Adventures of a Waterboy (15 page)

I wondered what he meant. The play of light on the land? Glimpses of the inner soul of Aran? Whatever, I took the advice to heart and found myself cycling at a gentle pace alongside Sean in companionable silence, all senses open, a light spring breeze on my face. Across Galway Bay I could see the mountains of Connemara gathered like a cluster of giant buffalos, red and brown in the afternoon sun with slow cloud shadows moving over their flanks. And as we left human familiarity behind and penetrated deeper into the stone landscape, it wove its spell around me, producing a detached, mesmerised mind-set.
Stoned
, indeed. We cycled for several miles until we reached to foot of a hill where we lay down our bikes and began a long climb. After fifteen minutes Dun Aengus loomed theatrically above us, a ruined prehistoric fort, dark against the sky, a hundred yards across with stone walls three times the height of a man. A tiny opening came visible in its side, with a window of blue sky showing cheerfully through, and we squeezed through this, coming into the central enclosure.

It was a sudden clear space; a roofless amphitheatre bounded on three sides by stone-age walls and on the fourth by a shockingly bare cliff edge and the vast panorama of the Atlantic. Far to our left the middle Aran Island, Inishmaan, rose out of the water like a dark snakehead and beyond it the coastline of Ireland tumbled endlessly southwards. I followed it with my eye until deep in the distance the thin faint line of the land faded into curling shapes of horned mountains like wisps of blue smoke on the horizon: the peaks and crests of County Kerry, last outpost of Europe, looking like a domain of magic, the lair of poetry and wizards. Anto and I had brought instruments, figuring that when we got to Dun Aengus we’d have a celebratory tune, but hundreds of feet above sea in a bracing Atlantic wind our hands were too cold to play. We would get music enough that night. Our imaginations satisfied, we descended the hill and cycled back across the island in gathering dusk. We ate greasy fish and chips by the light of the few Kilronan street lamps, then headed into one of the village pubs.

The American Bar was as bright and cosy as the land was barren. Locals sat round the walls and down the length of the bar, all with the same wind-blasted cheeks and sharp, bird-like eyes as Vinnie. A corner was set aside for us where Sean Watty and another local musician called Máirtín were waiting with accordion and banjo at the ready. We squeezed in under the unnerving gaze of the villagers as the pub held its collective breath. Word had spread that there were members of some kind of pop group in the island and by our next actions we would prove ourselves duds or kings. And what would we play? Sean and Máirtín were strictly trad musicians and Anto was a blues man, but we found common cause in an ad hoc repertoire comprising a battery of country hoedowns and robust Irish reels with warlike titles like ‘The Silver Spear’ and ‘The Sailor On The Rock’, over which Vinnie shouted chords while stomping his foot on the wooden floor. A slap of the banjo and we were off, with Sean and Máirtín playing like warrior strongmen; Sean ripping wild laughing torrents of music out of his accordion while Máirtín struck notes from his banjo like sparks from a flint. Within minutes we were surrounded by people cheering, shouting and talking unfeasibly fast in Irish.

Towards the end of the night a group of huge dark-eyed young men dressed in tweed waistcoats and flat caps burst through the pub doors. These were the boys from Bun Gowla, westernmost village of the island, a remote storm-battered cluster of cottages seven miles away, who’d heard there were pop musicians on the island and had come to have some sport with us. They brought with them an atmosphere of time unbroken, and as we blasted out the reels they launched into a storm of savage step-dancing, heavy booted feet clattering rhythmically on the floor, grunts, shouts and whoops bursting in the air like fireworks. I’d played on the stages of New York, London and Hollywood, I’d fought in the punk wars and rock’n’rolled from Glastonbury to Glasgow, but nothing had been as wild as this. I looked over at Anto, his strumming arm a blur as he bashed his mandolin. He caught my eye, an understanding passed between us and as the riot of high spirits raged all around we laughed with pure pleasure.

Thus initiated into the community we found next day that, like Vinnie before us, we’d been granted the freedom of Aran. Everywhere we went people smiled and said hello. We’d become part of the local colour, celebrities not because of our status as Waterboys but because we’d participated in an ancient social ritual: playing music for the people at the end of their day’s work.

On the morning of the day we left I made for the lonely southeast coast of the island, clambering over cracked stone under warm March sun across the great ridge of Aran until finally I came to the edge of the Atlantic. Huge balls of spray were exploding off the low cliffs, and the sound of the sea battering the island was a continuous roar. Far out on the fringes of the world I stood where the only powers were wind, stone and sea. Looking east my eyes fell on the snakehead of Inishmaan, dark and sullen in the ocean. All its houses were on the sheltered slopes of its northern ridge, facing inland towards Ireland, but on the bare southern side that swept recklessly to the Atlantic there were no buildings at all. Might Pan, the god of the earth and its wild places, I wondered romantically to myself, live on the back side of Inishmaan?

Pan! How much of my journeying, and even of rock’n’roll itself, was nothing more than a search for the spirit of Pan, for the combination of sacredness, wildness and freedom I mused on this for long sweet minutes while absently gazing into the onrushing waves, hearing them boom as they crashed full square into the cliffs below me. Then I turned my back to the wind, flipped up my collar, and made my way across the crackling stonescape, reaching Kilronan in time to say farewell to Vinnie and Sean Watty and catch a ride on a fishing boat back to the mainland with Anto.

Chapter 10: Mansion Of Music

Dunford steers the car through a crumbling stone arch then down a long slope with overgrown woodland on each side. At the bottom we cross a stone bridge and as I look down I see a white-flecked stream rushing underneath. The road rises again, veering left under the eaves of ancient oaks that grow so close they make a green tunnel speckled with jets and darts of flashing sunlight. Looking over Dunford’s shoulder, I catch my first glimpse of an enigmatic grey building through the branches. Suddenly we emerge into a sunlit driveway. Before us is an ivy-clad mansion facing a broad lawn. Beyond is a painting-like view of Galway Bay with the mysterious silver hills of Clare in the distance. It is a scene of high magic, private and reserved, as if we’ve stumbled on one of Ireland’s secrets.

We step out. As I turn towards the house its heavy wooden door opens and a woman appears, petite, dark haired, of a certain age as the French say, with a fidgeting Pekinese dog in her arms. Our guide Alec introduces her as Mavis and from her accent and bearing she is one of the old Irish landed gentry fallen on tough times. Traces of beauty linger in her handsome face and as I meet her gaze I look into the flinty eyes of a survivor. She ushers us into the house as the dog yaps angrily at Dunford. ‘Quiet, Ambrose!’ she scolds.

Inside is a dark corridor with a staircase on the right and a series of rooms on the left, facing lawn and bay, which we enter one by one. Each is a study in faded grandeur; ragged curtains, carpet-less floors and ancient furniture. Alec was right: Mavis could use the money. But the place is full of character and possibility. At the end of the corridor Mavis shows us a long sunlit dining room with chandeliers and wooden floor, large enough for the band. I clap my hands and hear a pleasing natural reverb, then imagine us set up and playing: Anto here, Steve there, drums in the bay window. Dunford and I look at each other and nod. Yes, this is our studio.

Back in Spiddal, with spring in the air and the last of my studio burnout blown away by the blustery winds of Aran, I was ready to go back to work and complete the album. But I was so at home in the west why not bring the band and crew, the whole shebang, and finish the record here? If we were all in this landscape, what music, what magic, might we make? I turned this outrageous thought round in my head for a few days, expelling doubts and conventional ideas one by one, until I recognised it was perfect. I called Dunford and we reprised our two-man travels, looking for a hall where we could set up a studio. We found several unsuitable venues (a damp hotel at Killary Harbour, a too-small country house in the Maamturk Mountains, a cold school hall near Screeb) until once again a meeting with a musician led us to our goal. We’d just returned to Spiddal after an expedition to deepest Connemara and were sitting in Hughes’s bar talking to Alec Finn, a curly-haired exiled Yorkshireman who played in the Galway trad band De Dannan. When we told him what we needed he said: ‘Why not use Spiddal House? It’s big enough.’ I’d never heard of this place, but Alec nipped out to the village phone box, made a quick call and arranged for us to see it straight away. It suited beyond our wildest hopes, and Dunford rented it from the owner Mrs Buckley – Mavis – for eight weeks on the condition that she move out. Then we sped back to Dublin to organise band and equipment.

We needed a drummer and Doug D’Arcy at Chrysalis suggested Patti Smith’s old skin-basher Jay Dee Daugherty, the chap who’d asked me who I was in her dressing room ten years before. When he arrived in Dublin and walked into our rehearsals Jay Dee didn’t remember me from 1978 and it was a long time since I’d listened to any Patti Smith records, but none of that mattered. From the first ear-blistering snare crack his drumming powered our music like a rocket blast.

Two days later we descended on Spiddal House. We commandeered three consecutive rooms overlooking the bay: a snug lounge with wood-panelled walls became the control room with the mixing desk; a large sitting room with French windows, striped walls and an antique piano was our den for hanging out and jamming in; and the dining room, as already decided, was the studio itself. Then we rented several holiday cottages to sleep in because we didn’t plan on going stir-crazy by living in Spiddal House as well as working there. Steve, Anto and Trevor were in a house halfway down the hill from mine, Jay Dee Daugherty was shacked up in a one-bed cabin across the boreen, with a turf fire and no phone, probably wondering what the hell he’d got himself into, while Dunford, Jimmy Hickey and our young recording engineer Pat McCarthy were in a bungalow a short walk from Spiddal House.

No band ever worked in more ideal circumstances. Each morning I’d step out my door with plans for the day’s music in my head, breathe in the sweet Atlantic air that tasted, as J.M. Synge would say, ‘like wine through the teeth’, cast my eyes over the awesome view, jump on my bike and swoop freewheeling down the long hill to the main road, then pedal a mile along the seafront, ocean breeze on my face. At the village crossroads I’d hang a right then turn left under the old stone arch, through the woods, across the bridge and finally walk in the door of our mansion of music to hear my bandmates already playing, drums and fiddles echoing through the hallway. As I sat strumming and singing in the studio this is what I saw: Jay Dee in a silver two-tone suit, clattering his drums in the bay window; Trevor Hutchinson standing by his double bass in the far corner, silhouetted against the sunlight; The Fellow Who Fiddles halfway down the room, swaying as he played, a microphone dangling over his fiddle to catch its sound; and Anto on my right, leaning over the keyboard of a Hammond organ like a cosmonaut steering a spacecraft, or crouched over his electric mandolin, absorbed in music.

And we meant business. Having learned from the previous year, I made sure these were disciplined sessions. There were no ten-songs-in-a-day blowouts. We focussed on one track at a time, finished it, then moved on to the next, keeping to a strict schedule: 1pm until 10pm in the evening. These measures restored order out of our creative chaos and in a few days we had our first song nailed. It was one I’d just written called ‘And A Bang On The Ear’, a nine-minute country-rock romp with six affectionate verses about my old girlfriends, each capped by a request to give the girl ‘a bang on the ear’, code for ‘say hello from me’.

Though I’d often make up joke songs in rehearsals, this lighter side had never percolated to the front line of Waterboys music and made it to a record. I didn’t exactly have a rock reputation for humour. But something had shifted since I’d come to Ireland and I’d learned how to take the mickey out of myself without undercutting the point of a song. Polishing off ‘Bang On The Ear’, with tragicomic lines such as ‘It started up in Fife, it ended up in tears’, was something of a breakthrough for me, and it felt good. So did the fact that we’d pulled off the gambit of setting up a studio in the frontier wilds of the West of Ireland. With our first master successfully recorded and sounding as slick as if it had been made in London or New York, everyone was thrilled.

We were still dizzy with this sense of achievement when drama struck. Dunford had hired a local Peter Lorre lookalike called Bandy Donovan as our cook and caretaker. At first the arrangement worked well. When the crew were setting up, Bandy was a flash of local colour, handsomely praised for his cooking and made to feel like one of the team. But when recording began, meals became a pit stop and no one had any spare attention to spend on Bandy. Which was a shame because he was gay, not an easy gig in rural Ireland. And being cooped up in the grandest house for miles with a gang of good-looking young men, some of them wearing leather trousers, none of them evincing any romantic interest in him whatsoever, became too much for Bandy’s sensitivities.

In the beginning this manifested in odd but harmless behaviour. First he gave us pottery mugs with our names inscribed on them, which we received with bemusement; then he morphed into a kind of loopy butler, emerging suddenly through the studio door holding aloft trays laden with glasses of sherry, a slightly creepy phrase on his lips such as ‘I thought you would appreciate some refreshment, boys.’ But we never drank alcohol while recording, let alone sherry, and our refusals, however diplomatically given, only increased Bandy’s sense of isolation. On the day he got his first week’s wages he compensated for his sorrows by downing some sherry himself, followed by several other libations and finally a dose of anti-depressant pills. Then he went and got a double-barrelled shotgun and marched on the house.

The first person he found was Jimmy Hickey. The World’s Greatest Roadie was in the kitchen dreaming of spark plugs and gaffer tape when his reverie was interrupted by an agitated Bandy brandishing a shotgun and shouting. ‘I’m going to kill you!’ Terrified, Jimmy backed himself out of the kitchen into the yard. Bandy followed him, firing a shot in the air. Realising there was no way out of the yard, Jimmy panicked and pushed past Bandy back into the house. He ran to the jamming room where John Dunford was on the floor fixing a broken tape recorder. John looked up to see a Jimmy bursting into the room followed by the gun-waving Bandy, eyes darting in his head, a stream of curses on his tongue. When Bandy spotted Dunford, the man who’d hired him in the first place and caused all his troubles, he forgot about Jimmy and advanced on the author of his misfortunes with gun pointed. But Jimmy, regaining his composure (and courage) crept up behind as if to grab Bandy. Hearing Jimmy’s movement, Bandy turned, averting his eyes long enough for Dunford to take his chance, grab the gun and smash its barrel on his knee. When he opened it and found live ammunition Dunford’s nerve snapped and he grabbed the luckless Bandy by the throat and dragged him out of the house.

All this time I’d been under headphones in the studio recording a cheery version of ‘Spring Comes To Spiddal’, oblivious to the unfolding drama. When the song finished I emerged to hear a fracas at the front steps. I ran to the door to find a shaken and very angry John Dunford yelling, ‘Just
fuck off
!’ at a squirming Bandy who, perhaps not quite grasping the import of what had just happened, was asking whether he should ‘go in and make the dinner now?’

As a reciprocal courtesy for recommending Spiddal House we invited Alec Finn to come and play, and on a Saturday afternoon he arrived with two fiddlers, his De Dannan colleague Frankie Gavin and my landlord Charlie Lennon, to record an ancient Irish air called ‘Carolan’s Welcome’. The track was completed quickly and, though no other song was planned, everyone wanted to keep playing. So I went upstairs to one of the house’s several ghostly bedrooms and restructured a song we’d done at Windmill Lane called ‘Killing My Heart’, giving it a mazy new folk tune and retitling it ‘When Ye Go Away’.

Downstairs I played it to the assembled musicians and an arrangement quickly came together, graced by Alec’s stream-like bouzouki and Anto’s bluesy mandolin. All we needed was a fiddle solo to finish the song but there were three fiddlers in Spiddal House that day, and which should perform it? Like men in a fable each took a shot. First Steve Wickham played a high dreamlike solo, full of sonic swoops and psychedelic murmurings. Then Frankie Gavin overdubbed a robust reel with cunning twists and ornamentations, topped off at song’s close, while the tape was still rolling, with a cocky ‘How’s
that
!’ But if these two, respectively Ireland’s most famous rock and trad fiddlers, were the hares in the fable, and it was the tortoise, landlord Charlie, whose part made it to the record. While Steve and Frankie were recording their flashy solos, Charlie had been in the garden composing a tune on his fiddle. He cut a strange figure, standing amid spring blossoms, scraps of apparently tuneless melody floating periodically from his bow, his mournful face and white hair crowned by an ill-fitting blue baseball cap, an unlikely accessory which provided some mirth to the onlooking band and crew. But when his turn came Charlie walked in, heedless of our scrutiny, and played a sublime tune called ‘The River Road Reel’, which sat on top of the track like a jockey on a horse and blew everyone away.

Not every song came together so smoothly. The Waterboys were masters of the great first take but a country waltz called ‘In Search Of A Rose’ took a prodigious ninety-nine, possibly the greatest number of attempts at any song by any band ever. The recordings absorbed four days, and we
still
didn’t get the right version. We tried it slow, fast, with and without drums, with a full band and with nothing but mandolin and fiddle. We even tried the Brian Eno gambit, explained to us by Pat McCarthy, who’d worked on
The Joshua Tree
, which Eno had co-produced. It worked like this: at the end of a day spent unsuccessfully trying to nail a song, instead of simply ‘trying it again tomorrow’, the band commits to doing five takes first thing next morning then moving on to something else, regardless of how the five takes turn out. According to Pat this method not only focused the musicians but paradoxically defused the pressure on them, usually resulting in the elusive master being among the five morning performances. But while it may have broken whatever creative blocks U2 experienced, even this didn’t work for poor old ‘Rose’, and the song was filed away to be re-recorded for some future album.

Everything else we attempted was successful, and a factor in this was the unseen extra member of the band, the sense of place. When Steve’s multi-tracked fiddles blasted out the solo on ‘When Will We Be Married’, he was mimicking the Atlantic winds that barrelled down the Connemara roads. When Anto struck shards and glints from his slide mandolin on ‘When Ye Go Away’, he was conjuring the play of light that bewitched the gardens of Spiddal House and the glittering bay beyond. In other ways too location added colour to the work. When we needed extra musicians we sent to Galway for them, like button accordion maestro Máirtín O’Connor, summoned to add flourishes to ‘Bang On The Ear’. Or they turned up unexpectedly, like the day Brendan O’Regan materialised at the control room window, waving his bouzouki, and was pressed immediately into service, leading Steve through countless exacting takes of the fiddle jig ‘Dunford’s Fancy’. And when we couldn’t get the groove right on ‘Jimmy Hickey’s Waltz’, Dunford nipped down to Hughes’s bar to enlist some dancers. He returned fifteen minutes later with a gaggle of villagers who quickly told us we were playing too slow for them to waltz properly. We sped up and within minutes the master take was nailed, complete with sounds of the dancers’ feet and the rustling of their clothes. Likewise, when we needed a party atmosphere for a track late one afternoon Dunford went to the village crossroads and invited a bunch of school kids to come up to the big house and help with the recording. A noisy crowd arrived and we stuck them in the studio, plied them with sweets and soft drinks, blew up balloons, handed round pins to stick in them, then taped the uproar that ensued.