Adventures of a Waterboy (25 page)

In transports of inspiration I went back to my B&B to collect my bags and bumped into Reg. ‘Come into the office with me, Mike, would you?’ he asked. Figuring it must be obvious to an old hand like Reg that I’d just had a serious spiritual experience I followed him, ready for something very meaningful to happen in the office. Perhaps Reg was going to welcome me to the inner group of super meditators or impart to me some final key of wisdom, a seal on the experience I’d just had. He lifted a slip of paper from the top of a cluttered desk and silently handed it to me. I looked. It was my bill for two nights’ bed and breakfast. This was a good reminder to keep my feet on the ground after spiritual experiences. Nevertheless, what had happened was immense. As I flew back to New York I felt I was returning from another civilisation. It was like when I’d gone to the West of Ireland, only that was an older world, and this was a new one. I wanted to explore this culture, to absorb it, become it, and receive whatever lessons and experiences it had to offer. And something else: what would happen if I could connect the machinery of my songs, lyrics and band to the flow of inspiration I’d felt in the Findhorn sanctuary?

Chapter 16: Some Kind Of Pop Star Living Up At Cluny

January 1994. Evening in the Northeast of Scotland. The waters of the Moray Firth are dark and restless. A harsh wind barrels down from the Arctic. A few lights glow in little hamlets and isolated cottages. Occasionally a car whizzes down a coastal road, its headlights making elliptical patterns in the night.

But from a long wooden building by the edge of a bay comes cheerful music. The Findhorn community is celebrating Burns Night with a ceilidh, and inside the community centre a veritable league of nations is gathered: boisterous German women, fine-boned Spanish men, visitors from Capetown, Rome and Buenos Aires, a troop of teenage American students, a muster of Antipodeans and even a few native Scots in kilts. Around the sides of the hall sit mothers with babies, middle-aged men out of puff, and a gaggle of wise-eyed old ladies. Supper was served an hour ago, the address to the haggis has been given, and a ragged eightsome reel is in full flow, ninety-six feet clumping on the wooden floor.

I’m watching this merry scene from my vantage point as guitarist in the ceilidh band. And man, we’re the weirdest ceilidh band ever: a bagpiper, a classical violinist, a bongo-playing Dutch girl … and me. Our music hurtles along with a kind of one-legged lope as the multitude parades in front of us. When the dance ends I strum a loud rally on the guitar, Margo’s bongos slip slightly out of time, and Rory’s pipes wrap up the tune with an ear-blistering squeal The next number is announced, ‘The Gay Gordons’, a Scottish country jig with a ho-ho rhythm. I turn to Rory and ask what the accompanying music will be. He replies, ‘The March’. Ah yes, ‘The March’, properly named ‘The Liberty Bell’, but most famous (though my three exotic bandmates don’t seem to be aware of this) as the theme music to
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
.

Rory squeezes his pipes, emitting another bloodcurdling wail, and launches haphazardly into the tune. And as I strum along, watching the dance, it strikes me that this has got to be the most surreal moment of my life. Three years after my last show I’m somewhere in rural Scotland playing the Monty Python theme with bongos and bagpipes, while forty or fifty cheery foreigners frolic back and forth doing The Gay Gordons.

When things collapsed with Geffen, Dick Lackaday and New York, my next move was clear. Set up camp in the powerful atmosphere of the Findhorn community. This was a leap into the unknown, not just for me but also for rock’n’roll: basing a band’s centre of operations in a spiritual mystery school had never been done before, as far as I knew. And in the late summer of 1993 I dragged my poor wife Irene to Scotland with the intention of convincing her to live in Findhorn.

When I’d returned from my first visit a year before, spectacularly inspired and excited, and having made a U-turn from my usual diet of chicken and chips to nothing but vegetarian food, Irene thought I’d been brainwashed, and decried the community’s philosophy as ‘codswaddle’. And she wasn’t much happier now. We drove up through Scotland, checked into a local hotel and made daily excursions into the community, Irene reluctantly tagging along. I couldn’t get her near a meal in the community centre, though I managed to persuade her to take tea with a few friendly members in their wooden eco-houses. And after a week it was official – she wasn’t having any of it.

I accepted that Findhorn wasn’t for everyone, least of all my wife, and so we focussed instead on relocating to Dublin, which was close enough to Findhorn for me to visit regularly. We rented a house called Campanella, an ivy-draped gaff with a walled garden, a gate lodge and a ‘Napoleon room’ full of grim-looking busts of the Emperor, a few hundred yards down the hill from Bono in the posh ‘rockbroker’-belt suburb of Killiney. But it was a dark, cheerless time. People we knew kept dying and we seemed to be forever attending funerals, while the house, set deep in the shadow of a hill and facing eastwards over the Irish Sea, got about an hour of sunlight a day and was cold and frayed. And all the while Irene and I grew further apart, the gulf between us expanding as our desires and ambitions diverged. As for Dublin, it was still a city full of ghosts, even more than when I’d left for New York two years earlier. The Fellow Who Fiddles and Anto were long gone, Vinnie Kilduff and other pals had decamped west. I still heard the odd busker doing a Waterboys song in the city centre, but the old magic was gone, and in my heart so was I. My physical form may have been wandering Grafton Street but my imagination was roaming in the clear northern air of Findhorn. It was only a matter of time before I cut loose and in the first week of 1994, promising Irene I’d be back in spring, I flew to Findhorn to begin a three-month stay as a guest, living and working in the community.

The North of Scotland was spectacular the day I arrived: serene and inscrutable under a pristine carpet of snow, with endless sailor-blue skies and barely a wisp of wind. I was billeted in the community’s main guest enclave, Cluny Hill College, a massive Victorian mansion, once a spa hotel, that nestled on the flanks of a pine-forested hill a few miles from the main campus at Findhorn. The taxi rattled up a curling driveway past cliff-side gardens covered in snow, then swung right. The College stood before us, gothic and sprawling like a great grey dragon, bright and stone-glistening in the winter sun.

‘Cluny’ was the very embodiment of the mystery school, a secret place set apart from the bustle of the world. It brooded in its hillside location like a fortress, cloistered by the deep woods. Its public spaces – long pale green corridors, quiet lounges and a majestic dining room – vibrated with a tangible meditative presence, a kind of buzzing stillness. Guests arrived every Saturday, some staying a week, some like me for longer, and around forty full-time Findhorn members lived there. A flotilla of cheerful white minibuses ferried people between Cluny and the main community site several times a day.

I’d stayed in Cluny once before, on a weeklong stay at the end of 1992, six weeks after my first visit, and I was beginning to find my place in the Findhorn universe. The community may have been a conglomeration of a few hundred souls gathered in a caravan park and a converted hotel, yet its imaginal space seemed limitless. Dozens of spiritual disciplines from East and West were practised here, and layers of knowledge and experience seemed to hang in the very air. It was like the bookshelves of Foyle’s Philosophy Room turned into a living village. Or a spiritual Spiddal, with the deeper wisdom crackling in the atmosphere around me just as the rarefied wavelength of the Gaelic language did in the west of Ireland.

I’d also begun to get the range of the Findhornian ‘contacting God inside’ philosophy, at least as it applied to me. Two things had happened. During my 1992 visit I’d experienced what that hackneyed phrase ‘an open heart’ really
means. I’d done a lot on deep meditation work that year, and after three days in the spiritual hothouse atmosphere of Cluny I felt my heart begin to ‘come on’, as if I’d taken some kind of drug. The feeling was of a fire in the centre of my chest, emotional, physical and metaphysical all at once; tender yet at the same time incredibly powerful, like all the loves of my life rolled into one. And then some. I was enfolded in a wave of intense lovingness and awareness that lasted a week, a kind of transfiguration that left me changed and seeing the world through new eyes. For the first time I witnessed everything as it really is, part of a vast functioning system beyond the capacity of my mind to grasp but all looped and bound together with love and purpose. I recognised human society as a crazy dysfunctional thing that even with all its madness somehow played its perfect role in a far bigger picture. I could feel compassion for everyone and knew beyond doubt that under the surface, beneath the contrivance of all personas and disguises, we all had the same needs: to love and be loved, to feel useful and valued. What I was experiencing, I now know, was a classic spiritual heart-opening, an initiation undergone by countless seekers of all disciplines and hues both before and after me. I had found the central secret of
The Mysteries
in my own heart, and its name was Love.

When I returned in January 1994 there wasn’t a repeat of this heart-fire experience, but there was something else. After a couple of weeks I noticed a subtle inner will constantly directing me. I knew this reflex from my songwriting, the itch in my soul that impelled me to choose a particular line of lyric or twist of melody. Now I recognised that this inner prompting, my intuition, had been active at crux moments of my life: when I felt the impulse to befriend Z, when I walked away from Kate Lovecraft, when I first heard the playing of Steve or Anto. It had been present too when I’d made some of my worst decisions, and those, I realised, were the times I’d ignored it. Now, in the mystery school of Findhorn, I learnt that this guiding impulse was always available. If I bypassed the bustle of my mind and the clamour of my emotions I could feel it quietly directing me. Then all I had to do was trust it. There was nothing exotically mystical about this, and it pretty much equated to ‘if it feels right, do it, and if it doesn’t, don’t’, but the realisation that I was free to act when something felt right inside was deeply liberating after decades of basing decisions on mental calculations, fears or blind hope. And though it would take me years to integrate it into my daily life as a functioning modus operandi, and there would be slip-ups and fuck-ups along the way, I’d found my inner groove.

Such a process of getting real with myself meant a lot of changes, and a big one was accepting that I wanted to split with Irene. This had been a long time coming. I still cared for Irene but the marriage was going nowhere. I needed to forge my own trail and in early February I returned to Dublin to tell her. For two afternoons we sat in the gloomy lounge at Campanella and like negotiators on a knife-edge worked through the terms of the split, emotional and financial. Then I got in a taxi to Dublin Airport and flew back to Scotland.

All that winter I lived on the top floor of Cluny in a room overlooking woodlands and green hills. My days began around 7am. I’d meditate sitting on a chair by my bed, then go downstairs to the sanctuary, a sparklingly silent room with tall windows, once the billiards parlour in Cluny’s previous incarnation as a hotel. ‘Morning sanctuary’ was optional and every day between ten and thirty people gathered for a group meditation lasting twenty minutes, sometimes silent, sometimes with instructions like the ‘sending light’ meditation I’d already experienced. Then I’d have breakfast in the cathedral-like dining room, sitting at a table with friends or strangers, the sounds of cutlery and conversation in our ears, early morning sunlight blazing through the bay windows.

Twice a week I took the ten-minute bus ride to Findhorn and spent all morning with the community garden team, donning gumboots, digging, gritting icy footpaths or collecting seaweed on nearby beaches. The rest of the time I worked in the Cluny kitchen, at first humbly chopping carrots and spuds, gradually progressing to accomplished soup-smith and pizza maker. I was part of an eclectic crew that included a passionate Dane called Neils who played loud opera music on the kitchen hi-fi first thing in the morning and said admirable things like, ‘May we never have another boring moment in our lives!’, a good-looking Swiss lady named Anita, and Wolfgang, a gentle German fellow who was curious about my life in music and asked me if I really knew U2.

For the truth about my day job had begun to slip out. I knew this for sure when I was in the community centre one lunchtime and fell into conversation with an Irish lady who remarked, ‘Have you heard there’s some kind of pop star living up at Cluny?’ After a second of confusion (I hadn’t noticed anyone like that) I realised the pop star was
me
. I wasn’t the first interloper from the world of show business to descend on Findhorn. Several people more famous than me had already showed up, but Shirley MacLaine and Van Morrison, who visited separately in the eighties, had come as their celebrated selves for day trips and only got a tourist’s eye view of the community. I asked Van about his visit some years later and all he remembered was ‘a bunch of old hippies’. It must have been the spectacles he was wearing. Burt Lancaster on the other hand, passing through in the late seventies, enrolled in a Findhorn programme and worked in the community. I suspect he also found, like me, that star status in the outside world didn’t automatically translate into opportunity and admiration in the parallel universe of Findhorn.

The community members took visitors as they found them. I learned this when I offered to perform at one of the regular Friday night concerts known as ‘sharings’. The organiser, a fearsome American lesbian called Patsy, told me I could have three minutes of performance time and no more. Relishing the prospect of surprising Patsy and her fellow organisers by being unexpectedly good, I chose a song which fit the prescribed length and let it rip on stage. But if I was expecting to win instant acclaim from the Findhorn audience, I was wrong. The applause was fair to middling and I was roundly upstaged by a comedy fashion-show given by the builders’ group, a motley parade of men in drag, G-strings and feather-strewn crash helmets, which drew from the scattered crowd all the enthusiasm my slot hadn’t. But I’d been noticed. Next day there was a little folded-up message for me on the Cluny noticeboard from one Rory O., inviting me to play guitar with the community ceilidh band. A swift rehearsal later I found myself pressed into service playing reels, strathspeys and the whole surreal glory of the
Monty Python
theme at the Findhorn Burns Night.

Being a community musician hadn’t been on my list of ambitions, but it was an unexpected consequence of my Findhorn odyssey. After the ceilidh I was asked to back all kinds of community singers, usually women. These included Nikki (willowy English rose with earnest songs), Diana (classy American singer with a penchant for showbiz numbers) and Julia (intense German lady who delivered, with great gusto, a Sarajevo women’s anthem she’d learned during a visit to the war-torn Bosnian city). It was a novelty being on stage without the pressure of being the star and I took to my new role with relish. For the first time I learned repertoires of other people’s songs and played the supportive sideman, and because I was backing amateurs, I had to learn how to sheath my onstage energy – my job was to let each singer shine, not overshadow them.