record company they work for, but their principal role is twofold: 1) to act as talent scouts who discover artists and 2) to steward artists’ recording careers, suggesting producers, consulting as to song selection, musical direction etc. A&R staff range from deeply intuitive music men like John Hammond who signed and worked with Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, to cloth-eared clowns who get the job because they’re a record company boss’s drug dealer or son-in-law.

  I went to New York, for the first time, to record some of my new songs with Lenny Kaye. The band was Lenny on bass, me on guitar, and David Donen, from Lenny’s band The Lenny Kaye Connection, on drums. We worked in a studio called Songshop and cut four songs, all remakes of stuff I’d already demoed in London. The New York recordings were good but the demos had more freshness and magic so they went on The Waterboys’ self-titled first album. The Lenny material remains unreleased.

  The Waterboys. I found the word ‘waterboy’ in the lyrics of ‘The Kids’, on Lou Reed’s album Berlin. I loved the sound and mystery of it. What on earth was a waterboy?

  A retro glam/punk scene that festered round some of the city’s music pubs, and for a while I was so lonesome I even took comfort there. I was sometimes accompanied by Nikki Sudden, with whom I’d go to The Golden Lion in Fulham or the Moonlight in West Hampstead to watch long-forgotten Faces-type artful dodger bands like Dogs D’Amour. Nikki was an English songwriter and bohemian spirit, real name Adrian Godfrey, and as ‘Nikki Mattress’ he’d been a member of late seventies DIY punk band Swell Maps. He was devoted to The Rolling Stones, Marc Bolan and Biggles the fighter pilot, had impeccable taste in clothes and song titles, and wrote good tunes. He couldn’t sing remotely in key, but this never stopped him living the life of a troubadour or making albums. I contributed piano and guitar to several tracks of Nikki’s 1982 record Bible Belt, including one called ‘The Road Of Broken Dreams’, which I also produced, and I was lead guitarist in his band for one gig. I came home once from a recording trip to find Nikki had moved into my flat with a girlfriend and a French drug dealer. We were never such good friends after that, but he left his mark on The Waterboys by turning me onto Anthony Thistlethwaite, whose sax I first heard on Nikki’s album Waiting On Egypt. My rendering of one of Nikki’s songs, ‘Cathy’ (my vocal over his original backing track), is on the remastered version of A Pagan Place (EMI, 2002). Nikki died in 2006.

  Mike’s Cafe on Blenheim Crescent. I always ate the same thing in this semi-legendary greasy spoon caff: breast of chicken, chips and baked beans. For some curious reason there was always one green pea among the beans.

  The gay punk rocker Gene October. I’d met Gene once before. His band Chelsea was signed to a company called IRS, and in 1979 Z and I turned up at their offices to see if they’d distribute the first Another Pretty Face single. Chelsea were hanging around the reception area like a gang and Gene, acting the big man, asked if he could listen to our record. We handed him a copy and he disappeared into another room. Five minutes later he stuck his head round the door long enough to say, ‘It’ll do well,’ and then, after a deliberate pause, added, ‘They ain’t goin’ for the real stuff anymore’ (ie his stuff), and disappeared before we could reply. It was very satisfying to say no when he asked me to join his band years later.

  My ‘musician-seeking’ ad in the NME. The ad was for ‘lead guitarist, into Iggy Pop.’ Karl was the only person to reply. He phoned me up and said he wasn’t a guitarist but he played keyboards and liked Iggy. I still have a cassette recording of him walking into his audition, and our lives, with the words, ‘Uh … hello … it’s Karl.’ The first song he played was ‘The Three Day Man’, and within ten seconds of it he’d got the gig.

  A look halfway between Billy The Whiz and a Mohawk. Billy The Whiz, the fastest boy in the world, was a cartoon character in the weekly British comic The Beano. His hairstyle was an aerodynamically efficient shaved head with two lone hairs standing rigidly on end.

  We had to change money every few days. Like most touring British bands, rather than keep track of the names of local currencies, we referred to all foreign money as ‘shitters’, as in, ‘can you lend me any shitters, mate?’

  His global wanderings would take him to Madagascar, Brazil and the Far East. Z still sends me emails, about one a year, always from somewhere exotic. And in a cheesy but reassuring way that immediately recalls the days of our early friendship he usually puts one of my old Another Pretty Face song titles in the subject box.

  Chapter 5: The Black Book And The Moon

  A witches’ store. Magickal Childe, West Nineteenth Street. The shop closed in 1999.

  The man behind the counter, a lantern-jawed character with an air of brusque authority. Herman Slater, author and owner of Magickal Childe.

  Steve Reich’s album of sacred music, Tehillim. I bought this by mistake while recording with Lenny Kaye in New York in 1982. I was browsing in a record store on Times Square when I found an album in a dark blue patterned cover with the strange title Tehillim. The artist’s name was Steve Reich, which I mistook for Peter Reich, whose memoir A Book Of Dreams had been the inspiration for a Patti Smith song. Thinking I was buying an album with some esoteric Patti connection, I shelled out my bucks. When I got back to London and read the sleeve notes, I discovered my error. Steve Reich was a New York ‘minimalist’ composer, whatever that was, with no connection to Patti Smith. I stuck the record on and heard a teeming rhythmic flow of bells, hand drums and fiddles overlaid with exquisite female voices chanting Hebraic words in complex yet organic patterns. It was like listening to blood vessels coursing through the body, or the ministrations of angels transformed into music. I was spellbound and quickly tracked down Reich’s other records. From these, particularly Variations For Winds, Strings And Keyboards and Music For 18 Musicians, I learned arrangement techniques and tricks which I deployed in Waterboys music. They included sudden offbeat chordal bursts or ‘pops’ (on �
�Don’t Bang The Drum’ and ‘This Is The Sea’); long brass harmonies sustaining across chord changes (‘This Is The Sea’); instrumental motifs played without emotion but having emotional impact because of their placing and context (‘The Whole Of The Moon’, ‘Trumpets’, ‘Beverly Penn’, ‘The Pan Within’); recurring melodies played in different time signature to the main rhythm therefore constantly changing in relation to it (‘The Return Of Jimi Hendrix’); and groups of tambourines emphasising multiple beats in the bar (‘This Is The Sea’). The overall sound and atmosphere of Reich’s work loosely influenced other Waterboys tracks such as ‘A Pagan Place’, ‘The Stolen Child’, ‘High Far Soon’, ‘Spirit’ and ‘We Will Not Be Lovers’.

  Anthony Thistlethwaite, who’d turn up in his car and whisk me off. Anthony had a Keith Richards bootleg perpetually on his car stereo. Wherever we drove we were accompanied by Keith’s doleful tones croaking out ‘Let’s Go Steady’ and ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’. When I walk down certain streets in West London today I immediately hear Keith’s cracked dulcets in my head, crooning, ‘Birds fly over the rainbow … why oh why can’t I?’

  Many of the sounds that would define This Is The Sea had their sonic dress rehearsal at Seaview. These sketches can be heard on CD2 of the remastered edition of This Is The Sea (EMI Records, 2004).

  I had a shimmering wall of music. Variations of this sound can be heard on the following: ‘December’, ‘The Three Day Man’, ‘Savage Earth Heart’ (The Waterboys, released 1983, recorded 1981–82), ‘Where Are You Now When I Need You’ (The Waterboys, remastered version 2002, recorded 1982), ‘Church Not Made With Hands’, ‘Rags’, ‘The Big Music’, ‘A Pagan Place’ (A Pagan Place, 1984, recorded 1983), ‘Don’t Bang The Drum’, ‘The Pan Within’, ‘This Is The Sea’ (This Is The Sea, 1985), ‘The New Life’ (Dream Harder, 1993), ‘The Hosting Of The Shee’, ‘News For The Delphic Oracle’ and ‘White Birds’ (An Appointment With Mr Yeats, 2011).

  When Kevin Wilkinson’s epic drums and Anthony Thistlethwaite’s sax were subsequently added, the musical picture became huge. Best heard on ‘Red Army Blues’ (A Pagan Place, 1984, recorded 1982).

  John Brand. John later discovered and managed the band Stereophonics.

  Chris Whitten. A doleful skin-basher with bog-brush haircut who later played with Dire Straits and Paul McCartney. Chris’s finest moment with The Waterboys is his drum performance on ‘The Whole Of The Moon’, overdubbed in place of the original drum loop after everything else was recorded. But my defining memory of him is of us recording a fast Stax-style R&B version of ‘This Is The Sea’. We were closing in on the perfect performance, every musical element coming into focus and victory in sight, when Whitten broke the spell to say, ‘This is my two-take warning’, meaning he’d had enough and would play the song only two times more, and if we hadn’t got it right by then, tough luck!

  A carnival of trumpets. Played by Roddy Lorimer, the Glaswegian trumpeter whose solos and horn work were a hallmark of the early Waterboys sound. Roddy was introduced to me by Anthony Thistlethwaite in 1983 and he features on the first five Waterboys albums, as well as Still Burning (1997) and Book Of Lightning (2007). For the solo on ‘The Whole Of The Moon’ I asked him to do for the song what the piccolo trumpet did for The Beatles’ ‘Penny Lane’, though without copying its melody, and to enter ‘like a bolt of sunlight streaming through a gap in the clouds’. Roddy began drafting a score and within an hour had recorded a four-part solo, in a cleverly structured series of heraldic fanfares, which did the job beautifully.

  Candy-flavoured ‘la-la’ backing vocals. Sung by Liz Wilcox, an Australian friend of Anthony Thistlethwaite’s. At the time of ‘The Whole Of The Moon’ she was calling herself Max Edie.

  Chapter 6: Don’t Forget To Get On The Bus

  My record company bosses, Nigel and Chris. As well as partnering Nigel Grainge at Ensign Records, Chris Hill was and still is a top British soul and funk DJ. The third member of the Ensign team was Doreen Loader, who ran the company business. Doreen was the background hero of The Waterboys’ first incarnation and handled our day-to-day affairs for many years. She remained a good friend after I left Ensign.

  The Fellow Who Fiddles. Steve’s pre-Waterboys activities, other than playing with In Tua Nua and Sinead O’Connor, included playing fiddle on U2’s ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ and guesting with them on a 1982 Irish tour.

  He’d met Steve when In Tua Nua had played support to him in Ireland a year earlier. Slane Castle, July 1984. Steve guested on Bob’s encore, playing fiddle on ‘Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat’.

  Top Of The Pops. A weekly BBC show that ran from 1964 until 2006. It’s often said that I refused to appear on Top Of The Pops with ‘The Whole Of The Moon’. I’d loved watching Top Of The Pops in the sixties and early seventies, but by the eighties the show had degenerated into a garish celebration of everything I liked least about pop, and was a filter through which I felt it was impossible to convey authentic energies of rock’n’roll, power, inspiration, or even an attitude. An appearance on Top Of The Pops could increase a band’s audience but at the cost of being tamed, and I agreed with The Clash, who throughout their lifespan refused to appear on the show. I even discussed it with Joe Strummer after a Clash show in Edinburgh in 1980, during my Another Pretty Face days. We exchanged baleful views on the programme, and though my band hadn’t yet had a sniff of a hit I zealously told Joe, ‘We won’t do Top Of The Pops either!’ ‘That makes two of us,’ he replied, sealing the deal. Five years later, when ‘The Whole Of The Moon’ reached the charts, the offer came for The Waterboys to do Top Of The Pops, thus testing both my conviction and my fealty to Chairman Joe. But we were playing Boston on the night of the TV filming, midway through an American tour, and I chose not to cancel the gig and fly back and forth across the Atlantic. If we’d been in the UK I might have conquered my resistance and done it; no one will ever know. When ‘The Whole Of The Moon’ was a hit in 1991, Top Of The Pops broadcast the promo video. My attitude had softened by 1993 when The Waterboys finally appeared on the show with ‘Glastonbury Song’.

  A young piano player, Guy Chambers. Now a successful songwriter, best known for his work as writer/producer with Robbie Williams.

  I wrote to Gary Kurfirst and split with him. I’d signed a three-year contract with Gary and after our split the spectre of some form of legal action hung over me for several years, adding an extra frisson of stress to the making of Fisherman’s Blues: what would happen if the album came out while the contract was still in force? An injunction, lawsuit or other drawn-out battle seemed likely, and perhaps it was fortuitous that the music slowed me down. When the album appeared some months after the contract expired, Gary took no action. In fact, he never charged me for the nine months in 1985 when he actively managed me, for which I’m grateful. In 1991 we bumped into each other at Los Angeles airport, a cordial reunion. Gary died in 2009.

  Chapter 7: You Guys Are The Whizz!

  B.P. Fallon … seems to have been present, Zelig-like, at every significant moment in rock since 1965. Including both of John Lennon’s 1970 Top Of The Pops performances of ‘Instant Karma’, and The Rolling Stones 1969 Hyde Park concert, which he watched from a lighting scaffold above the stage. Showing me a picture of the gig twenty years later, B.P. pointed to a pair of legs at the top of the frame, the rest of their owner cut out of the shot, and said, ‘Those are my legs, man.’

  A bustling dining hall with a vaulted ceiling and fantastical stained glass windows. The windows in Bewleys Cafe, Dublin, were created by Harry Clarke (1889–1931).

  I’d got to know Paul McGuinness when The Waterboys had supported U2 on some shows. Twenty dates in the UK and North America in November and December 1984.

  Nothing we could put on a record. Three Keltner/Patitucci tracks have since been released. I returned to the tapes in 2001 and 2005, edited three extended workouts to song length and filled in the missing lead vocals. They are: ‘Blues For Your Baby’ and ‘Lonesome Old Wind�
� (Too Close To Heaven, BMG 2001/Fisherman’s Blues Part Two, Razor & Tie, 2002) and ‘Soon As I Get Home’ (CD2 of Fisherman’s Blues remaster, EMI 2006).

  Chapter 8: The Power Of The Music Gives Everybody Wings

  We Free Kings. Named after a 1961 Roland Kirk album, and also the ‘Wee Frees’, the nickname of the Scottish Free Church. Joe Kingman’s band played round Britain and Ireland from 1985 to 1991. They released one album, Hell On Earth And Rosy-Cross (1988).

  A crowd of several hundred had converged on the docks, including every busker in Dublin. Among their number was a teenage Glen Hansard, later of The Frames and The Swell Season.

  A Yosser Hughes moustache. A character in the early-eighties British TV series Boys From The Blackstuff, Yosser was a doomed Liverpudlian hard-man who entered national folklore.

  Letham Village Hall was a lonesome-looking redbrick building on a hill overlooking a tiny hamlet. Five months before The Waterboys’ appearance at The Pictish Festival, Letham Village Hall hosted Scottish accordionist Jimmy Shand’s televised 1986 Christmas Eve Party.

  The Cibeal. Pronounced ‘Ki-bal’. Loosely translated it means ‘hubbub’.

  Chapter 9: Go Slowly And You Might See Something

  Many of the tunes I’d been hearing in Dublin, I realised, were Scottish. The majority of the trad melodies that pepper the Fisherman’s Blues and Room To Roam albums are Scottish. To compound the cultural cross-fertilisation, most of these were introduced to the proceedings by our Irish members, Steve Wickham and Sharon Shannon. We didn’t care where the tunes came from; we played what we liked, and anyone who says The Waterboys somehow appropriated ‘Irish’ music is talking through their hat.

  In the bloom of their youth on the Isle of Mull. Mull is one of the Scottish Hebridean Islands.

  The Joshua Tree, on which I heard the spiritual seeker vision and big music of the last two Waterboys album re-calibrated. Orthodox rock history doesn’t acknowledge any Waterboys influence on either U2 or their album The Joshua Tree. Even broaching the subject of a Waterboys influence on U2 is to risk appearing churlish because convention considers it unseemly for one artist to claim influence over another, and not without reason. But the evidence of my ears tells me Bono and The Edge were paying rapt attention when we supported them on tour and when they listened to A Pagan Place and This Is The Sea.