Adventures of a Waterboy (13 page)

The concert had been going all day and was running hopelessly late. We Free Kings were on before us and when their fiddler didn’t turn up, Wickham stepped into the breach and played their whole set. The Waterboys finally took the stage shortly before one in the morning and the atmosphere was dense; thick with drunkenness and excitement, a wild tartan bacchanalia. We poured our music into this atmosphere, playing till almost 4am. We closed with ‘A Pagan Place’ and during its extended outro, with Roddy Lorimer’s trumpet soaring and Vinnie’s pipes wailing, several members of other bands on stage with us, and a freight-train mother groove roaring around our heads, a critical mass of musical wildness was achieved. With a sudden ‘Pop!’ I felt us come into alignment with a down-flow of power, some bright shard of the Celtic soul, wild and ecstatic, that flowed through us and into the audience like a rite.

When we stumbled outside for air, dawn was softening the sky and the birds were singing. I stood, ears ringing, feeling the breeze on my skin. Something had just happened, some piece of the new Waterboys vision had slotted into place and it had to do with the Celtic. I
was
Celtic, and so were most of my band. But it was something I’d never consciously thought about before. What did it mean to be Celtic? I would find out soon enough, in a new and magical landscape that was about to open up before me: the West of Ireland.
The West of Ireland
means Ireland’s great Atlantic seaboard: from County Donegal in the north, southwards through Sligo, Mayo, Galway, Clare and Kerry to the western parts of County Cork. I’d been there a few times: a childhood holiday in Sligo, a couple of concerts in Galway and some brief trips with The Fellow Who Fiddles or my girlfriend Irene. But it was during a trip to County Kerry a week after the Pictish Festival that I began to comprehend what was special about the west.

B.P. Fallon had been raving about an upcoming festival called the Cibeal, held in Kenmare, close to the Cork and Kerry border. It sounded magical indeed; a little market town taken over for the weekend by music and high spirits, with festivities in the street and an influx of trad players, gypsies and rock bands. ‘It’ll be shaking, man!’ said B.P. in his hushed, intense voice. Anto and I decided to go down with him.

The drive from Dublin was a hundred and eighty miles southwest across Ireland, and when we came into County Kerry the fields and low hills of the midlands gave way to sharp noble mountains and blue lakes, a landscape of the gods. Kenmare was in a lush valley, resplendent in late spring abundance, and as we drove through the toy-like streets of brightly coloured houses to the town square all my expectations were realised. It was like a frontier town in the Wild West or an olden gypsy fair. Covered stalls and marquees occupied the pavements while festive strings of bunting hung from one side of the town’s broad main street to the other. The pubs spilled clouds of revellers onto the sidewalk and convivial music, a bright mosaic of whistles and fiddles, flavoured the air. Dark-eyed black-bearded men and thin lawless women who looked like they’d come down from the mountains hung out in every doorway, smoking, drinking and dancing. A long flat truck with a stage set up on it stood ready for action on the square. High trees and church spires shaded the scene while a backdrop of mountains brooded in the distance. It was like stumbling on a hedonistic Shangri-La. I wanted to be in every part of it at once.

There were concerts and events all round town, in school halls, hotels, even churches, and B.P. quickly vanished in pursuit of some scene or other. Anto and I rambled around the town square and somebody told us that a band we knew, a Dublin country-rock combo called the Fleadh Cowboys, were playing right now in a hotel on the outskirts of town. I had my guitar and Anto had his sax, so as we walked to the gig through the cheerful streets we started playing. A small crowd gathered round us and we made our procession through town. Finding myself in the role of pied piper, I made a medley of songs last for the twenty minutes of our march while the Human Saxophone blew loud solos that reverberated off the stone fronts of the houses. Finally we came to the edge of town where the stately pile of the Park Hotel stood amid trees and meadows. There we found the Fleadh Cowboys hanging around, smoking and talking on a patio outside the ballroom, their performance just finished. The Cowboys were led by two Stetson-wearing Dublin characters: Pete Cummins (tall, rangy, always looked like he’d just climbed down off a horse, nasal singing style) and Frank Lane (charismatic, testy, with a Hank Williams fixation and a helium voice). We’d guested with them a few times before and they invited us to form a one-off band to play that evening on the truck I’d noticed in the town square. Bingo! We’d scored ourselves a gig in paradise.

Down at the square an hour or so later word had spread and a rowdy audience was gathered. We climbed onto the truck and soundchecked in twenty seconds flat. B.P. Fallon appeared bang on cue with The Pogues’ accordion player, James Fearnley, who was quickly hauled up to join us. We struck up a boxcar-train groove and lit into a set of country songs, all rattling Tennessee Three drums and slide guitar licks punctuated by Anto’s rasping sax breaks, while I traded lead vocals with the two Stetsoned Cowboys. Between numbers I heard the unmistakeable sound of someone shouting for ‘Red Army Bluuuuuues’. This plaintive holler, a plea for the least-played, most-requested Waterboys song, our own personal ‘Freeeeeebiiiiiird’, had followed us on tour from L.A. to Tel Aviv and someone was even shouting for it in this mad Irish mountain fastness. Halfway through the gig I noticed Liam Ó Maonlai, the young singer from The Hothouse Flowers, in the crowd. I loved his bluesy swagger and deep voice, and with his floppy fringe and piano antics he was like an Irish Jerry Lee Lewis. I reached down and pulled him up from the crowd and asked if he’d sing a song I’d heard him do a couple of times. He agreed, I gave the band a signal, and we smashed into Iggy Pop’s mighty ‘Cock In My Pocket’, with its all-time great lyric, ‘I’ve got my cock in my pocket and I’m rootin’ down the old highway!’

‘Rootin’
… I loved that! It conjured up an image of Iggy or Liam slouching down the road, fist in the air, on the scout for mischief, sex and trouble, and it was a perfect punk rock note to sound on a truck in Kenmare to an audience of wild Kerrymen and lawless women. Except for one thing: the Fleadh Cowboys couldn’t play punk rock, so our rendition of ‘Cock’ was closer to an Allman Brothers’ Southern-fried boogie than the metal mayhem of The Stooges. His song well sung, Liam jumped back into the audience, and a few numbers later we finished our set. We wrestled our way through the crowd, crossed the square and ate a quick meal in a teeming bar. And there was no time to waste, for the musical worlds weren’t done colliding yet.

My girlfriend Irene, who’d come with us, wanted to take me to the late-night show at the Park Hotel to see a hot trad music supergroup called Patrick Street. Their accordion player Jackie Daly was local and as dusk descended on the festive town a heavily accented male voice crackled through the tannoy speakers that hung from every lamppost, cajoling all and sundry to ‘coom and hear Jackie Daly an’ his friends oop at the Perk’.

Oop at the Perk the atmosphere was electric and the grand ballroom was packed. I’d heard a lot of trad music on tape and record and I’d gamely played along with The Fellow Who Fiddles when he cracked into jigs at rehearsals, but I’d never seen trad played live by master musicians or heard it amplified through a PA system. A revelation was in store.

Patrick Street looked like the archetype of a folk band: beards, waistcoats, brown tweed jackets and flared jeans, fiddle, accordion, bouzouki, guitar. And when they started playing their nimble jigs and reels it sounded pretty much like all the other traditional Irish music I’d heard, sweet on the ear but likely to leave me as it found me. Then I looked at Irene: standing beside me on the ballroom floor, she was rapt. I watched her and began to see she wasn’t listening so much to the tunes, the melodies. She was connected to the
energy
of the music, its rhythm and spirit. And as I observed my lovely Irish girlfriend responding to the sound, whooping spontaneously at a moment of emphasis, swaying like a willow in the wind as the tune picked up rhythm, lifting her arms high over her head in joy when the music revved up a gear, I began to understand and to feel the energy myself. At one point she turned to me with a quizzical look as if to say, ‘
now
do you see?’ And by God, I did. I looked at the crowd and they were all plugged into the music like Irene, receiving its pulse and force in the same way as a rock audience, except this transmission was on a different, finer wavelength. And it had balls
–
amped up loud through a sound system, trad music packed a serious visceral punch.

After the concert we hooked up with Anto, B.P. and Liam and played music in someone’s hotel suite, making up strange songs that were sung once and never heard of again. In the small hours of the morning Irene and I drove twenty miles over the mountains to Killarney where we’d booked a room. As we journeyed the empty road in sweet silence, the events of the day buzzed in my memory and the sounds of trad music echoed ecstatically in my mind. And all around us a mighty Celtic dawn was breaking. The clouds and the high faces of the mountains were burnt scarlet by the rising sun and the landscape on either side of the narrow road looked prehistoric and wild. Nothing would be the same again: I had left one world and entered another.

Chapter 9: Go Slowly And You Might See Something

It’s a blustery day at sea and the fishing boat rocks as we cross the choppy waters of Galway Bay. Anto and I are strumming mandolins on deck, sending up peals of bright music that evaporate like sea spray in the March air while the dreaming hulks of the Aran Islands recede behind us and seagulls chase the boat making their wild cries. The Human Saxophone and I are a long way from anywhere, not just geographically but mentally and spiritually. We have become walkers between the worlds, two of Rimbaud’s ‘horrible workers’ of the future. We have breached the veils of an ancient realm and now, returning, bring with us news and visions.

But for all that, I need a piss. So I lay down the mando, its strings still vibrating, and step down into the shaded hold of the boat. There I find a rough little cubicle with a swinging, creaking door and a toilet. I step in and make my peace with nature. As I’m heading back up the steps to the sunlit world, I notice an old wood-framed mirror on my left. Casually I look into it and to my amazement see a creature who is not me. The god Pan is looking back. How do I know? No one’s ever seen a photo of Pan, but the inscrutable goat-like face in the mirror is unmistakeable, a face I’ve known forever. And yet it’s my face too, Pan and myself sharing skin and bone. By what alchemy is this happening? I look into the reflected eyes and with a slow thrill realise (though it will take me years to frame this realisation in words) that Pan is an archetypal power deep inside all human beings, and my experiences in the primeval atmosphere of Aran have called forth this power in me and laid its mark on my face. I stand gazing at the mirror contemplating this mystery, my ears filled with the roar of the ship’s engines and the crying of the gulls.

Snapping back to the here and now I feel the boat turning as it comes within the lee of the Connemara coast, and Pan or man, or both, I climb back on deck, stand beside Anto, and turn my eyes to the fast approaching land.

Back in the summer of 1986, around the time I was playing the Hank Williams piano in Bob Johnston’s house, my old mentor Nigel Grainge sold Ensign Records and The Waterboys’ contract with it. But the decision who to sell to was made by me. Chris Blackwell, the owner of Island, who licensed and released Ensign’s output, phoned to tell me Nigel was on the cusp of selling Ensign to Virgin Records. Blackwell explained, however, that neither Virgin nor the other company bidding for the deal, Chrysalis, would buy Ensign if they couldn’t also secure the rights to the first three Waterboys albums, which Island controlled. Consequently Blackwell was positioned to decide the outcome of the deal by his choice of which company to sell the three albums to.

‘So,’ he asked me, ‘do you want me to sell them to Virgin or Chrysalis?’

Blackwell was giving me the power to decide my own future, and I was damn grateful. I didn’t have to think long about the answer either. I remembered my liaison with Virgin seven years earlier and didn’t want to go back there – nor did it escape me that Nigel, doing a deal on the strength of The Waterboys’ then sky-high stock, hadn’t asked my opinion. I told Blackwell to sell the albums to Chrysalis.

Exactly as he’d forecast, Virgin dropped out and Chrysalis bought Ensign. And because Chrysalis knew they’d sealed the deal through my casting vote, I was in a strong position to have my lawyer John Kennedy renegotiate my contract. Kennedy was a whip-sharp English son of Irish parents. He looked like the sixties pop star Joe Brown, and played the legal side of the music business like a splendid principled game. He took to the negotiations, his first big job on my behalf, with lip-smacking relish, a hound to the hunt, and quickly convinced Chrysalis to flip my royalty rates dramatically upwards from the meagre cut I’d got when I signed as an unknown to Ensign, and to grant me the holy grail of artistic freedom, final approval over my records.

I went to meet the Chrysalis boss in London. Doug D’Arcy was an affable fellow with a sculpted beard and a Yorkshire accent, but he perplexed me. I was so used to Nigel trying to get me to do what he wanted, as if my own ideas about my music were an obstacle to be worked around, that I was confounded by Doug’s willingness to listen to me and let me do what I felt was right without my having to fight for it. Like a traumatised dog finding itself in a safe home for the first time, it was a couple of years before I started to trust Doug and use him as the shrewd counsellor he was. The first thing I told him was I didn’t want an A&R man interfering with my records. After delivering the goods with
This Is The Sea
I wanted to keep making albums my own way. Doug accepted this and amazingly didn’t even ask to listen to what we’d already recorded. Then he bankrolled our Bob Johnston recordings in San Francisco, and with nary a raised eyebrow backed me when the band spent several months in Windmill Lane through the winter and spring of 1987.

In fact we had enough killer music for an album from our Dublin sessions the previous year, only I couldn’t see it. I hadn’t yet learned that with spontaneous studio recordings it’s crucial to accept flaws. All the best records are full of mistakes, as any sixties Stones or Dylan album will attest, but I felt I had to re-record a song if there were slight tuning or timing problems, or when a drummer overplayed or my singing didn’t please me, even if the overall impact of the track was powerful and infectious.

And the variety of material was overwhelming. I had dozens of songs in almost as many genres and my usual focus and ability to make hard decisions were undone by the volume of music. As the stack of tracks grew the scope of possible album directions became dizzying and decisions went unmade until it grew harder and harder for me to hear my ‘instructions’ and locate the inner musical will that had steered me through
This Is The Sea
. Another factor was that we didn’t have a full time drummer, so we were forever trying out new guys or bringing back old ones. We outdid
Spinal Tap
: no less than fifteen tub-thumpers played on this one album. And because the sound and feel of a song changes dramatically with each drummer, and because some of our songs were recorded on three, four, or even five separate occasions with different dudes on the drum stool, the range of strikingly different yet usable versions of the songs expanded. How was I to choose between the Pete McKinney version of ‘Fisherman’s Blues’ with its lusty, crashing drums and the Noel Bridgeman version with its subtle groove, both of which I loved? Even as I vacillated the music kept evolving with new sounds and players entering our orbit, like Vinnie Kilduff and his Irish pipes. We fearlessly integrated these new elements with often thrilling results, but with the consequence that songs we’d cut a year, even six months previously now sounded like another group.

By the late summer of 1987, a year after the Chrysalis purchase, I felt like a madman trying to steer a runaway train. If ever I needed a strong hand on my shoulder and some artistic steering it was now, but as a consequence of my own choices no one was empowered to play that role. I was alone in my responsibility for the album, acutely aware that the eyes of the music world would be on its eventual release. Burned out, confounded and with over sixty tracks in various states of completion, I withdrew from the studio. I didn’t know whether I’d come back to the existing work after a break, or whether I’d scrap it all, re-gather my energies and quickly record an all-new record that captured the band at its latest stage of development. For out of the studio the changes in the music kept right on coming. The new folkier elements in our sound were integrated during shows in Dublin and Galway that autumn as trad music, which had begun to enchant me in Kenmare a few months before, now cast its whole spell.

I’d started hanging out with piper Vinnie who lived in the street next to mine in Ranelagh, on Dublin’s Southside. Vinnie was a dapper Brylcreemed fellow with a maroon waistcoat, a headful of craftiness and an insatiable appetite for hedonism – a cross between Brer Rabbit and Mr Toad from
The Wind In The Willows
. He would stand in the middle of his living room, its walls covered with Irish movie posters and dodgy pop pin-ups torn from the pages of
Smash Hits
, a straw-thin reefer dangling from his lips, while holding forth on the stylistic differences between tin whistle players in adjacent town-lands of County Mayo. An ever-voluble font of information on all things trad, Vinnie became my guide, initiating me into the mysteries of Irish music and bringing me to sessions; not recording sessions but pub sessions, the lifeblood of the trad scene, in which musicians sat round a table and played tunes – reels, jigs, hornpipes, polkas and slides – while the bustle of the pub went on around them. To enter a Dublin bar and find a gaggle of musicians firing off joyful, celebratory music is a delightful experience, as any lucky tourist will confirm. And to my ears it was heaven. Here was a wild, articulate music that expressed the soul of Ireland and evoked its landscape, played with power but without machismo, with mastery but without ego. How this appealed to me in my weary and confused condition! The charms of traditional music emerged from the mist as eternal verities to be envied and achieved, emanations from a world far removed from the manipulative, distorted ghetto of the rock business.

Soon this education was expanding my musical consciousness and changing the way I listened: trad tunes flew by so fast I had to sharpen my wits just to follow what was happening, and as I drew closer to the music I discovered sophistication at work – nuance, ornamentation, interplay, the personality of individual players, all of which my ears had to learn to grasp and my mind to process. And the instruments! Dusty bustling fiddles, sputtering banjos, melodeons and button accordions that sounded like trails of winking lights, the primal wail of the pipes, the thrum and plash of the bouzouki, the lonesome purity of the whistle and the warm quizzical burr of the flute all recast the musical colour scheme of my imagination and resonated with new possibilities, the promise of magic. In addition to Vinnie’s ministrations, our soundman John Dunford was turning me on with live recordings of the great Irish groups he’d worked with like Moving Hearts and De Dannan, and slipping me preconception-busting albums by The Bothy Band, full of elemental, Promethean music.

The Fellow Who Fiddles and bassist Trevor caught the bug too. Trevor taught himself bouzouki while Wickham got busy learning tunes from the trad player’s bible
O’Neill’s Music Of Ireland
, an inch-thick yellow tome containing a thousand manuscripted melodies with archaic titles like ‘The Fiddler’s Frolic’, ‘The Bashful Bachelor’ and ‘Banish Misfortune’. As 1987 marched to a close all influences conspired to bring The Waterboys ever deeper into traditional music and the older, wilder world it represented.

I spent that New Year in Scotland and bought some Scottish folk records while I was there. When I listened to them I recognised the music was the same as Irish, only a different vernacular: harder, more angular perhaps, and paradoxically more straight-laced and less free, but as like to it as brother and sister and flowing from the same Celtic wellspring. And many of the tunes I’d been hearing in Dublin, I realised, were Scottish. This was a revelation. As a teenage rock’n’roller I’d considered Scottish folk music a hinterland of kilted buffoonery. Now I heard it anew, and the music I was in love with was the music of my own ancestors. In the bloom of their youth on the Isle of Mull my great-grandparents themselves might well have shaken a leg to ‘The Fiddler’s Frolic’.

I flew back to Dublin in the grip of a dream, devouring Celtic albums on my Walkman at the rate of nine or ten a day, and having made the decision to go immediately to the west of Ireland, the cradle of Celtic culture. I wasn’t up for dabbling; I wanted to step fully into this older world, absorb it, become it and bring back what I found, however long it took. And despite the pressure of the unfinished album, I was relaxed about time. A Canadian band, The Cowboy Junkies, mining the same vein of country and American roots we’d been exploring for two years, had pipped us by releasing
The Trinity Sessions
. That horse had bolted. And with
The Joshua Tree
, on which I heard the spiritual seeker vision and big music of the last two Waterboys albums re-calibrated as towering arena rock, U2 had relieved us of the responsibility of making the follow-up to
This Is The Sea
. I was free to explore, and both the road less travelled and the way of fascination pointed towards the Celtic dreamtime.

And so on a cold, clear afternoon in early January 1988, John Dunford drove me to Ireland’s West Coast to look for a cottage I could rent for a few months. We arrived in Galway City at nightfall and checked into an old-fashioned seaside hotel where a wedding party was in full swing: a good omen. Dunford and I spent a week scouting County Galway to the North and Clare to the South, driving under vast ever-changing Atlantic skies through a land of lonesome harbours, wild hills and tiny coastal villages scented by the sweet, intoxicating smell of turf fires. And as we drove, John recounted to me the entire history of modern Irish music while the car stereo crackled to the sounds of Sweeney’s Men, Planxty and a hundred more. But as far as finding a house went we were out of luck. Cottages that looked enticing in brochures turned out to be behind petrol stations; others were in lonely depressing spots miles from anywhere; yet more were only available in season, from April to September.

On the seventh day we were in one of Galway’s music bars where a session was in progress, five or six players hunched round a drink-strewn table. I knew one of them, a bouzouki-plucking mate of Vinnie Kilduff’s called Brendan O’Regan who called me over to play. I sat down and banged away on my guitar, guessing the chords and stomping my feet. Then, gathering my breath between tunes, I fell into conversation with the musician on my left, a cheeky-faced fiddler. He knew I was ‘yer man from The Waterboys’ and asked me what I was doing in Galway.