Adventures of a Waterboy (20 page)

Barry may have blown the protocol in the after-hours session but he knocked spots off us in the studio. His insistence that we record using overdubs, and the light this process shone on what each musician played, had an unexpected effect: it exposed fault lines in our sound. When I heard the music stripped down I realised that beneath the orchestral impact of the full ensemble, so persuasive in concert, there was a lot of odd stuff going on. People were playing wrong melodies, harmonies were off and there were tuning issues between instruments. More worryingly, the grand experiment of merging rock and trad wasn’t working. Stretched between two cultures, the music was being compromised; songs that needed a tough, ballsy treatment, like ‘A Life Of Sundays’, were being played too soft. Others, like ‘Something That Is Gone’, which needed a spare minimalist setting, had too many elements; sometimes accordion, fiddle or flute, or all three, simply didn’t suit a composition. In my zeal to blend the worlds, I’d neglected the needs of the songs. This necessitated a hasty reorganising of the music, with the result that several songs featured smaller groups of players. Often it was Sharon, the most traditional musician, who had to sit out, but sometimes it was Blakey, Anto, or even The Fellow Who Fiddles, my fellow walker between musical worlds, the sonic glue around whom the whole cross-cultural experiment revolved.

Matters were compounded several weeks into the sessions when Anto, Trevor and John Dunford asked me to take over the production from Barry. The band felt Barry didn’t understand the Irish/Celtic side of the music and they wanted a more familiar hand at the tiller. So I spoke to Barry and he agreed to let me deal with the musicians one-on-one while he stepped back into the role of overseer. Roles duly shuffled we got on with the job and there were moments of inspiration, like when Blakey played a psychedelic fuzz flute solo at the climax of ‘A Life Of Sundays’. Or when we turned Anto’s sax solo on ‘Something That Is Gone’ backwards to discover a gorgeously weird sonic ballet that perfectly suited the mood of the song. But these were rear-guard victories in a lost war. As the album neared completion it was clear that my dream of merging trad and pop in a rootsy
Sgt Pepper
was busted.
Room To Roam
, as it was titled, was a mixed-up curio of a record: a musical kaleidoscope that had its charms but wasn’t quite in focus. And my beautiful seven-piece band was doomed. Whatever the long-term future of Waterboys music was, I knew it wasn’t this. Anto had been right: the winds had changed.

And more was broken. Steve Wickham had gone through a painful divorce and by the time we finished
Room To Roam
he’d gradually withdrawn into himself, becoming a shadow presence in the band. All his joy and mischief, his very
fellow-who-fiddles-ness
vanished. Even his trademark holey hat was gone, taken by the ex-wife. At first I tried to give Steve space to work out his emotions, then when he just grew more distant I tried to find out what was going on, but he was unresponsive and closed to me in a way he hadn’t been before. My friend, it seemed, was lost, and I couldn’t reach him.

We lost Doug D’Arcy too, our champion, when he was fired from Chrysalis. Then, towards the end of the recordings, former Waterboy Karl Wallinger, giving a series of press interviews for his new album, slagged me off for ‘hiding in Ireland for three years’ and cajoled me to ‘stop being an Irish git’. Perhaps he meant it lightly, or maybe there were deeper emotions at work, but his statements coincided with a wider perception in the music media that The Waterboys had taken a blind alley. Coming from someone who’d been in the band, Karl’s comments provided a focal point around which these perceptions coalesced and like the first shot of the hunting season, they proclaimed open fire on The Waterboys.
Room To Roam
was going to meet with a tough critical response, I knew, for it was all the things people were ready to pan us for: mellow, made in Ireland, Celtic and otherworldly. The aura of promise and momentum that had surrounded The Waterboys for five or six years was about to be shattered.

But fuck ’em all, we still had a tour to do, an album to serve up, and fifty sold-out concert halls waiting in the cities of Europe and North America. And I had other things on my mind: I was getting married to Irene. We’d set the date for 14 June and were spliced in a registrar’s office on Molesworth Street in Dublin, she in white beaded dress, me in a dark blue double-breasted suit, just purchased. Steve and Anto were the best men and as we left the building they raised their fiddle and mandolin at the door, making an arch for bride and groom to walk under as confetti rained down.

The reception was in a country house hotel in the foothills of the Wicklow Mountains and everyone made their way there in a convoy. The first thing Irene said to me as we got into our chauffeur-driven car was, ‘I think I’ll keep my maiden name,’ which wasn’t the best start. Anto compounded matters by slipping me a reefer through the window before we drove off, which I casually smoked all the way to Wicklow. Deliberately or not, Anto had made it about three times as strong as any reefer I’d ever had, and by the time we drove up to the grand hotel forty minutes later, I was as smoked as a kipper. The first person I met when we disembarked was my new brother-in-law Vinnie Flynn, a cheerful, no-nonsense County Dublin farmer who’d married Irene’s sister Mouse a year before. When I told him how stoned I felt he said, ‘Ah, don’t worry. It doesn’t matter how much you drink or smoke on your wedding day, you won’t be able to get out of it. You’ll be fine.’ This sage advice worked like a trick and my equilibrium returned. And it was true: no matter how much I drank on my wedding day I didn’t get drunk.

Late that night I was lying in the bridal bed, head crooked on my arm, Irene sleeping gently beside me, my mind ranging over the day’s colourful scenes, when I heard a creak. I looked up and saw the door handle turning. Slowly, silently, the door opened and a silhouette entered. Someone was in the bridal suite with us! The figure walked unsteadily across the room, looked about in the darkness, then turned, and I recognised the familiar silhouette of
a gnomic man with suit jacket and Brylcreemed pompadour: Vinnie Kilduff, not as sober as he’d ever been. Having missed his lift back to Dublin, Vinnie was looking for an empty room to crash in. But when he saw me looking up at him from the bed, instead of mouthing an embarrassed apology and swiftly scarpering, he leaned towards me, smiled cheerily, said, ‘Ah, howaya Mike?’, as if we’d just met on a country lane. Then ignoring the sleeping bride entirely he sat down on the side of the bed expecting a chat.

Irene and I went to Greece for our honeymoon, spending two weeks in Arcadia, a land of high mountains, ancient villages, warbling clarinet music and vast hazy views; a suitable place to ponder the imminent crucifixion of
Room To Roam
. Even if the album tanked, I figured, leaning on our balcony with the sound of goat bells floating across the hills, at least the band would be as good as ever in concert. And for the first time ever, I mused with some satisfaction, I had a settled line-up and the whole touring cycle booked well in advance. But if you want to give God a laugh, the saying goes, tell her your plans, and as soon as we returned to Dublin and began rehearsing, the process of disintegration that had begun in Spiddal recommenced. With alarming inevitability The Waterboys began to crumble from the inside. After two days of running through the set it was clear the band didn’t sound or feel right and Anto and I met privately to discuss the situation. We agreed we needed to replace Noel Bridgeman with a tougher drummer who could hold everything together.

Then I made a big mistake. Because of the cloud hanging over him I left Steve Wickham out of the decision, figuring, benignly but patronisingly, that it would be kinder to spare him participation in a ruthless action. Noel Bridgeman took the news well. But when I told Steve the next day, in a bar appropriately called the Waterloo, he didn’t. I watched him seem to fold in on himself, a storm passing over his brow. That night he turned up at my flat and told me he was leaving the band. He offered to stay for six weeks to help me out but as that only took us a short way through our tour, and I knew he needed to leave for the good of his soul, I said no thanks. I told him he could rejoin the band at any time but I wasn’t holding my breath. I got on with the task of reconfiguring The Waterboys and readying my nose for the critical bloodying it was about to receive.

We brought in a drummer from Louisiana called Ken Blevins who’d been spotted by Anto and Trevor playing with the songwriter John Hiatt. Blevins was a robust player and when we rehearsed with him it was immediately clear that without Wickham’s glue holding the rock and trad players together, Sharon and Colin’s instruments no longer fit. Having done the deed myself with Noel, I asked Anto and Trevor to tell the other two. Trevor told a relieved Sharon, who couldn’t see how were going to play the
Room To Roam
music live without Steve’s fiddle anyway. But the softhearted Human Saxophone couldn’t bring himself to tell Blakey, so I did, once again in the fateful Waterloo bar, and when the words were spoken I watched Colin finish his drink in haste, nod glumly and leave. I wouldn’t see him or hear his Pannish flute again for thirteen years. And so we hit the road as a four-piece rock band, me on electric guitar for the first time in an aeon and Anto scurrying across the stage changing instruments with every song, guitar to sax to mandolin to organ, plugging the gaps in our sound like the Dutch boy keeping back the sea with his fingers in the dyke.

To soften the transition Sharon guested with us for three warm-up shows on the eve of our European tour, all in the west of Ireland. At the last one, in the Connemara mountain town of Clifden, an English rock journalist turned up to interview us and after soundcheck his photographer asked if he could take a shot of the band on top of a nearby hill. Sharon was beside me and, still holding onto the last tatters of my old dream of the band, I asked her if she’d come and be in the picture. But if I wasn’t ready to let go, Sharon was; she shook her head and waved us on our way as the four of us bent our backs to the ascent and started walking out of the Celtic dreamtime back to the world.

Chapter 13: A Walk In The Lake Shrine

Los Angeles, April 1991. I’m walking down a sunlit path in the Lake Shrine, a meditation garden close to the Pacific Ocean end of Sunset Boulevard. I’ve just been for a meeting with a record label that wants to sign me, and my new manager Dick Lackaday and the label’s A&R man Benny Breeze, an odd-looking chap with a distressing resemblance to one of the psychiatric patients in
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
, are strolling a little way behind me, heads close in conversation. The Lake Shrine was founded by an Indian guru called Paramahansa Yogananda, one of several Eastern mystics whose images George Harrison snuck onto the cover montage of
Sgt Pepper.
Lush gardens and swaying tropical trees surround the lake, and a tall white arch stands regally on the bank, crowned with a golden lotus that glints in the sun. The busy highway is close by and its roar is audible yet within the grounds of the Shrine a tangible calm prevails.

I stop to watch some swans glide by as Dick and Benny catch me up. Benny puts his hand on my shoulder and says, ‘Aw man, the Lake Shrine! Did you know my old man used to give money to this place? He told me once if I ever had a problem to go and think it over at the Lake Shrine and I’d be sure to feel better about it, and you know, I often did.’ I’m impressed. A&R men aren’t usually hip to spiritual places like this and I think to myself what a good guy Benny is, and what a sympathetic person he might be to work with.

We walk on round the circumference of the lake, finally returning to Benny’s car. He drives us back along Sunset to our hotel and drops us off. We’ll see him again tomorrow for more discussion about whether The Waterboys will choose to sign to his label, and after what he said back in the Lake Shrine I’m feeling pretty good about it. But in the hotel lobby Dick Lackaday turns to me with a perplexed look on his face and says, ‘Just before Benny spoke to you about his old man, he asked me, “What the fuck is this place, Dick?” He made the whole thing up!’

Everything changed that autumn of 1990. The Celtic adventure was over, I was married, and with the release of
Room To Roam
my old Ensign/Chrysalis deal expired, leaving me free to sign to a new label and make a fresh start. Meanwhile the actors were leaving the drama one by one and the next to go was Jimmy Hickey, fired after a Swedish rock festival for turning into Captain Muck and terrorising the local record company man. Even John Dunford was bailing out, announcing his departure in the grim waiting room of a Scottish ferry terminal en route to the first show of our British tour. I persuaded John to stay till we found a replacement soundman but the knowledge that I was losing one of my closest collaborators, the wily counsellor who’d been an inestimable part of the whole Celtic trip, was a bitter blow indeed.

The tour started with seven shows in a circus tent round the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. This had been a dream of mine, an extension of the ‘colourful travelling explosion’ band vision. The shows were booked before the line-up imploded and I’d imagined our merry cavalcade rolling into towns, the big top going up on the town square and a country fair atmosphere, perfect for the performance of the pop-folk
Room To Roam
music. But without The Fellow Who Fiddles and Sharon Shannon to share it with, suddenly it didn’t seem like so much fun anymore. And it wasn’t. The weather was brutal, the tent was invariably erected on lonesome car parks or hilly fields on the outskirts of town (once even on a building site) and the atmosphere was more drunken school disco than country fair. The experience was poetically summed up by our onstage soundman, an abrasive New Yorker called Keith who’d just joined us from a Madonna tour. Standing side-stage on the Isle Of Skye, while large globs of Hebridean rainwater seeped through holes in the tent and dripped down his neck, Keith slammed his fist on the mixing desk and howled, ‘This is a
suck-fest
!’

Worst of all, the rump four-piece band could play hardly any of the new album. Without fiddle, box and flute, songs like ‘A Man Is In Love’ and ‘The Raggle Taggle Gypsy’ were impossible to do. So we came out of the traps playing a weird repertoire halfway between the past and the future; guitar-driven numbers from the first three Waterboys albums and barely finished new songs written since the split, plus a few covers like Dylan’s appropriate ‘Everything Is Broken’. All of which left the Scottish punters just about as bemused as the rock audiences had been when we’d first gone rootsy five years earlier. Only this time, instead of evolving, our sound and charisma had shrunk.

I kept telling myself things would get better, but the tour was like a game of snakes and ladders. From Aberdeen onwards we blessedly found ourselves in indoor venues: a ladder. A few days later the reviews for
Room To Roam
came out and were as damning as I’d expected: a snake. Roddy Lorimer’s brass section, The Kick Horns, joined the tour in Cardiff and suddenly we had a fuller sound: a ladder. But they could only do four shows: a snake. And so on. The final UK show was in another tent, a whopping great one holding 8,000 punters in a North London park. We’d had over 50,000 ticket applications for this show alone and if I hadn’t nixed the idea when it was put to me, we could have done multiple nights at Wembley Arena. But no, I had to do things the hard way, in another bloody tent, on a stage that, because the park wasn’t flat, sloped from one side to the other. As I looked over at the Human Saxophone mid-song, he was
downhill
.

The tour was scheduled to roll on through Europe and North America for another fifty shows without a break, but our reinforcements The Kick Horns had other commitments and couldn’t rejoin us till New York, thirty shows away. This was a killer. I’d made it through the British Isles but when I faced the prospect of the band shrinking back to a four-piece and looked at the endless list of cities, including those in several countries like Spain and Portugal where the audiences were wild for the Celtic music we could no longer play, I felt weariness paralyse my bones and brain. I couldn’t do it. I cancelled a dozen shows and gave everyone three weeks off.

I needed some serious chill-out time, and not in Dublin, so I rented a cottage a mile from Glastonbury. I rose every morning at dawn and walked through the orchards and fields to climb the mighty Tor. High above the world I drew the sweet West Country air into my lungs and took stock. Everything was broken all right, but I still had music in my head and words to sing, and each morning I came back down from the Tor a little stronger. I spent the rest of my days sleeping and reading, and when we hit the road, though the European and American tours were tough, my mantra of ‘it’ll never be as hard as this again’ kept coming true. By the time we came home to play Ireland at Christmas, Kick Horns and all, we were a powerful, lean machine.

Nevertheless, I missed The Fellow Who Fiddles on stage like an amputee misses an arm, and when the tour ended and I found myself back in Dublin again I missed him personally too. He was still in town, living in a little house near the Phoenix Park, but when I visited him he was distant and distracted. He was in some dark night of the soul, and until he came out the other side I couldn’t communicate with him. Without my co-conspirator, Dublin was a ghost town. Everywhere I looked were reminders of times that were over; theatres and ballrooms where we’d played famous shows, streets we’d walked down when the aura of magic was upon us and the pearl was ours for the taking; the scenes and empty stage sets of a golden era that was gone, baby, gone.

The Waterboys’ position in the topography of rock had changed too. It was six years since the sense of breakthrough that had surrounded
This Is The Sea
, when we’d had that most powerful of showbiz attributes,
newness
, and everyone had wanted in on the discovery. Now The Waterboys was a familiar name, if not yet an old one, and
Room To Roam
had cost us our hip quotient. If I was to bring the public on my next adventures I needed to recast the band, take the measure of the times, and make peace with the music business. And I was certain of two things: I wanted to play rock’n’roll again and I needed to do it somewhere other than Dublin.

Galway was out – too many memories there as well, and if I wanted to sharpen my rock chops my beloved west wasn’t exactly boogie central. I had to get out of Ireland, and I had non-musical reasons for leaving too. One hazy morning, when my first thought on waking was ‘where will I have my first pint of Guinness today?’, I knew I had to escape the drinking culture. Plus I had ideological problems with the Catholic Church and the sense of guilt that seemed to be strangling Steve. After five years of being immune I’d begun to feel the Catholic pressure
in the very air and atmosphere of the nation. It seemed two powers had Ireland’s manhood by the throat, and each was black with a white collar.

When our tour had rolled through America the previous November I’d felt New York calling me, and so I decided the world’s greatest rock’n’roll city, with all its musical, philosophical and social freedoms, would be The Waterboys’ next home. But there were a few things to sort out first. Since I’d split with Gary Kurfirst five years earlier, I’d effectively managed the band myself and I was burned out carrying its affairs on my shoulders. With new labels queuing up to sign me despite the disappointment of
Room To Roam
, I was in the ideal position to attract a manager. And right on cue one arrived.

Dick Lackaday was an Englishman living in New York, a charming if insipid-looking fellow who always wore a crew-neck jumper with the top of his shirt collar poking up underneath, as if his mum had dressed him. But there was a hint of steel under Dick’s Clark Kent exterior and when he pursued and wooed me towards the end of the
Room To Roam
tour, I took note of him as a real contender. When he followed me to Dublin in early 1991, full of persuasion and plans, I was won over and he was hired. As record companies usually do when contracts end, Chrysalis planned a
Best Of The Waterboys
album, and Dick’s first job was to negotiate with them to ensure I got to pick the track list myself. He succeeded, and I compiled the album: side one from the first three rockier albums, side two from the Irish years. A single was scheduled too, a re-release of ‘The Whole Of The Moon’.

While I’d been in the West of Ireland, ‘Moon’ had become a hit at Balearic clubs and English raves, where apparently it was blasted out to fields of blissed-up revellers as the sun was rising. And because the original 1985 single had been deleted for years there was huge demand for the reissue, which was expected to be a big hit. Its release date had just been set when I was invited to a music awards ceremony in a Dublin hotel. Towards the end of the evening an elegantly rumpled chap walked up to me and introduced himself as Rob Dickens of Warner Brothers. He told me one of his artists, the English soul singer Terry Reid, had just covered ‘The Whole Of The Moon’ and would be releasing it in a couple of months. ‘If you’d recorded it properly,’ he said, ‘you’d have had the hit, but now we’re going to have the success.’ I could have told Rob our own version was coming out in four weeks, but he’d only have moved his release date forwards. So I said nothing, and said it well, and that April when the Waterboys’ original version flew up the charts and took up residence in the top three, Rob was left chewing on his ‘recorded it properly’ chutzpah.

Like a character in a teen-rock fantasy, I was sitting by a swimming pool on a Caribbean island (an overdue holiday at Irene’s insistence) when I received the phone call telling me ‘The Whole Of The Moon’ was in the charts. Two weeks later
The Best Of The Waterboys
followed and was a big hit album. This belated success was a sweet feeling and lent a providential backdrop to negotiations for the new record deal; that spring John Kennedy, Dick Lackaday and I met with a parade of almost every major label boss in the UK, and several Americans too. And what a marvellous roll call of the grandees of the music business this was: legends, sharks, conmen, sharpshooters, cynics, eccentrics, and a few spectacular hot air balloonists in love with the sound of their own voices.

One such was Bob Krasnow, the chief of Elektra New York, who flew to Dublin and lectured me in his hotel room for an hour on how to run my career while I sat wondering whether to sign to him or pour a drink over his head. The lecture continued over dinner, peppered with mentions of how Bob had discovered this or that band and jibes about how I needed to articulate a long-term plan and sell myself as an artist. When he started to tell me I needed professional discipline I snapped and ranted back at him that I had plenty of professional discipline and a shit-load of unfinished business with rock’n’roll, and couldn’t describe my long-term plan because the music told me what to do and only gave me a little bit of the picture in advance at any one time. When I went to the men’s room Krasnow remarked to Dick Lackaday, ‘The cunt has seduced me.’ But Bob hadn’t seduced the cunt.

Then there was an English label manager called David Munns, who slouched on a hotel sofa and said, ‘It’s all a game, innit? Sign to me and as long as you don’t cost me money you can do what you want.’ I was too earnest to see the sense in this sagacious, practical philosophy, thinking it at the time absurdly cynical, and didn’t give Mr Munns another thought.

We met Clive Davis of Arista Records in a private airport lounge when he was flying one way across the Atlantic and we were going the other. I admired Clive, an old-school music man who’d signed Patti Smith at the dawn of her career and knew how to treat artists; part impresario, part talent-spotter, part CEO and part street-fighter. Though he was courteous, almost avuncular, there was a bare-knuckle boxer in every cell of Clive’s body. You wouldn’t want to be his enemy. Irene, sitting in on the meeting, didn’t get this. Bamboozled by the genial exterior, she came away cooing, ‘What a lovely old man!’