Adventures of a Waterboy

by Mike Scott

  Boreens. Irish country back roads.

  Bodhrán. Irish goatskin hand drum, pronounced ‘bow-rawn’.

  The Crock Of Gold. A novel by the Irish author James Stephens (1882–1950), published in 1912.

  The locals conversed in Irish. Also referred to in the text as Gaelic, this Celtic language is still spoken in regions of Ireland and on some of the Hebridean isles of Scotland.

  I’d … work … late into the night, often till dawn. Often, in fact, late enough to see the top of the Spiddal postman’s green minivan bobbing over the stone walls as it chugged along the country lanes delivering the morning mail. This vision had resonance for me because often, after staying up all night recording at Windmill Lane the previous year, I would wind down in the studio lounge watching early morning kids’ TV, which in those days featured Postman Pat, the top of whose green minivan bobbed over the stone walls as he chugged along the country lanes delivering the morning mail.

  Galway was a convivial city then as now, but in 1988 it had a slow, magical character. And a lawless streak typified by the Harbour Bar, a festering Fellini-esque dockside den with peeling flock wallpaper and sticky carpets where, due to some arcane by-law, the coastguard had jurisdiction instead of the police. This resulted in it being ‘legal’ to smoke reefers in the bar. It was demolished in the nineties.

  The Islandman. Irish title An t-Oileánach, first issued in 1929, currently published by Oxford Paperbacks. This is an Irish classic, a wonderful book describing the now-extinct life of the Blasket Islanders off the Kerry coast.

  Irish was the same language as the Scottish Gaelic my grandmother spoke, and I was separated from it by only two generations. The passage of the language down generations was broken when my grandmother’s family moved from Gaelic-speaking Mull to Glasgow in the early twentieth century. Her children, my mother and uncle, grew up speaking only English.

  Inishmore, largest of the Aran Islands. The three Aran Islands – Inisheer (‘eastern island’), Inishmaan (‘middle island’) and Inishmore (‘big island’) – can be reached by plane or ferry from Connemara or by boat from Doolin on the Clare coast. They are every bit as strange and rewardingly unique to visit as I’ve indicated in the text. Among the best books on Aran are Tim Robinson’s two volumes Stones Of Aran: Pilgrimage (Lilliput Press/Faber 1986) and Stones Of Aran: Labyrinth (Lilliput Press/Penguin 1995, both published in the USA by New York Review Books Classics). Also recommended: The Aran Islands by J.M. Synge (1907).

  Kilronan, a cluster of white buildings hunched on a hill round a little harbour. Kilronan has grown a lot since my first visit, with many new buildings, a new pier and much tourist development. When I returned in 2009 after a break of eighteen years such were the changes that I felt like a character in a movie who’s been catapulted a hundred years into the future.

  Vinnie was staying in a house a few yards away. Vinnie Kilduff was on Inishmore to record local Gaelic singers. Some of the recordings he made appeared twenty years later on a 2CD set called The Aran Lifeboat Collection (Aran Recordings, 2008).

  Sean Watty. His real surname was Flaherty, but Sean was known to everyone on the island as ‘Sean Watty’ because he played in Joe Watty’s Pub. Like most Irish box players, Sean played button accordion, not piano accordion. He died in Galway in the nineties.

  Sean Watty and another local musician called Máirtín were waiting with accordion and banjo at the ready. Pronounced ‘Mawr-cheen’. Twenty years later, Máirtín told me that on that first night at the American Bar he and Sean decided to play as fast and wild as they could, in order to show up the pop musicians, but that Anto and I ‘kept up with everything we threw at ye’.

  We’d become part of the local colour. But not quite acclimatised. On the day we were due to catch the plane back to Galway, Anto and I were having such a good time we decided to stay longer. From the one phone box in Kilronan I called the island’s airfield to cancel our tickets and book some new ones. But the chap on the other end of the line, an older man with a slow island voice, wasn’t best pleased. ‘If you bought a ticket you have to take the flight,’ he said, ‘you can’t be goin’ changin’ it.’ Maybe this was how they did things in Aran, but I was used to the mainstream world where if plans change you cancel or postpone a journey, and it’s nobody’s business but your own. I argued with the fellow and stuck fast to my position despite the waves of disapproval coming at me down the phone line. The conversation ended with me, royally cheesed off, telling him to forget it, that we’d take a boat instead. In a Kilronan pub that afternoon I told Anto about the phone call. When I’d finished the story, he said, ‘The guy who runs the airline is Colie Hernon. Is that who you spoke to?’ I wasn’t sure if it was, but I’d heard of Colie Hernon all right. He was the island’s equivalent to a mayor, the man who brought the airline to Aran, who’d organised the island’s first supply of electricity in the seventies, and who ran the lifeboat. The local Big Man. Still, I thought, that didn’t give him the right to give me a row for cancelling our flight tickets like I was a naughty schoolboy. With indignation I thumped my fist on the bar and said, ‘Well, I don’t care who he is, he doesn’t have the right to speak to me like that!’ A few moments later we got up to leave. As we stepped down from the bar, sitting a few feet behind us quietly reading a newspaper was Colie Hernon. He looked up at us with a hint of mirth in his eyes, said, ‘Hello there, lads,’ in a jaunty but unmistakably matter-closed way that was impossible to reply to, and returned to his paper.

  Chapter 10: Mansion Of Music

  Our young recording engineer Pat McCarthy. Now a successful record producer. Pat produced R.E.M. for ten years.

  Even this didn’t work for poor old ‘Rose’, and the song was filed away. ‘In Search Of A Rose’ was re-recorded for Room To Roam.

  Dunford nipped down to Hughes’s bar to enlist some dancers. He could only find five but by happy coincidence a young chap turned up at Spiddal House who’d met us when we played a benefit for the Irish Green Party six months before. His name was Trevor Sargent and he made up the third waltzing couple. Years later he became leader of the Irish Greens and a member of the Irish Parliament.

  For one song I wanted the sound of a distant faery band. This can be heard on ‘The Stolen Child’ from 2:35 to 2:52.

  Galway drummer Padraig Stevens. Pronounced ‘Paw-rig’.

  Stig Of The Dump. A British children’s book, written by Clive King, about a strange caveman boy called Stig (Puffin Books, 1965).

  Tomás Mac Eoin. Pronounced Taw-mosse (emphasis like finesse) M’Kyo-in.

  Sean-nós. Prounced ‘shan-noas’. Translates literally as ‘old style’ and refers to an unaccompanied, ornamented style of traditional Gaelic singing.

  Rockfield Studios on the Welsh/English border. I’d recorded at Rockfield before. In 1983 The Waterboys made half of A Pagan Place there, but my first visit was two years earlier with the last line-up of Another Pretty Face. We drove from London and arrived at the Rockfield farm at night. We couldn’t find the reception but saw some lights in a long barn-like building. We knocked on the door, someone shouted ‘Come in!’ and we pushed it open to find ourselves in a studio control room face to face with Robert Plant and his entourage. Robert looked us up and down and said, ‘Where are you guys from?’ Our sax player, a punk rocker called Gordon with a deep dislike of Led Zeppelin, stepped forward, put his hands on his hips, tilted his head slightly in a well-practised defiant pose and replied, ‘We’re fae Edinburgh.’ Robert said ‘Edinburgh? Oh, you must know Ray Thomas,’ whoever that was, as if Edinburgh were a village in which everyone knew everyone else. Gordon, motionless, said, ‘Whit gang was he in?’ Discomfited by this unexpected line of questioning, and trying to be the coolest person in the room, Robert sputtered, ‘Er … the Led Zeppelin gang, mate,’ with a little aggressive edge on the word ‘mate’. To which Gordon, nonchalantly delivering the coup de grace, replied, ‘Oh? That wis before our time.’ It wasn’t the last blow in the punk wars, but it was a good o
ne.

  Chapter 11: Sharon Has A Tune For Every Beat Of Her Heart

  Winkles Hotel. A legendary haunt of trad musicians in the West of Ireland, owned by Tony and Phil Moylan. Tony’s grandfather Bartholomew ‘Ballo’ Winkle bought the premises in 1913, and after his death in 1938 his daughter Tiffy ran Winkles for over forty years. Her husband Ciarán Moylan was a musician, and his friends, who included trad heavyweights of the day like box player Joe Cooley and fiddler Joe Leary, played sessions in Winkles, establishing its reputation as a music hotspot. From the fifties to the seventies, Irish broadcaster Ciarán Mac Mathuna recorded trad singers and players in Winkles, and during the sixties the bar was a playground of John Huston, Peter O’Toole and Richard Harris. Winkles experienced a late heyday in the eighties and ninenties when Sharon Shannon, Jackie Daly and Seamus Begley were regular performers. Decreasing business and ill health forced the Moylans to sell Winkles in 2003, and the building was demolished in 2007.

  The empty shop in Temple Bar where we rehearsed. 7 Crow Street, now the Crow Street Bazaar. This was only one of many places we rehearsed in Dublin. Others included the Top Hat Ballroom in Dun Laoghaire, the Revenue Club, the Royal Hotel in Howth, and professional studios the Warehouse and the Factory.

  By the second night, in Mallow, she was a veteran. The venue in Mallow was the Majestic Ballroom, a country dance hall with a legend that the devil had once appeared there. A well-dressed stranger, the tale went, turned up at a ceilidh and proceeded to dance with every unattached woman. During the last dance his partner dropped an earring, bent to pick it up and saw his cloven hooves. She screamed and he ran out, never to be seen again.

  A trad duo called Cooney & Begley. The same ‘Cooney’ Steve Wickham had told me about the day we first met.

  Cooney … played a battered old nylon string guitar like he was driving a tank. Steve Cooney revolutionised Irish music. Before Cooney, string accompanists (guitarists and bouzouki players) strummed along with jigs and reels providing depth and chordal colour but rarely any driving or eruptive power. Cooney changed that forever. He introduced backbeat and an entire vernacular of triplets, skirls, rallies, stop-starts and dizzying runs of impossible chords, which no one else has yet figured out how to do. His influence on Irish trad guitar is akin to Hendrix’s on rock: he raised the bar and the rest of the world is still catching up. Since Cooney, and in his image, guitar accompanists have driven Irish music with momentum and visceral energy, though none has yet matched Cooney’s genius.

  Handfaster. Person who performs a pagan or traditional non-church wedding.

  Mattie Mullen had a bottle of potcheen. Irish spelling: poitin, pronounced ‘poh-cheen’. A violently strong form of moonshine whiskey distilled from potatoes or barley. It’s now legal in Ireland and some companies manufacture a tame version somewhat less combustible than the ‘field’ variety. Once, during the prohibition days, Tomás Mac Eoin took me out in the middle of the night to buy a bottle from a rustic smallholder in Connemara. We knocked on the man’s door, Tomás and he exchanged a look, and the man promptly disappeared into the fields behind his house. Five minutes later he returned, in an advanced state of excitement and agitation, with a lemonade bottle filled with a coarse alcoholic brew so strong it almost had hair.

  A guest slot with The Saw Doctors. I befriended this band of Galway ragamuffins after their guitarist Leo Moran blagged a slot with Wickham and me at an impromptu gig one summer. We gave them their early break as support on the Fisherman’s Blues tour, and I produced their first single, ‘N17’. Years later I realised my song ‘And A Bang On The Ear’ was subconsciously influenced by their number ‘I Used To Love Her’, with its comedic mentions of an old girlfriend, which I remember them playing in local pubs around the time The Waterboys were working in Spiddal. The Waterboys team photograph on the inner sleeve of Room To Roam is from the day we played The Saw Doctors at football in the grounds of the Gaelic college at Spiddal. The score was 2–2.

  The name Dingle sounds cutesy. Dingle isn’t even the original Irish name of the place at all, but a clumsy medieval (probably Norman) phonetic translation of the local town An Daingean (pronounced An Dan-gan), which means ‘the fort’. The town is also known as An Daingean Uí Chúis (the fort of O’Cuis). The correct Irish name for the peninsula on which Dingle stands and Seamus Begley lives is Corca Dhuibhe (Corka-gwinney).

  The music he and Begley recorded that September … remains unheard. Cooney & Begley finally released an album titled Meitheal (Irish for ‘working together’) in 1993, credited to ‘Begley & Cooney’, though no one in Irish music ever refers to them with the names that way round. The album includes one live track from the pub session detailed in Chapter 11. Unfortunately Cooney & Begley weren’t ‘meitheal’ for much longer and fell out in the mid nineties. Begley now works with a variety of guitar players and has made two albums with Jim Murray (Ragairne, 2001 and Eirí Go Lá, 2009), and one (Disgrace Notes, 2011) with Tim Edey. Cooney is a perpetually in-demand accompanist in the Irish trad world and was married to Sinead O’Connor from 2010 to 2011.

  Chapter 12: Like A House Of Cards Collapsing

  In L.A. where we were joined by The Scottish Fiddlers Of Los Angeles. And also by several members of The Tannahill Weavers.

  In my zeal to blend the worlds, I’d neglected the needs of the songs. And overlooked the unique power of my two closest bandmates. After the split of the Room To Roam band I realised how the large ensemble had crowded Steve and Anto, denying them the space they needed to continue making their remarkable two-man-orchestra sound of 1985–88.

  Even his trademark holey hat was gone, taken by the ex-wife. A friend returned the holey hat to Steve in 2000, in time for him to wear it when he guested with The Waterboys at Dublin’s Olympia Theatre that December. After his first song the audience went mental and started chanting his name. Inspired by this reception Steve whipped the hat off and flung it, Frisbee-like, into the crowd, never to be seen again.

  But if I wasn’t ready to let go, Sharon was. A successful solo career awaited Sharon Shannon. She’s now recognised as one of the finest acoustic musicians in the world and is, as far as I know, the only accordion player to have achieved several number one albums and a number one single (‘The Galway Girl’) in Ireland. John Dunford has managed her since 1991.

  Chapter 13: A Walk In The Lake Shrine

  Seven shows in a circus tent round the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Our then-agent Denis Desmond presented band and crew with Waterboys denim jackets to commemorate this tour. At my request each had a row of coloured medal ribbons sewn above the left chest pocket, one for each tent show. We’d earned them.

  ‘Moon’ had become a hit at Balearic clubs and English raves. ‘The Whole Of The Moon’ was made popular on Ibiza by DJ Alfredo (Alfredo Fiorillo), Andrew Weatherall, Tony Wilson and Terry Farley.

  I received the phone call telling me ‘The Whole Of The Moon’ was in the charts. ‘The Whole Of The Moon’ also won the Ivor Novello award for Best Song, Musically And Lyrically, 1991.

  Did you hear what happened to Charlie Minor? He was shot dead by former girlfriend Suzette McClure. In 1998 Charlie’s dramatic demise was turned into a TV film with the tongue-twisting title Death In Malibu: The Murder Of Music Mogul Charlie Minor.

  A friend in Chicago called Jim Powers who offered to show me round the city’s blues clubs. On some of our explorations we were accompanied by Chicago resident and former Supertramp member Dougie Thomson.

  Chapter 14: Shutdown In The Big Apple

  A young L.A. producer called Brendan O’Brien. Later to work successfully with Bruce Springsteen, among many others.

  The closest I got was a trio of guys I played with on a musician-seeking trip to Texas: Bukka, Joey and Brad. Bukka Allen, Joey Shuffield and Brad Fordham.

  Chapter 15: The Philosophy Room

  I ask another assistant where the Philosophy Room is and she points to a small archway in the far corner. The room is on the top floor of Foyles ov
erlooking the corner of Charing Cross Road and Manette St, and is now a private staff area.

  Elgin Books. Sadly, this shop closed in 1999. Its owner, the lady who directed me to Foyle’s, was Mary Mackintosh. She died in 2003.

  I came upon a scarlet-covered volume of A Season In Hell and The Illuminations. Arthur Rimbaud: A Season In Hell / The Illuminations, translated by Enid Rhodes Peschel (Oxford University Press, 1973)

  ‘Lettre Du Voyant’. The ‘Lettre Du Voyant’ can be found in Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters, translated and with notes by Wallace Fowlie (University of Chicago Press, 1966), pages 305–11.

  A biography of him written by an Irish scholar. Arthur Rimbaud by Enid Starkie (Faber, 1961).

  A contemporary Frenchman called Eliphas Levi, author of something called The History Of Magic. Histoire De La Magie par Eliphas Levi (1860). English version: The History Of Magic, translated by A.E. Waite (Rider & Co, 1913). Levi’s real name was Alphonse Louis Constant.

  The dozen books I purchased at Foyles that day. I no longer remember what they all were, but they included The History Of Magic (Eliphas Levi, Rider & Co); The Esoteric Orders And Their Work, The Training & Work of An Initiate, Practical Occultism In Daily Life (all Dion Fortune, Aquarian Press); A Book Of Pagan Rituals (Herman Slater, Weiser Books); The Opening Of The Third Eye (Dr Douglas Baker, Thorsons) and The Secret Tradition In Arthurian Legend (Gareth Knight, Aquarian Press).

  More things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Hamlet, Shakespeare, Act 1, Scene 5.

  A transcendent, attainable reality to which all the world’s religions pointed: that all is one. A profound exploration of this, with references to countless spiritual texts, is Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy (Harper & Brothers, 1945). A shorter but excellent exposition can be found in Peter Russell’s The Awakening Earth (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), Chapter 8, ‘The Quest For Unity’.