Adventures of a Waterboy (26 page)

These concerts, like the ‘sharing’ I first guested at, were all in Universal Hall, the five-sided edifice I’d been stunned by on my first night in Findhorn. The Hall had a peculiar aura: used for performances, conferences, and community meetings, its atmosphere fell somewhere between a hallowed temple of the arts and a futuristic new age congress. And it was a highly exposed environment in which to work. Performers were on floor level surrounded by banked seating, and the community atmosphere dispelled the usual mystique and distance between artist and audience. Performing at Universal Hall was like stepping out on a high wire and the only way to keep balance was to be authentic. Any artifice or pretension was fatal.

This intensity blended comically with the inept. Despite its neo-Atlantean grandeur, Universal Hall was a local theatre deep in the provinces run by amateurs on a shoestring. Microphones failed, the sound system flipped on and off mid-performance, cats or children would wander on stage and once I even experienced that most cruel of onstage mishaps: the slack-jointed microphone stand that progressively tilts downwards through the duration of a song, rendering the luckless performer, by number’s end, a knee-buckled, shoulder-arched hunchback, desperately trying to make the enforced posture look deliberate. I also had to be my own roadie: there was no Jimmy Hickey now to string my guitar or scurry on stage if something went wrong. But all this was good for my rock star ego. Any lingering tendencies I had towards performers’ afflictions, such as self-aggrandisement or a yen to take myself too seriously, were roundly punctured in the crucible of the Hall.

At Friday night concerts I’d sing my own compositions, serious new songs like ‘What Do You Want Me To Do?’ or comedic numbers poking fun at community life. I was in good company. There was a tradition of lampooning at Findhorn and a talented troupe of comedians – Americans Rolf and Marietta, Jordi from Spain and a dry-witted Aussie called Peter Z – would roast the community for its idiosyncrasies every Friday. Targets included the tendency of members to wear purple, the perennial presence of parsnips on the dinner menu and individuals who used ostentatious meditation postures to show how ‘spiritual’ they were. Soon my increased profile meant I could command two songs a time at sharings, a Findhornian measure of success, and in the late spring of 1994 I finally did my own solo concert where I showed the community what I did for a living.

It was strange playing as a one-man band to an audience so totally different from a rock crowd. There was nowhere to hide, no moment when I wasn’t the focus of attention, and the community members weren’t cognoscenti with a grounding in the rock’n’roll I’d grown up with or the roots music I’d played in Ireland. They were people from many different cultures with casual musical tastes that tended to the conservative (pop, classical and singer/songwriters) or the far out (hypnotic new-age sounds and ethnic fare from India, Africa or Tibet). From my experience of Friday night shows I knew the songs that would make most sense in this context would be the ones that carried the deepest personal and emotional charge. The man standing alone with all safety nets and boundaries removed, I figured, was most effective when he dug inside and sang from the soul. But sustaining this level of intimacy for a full show was a new trick for me, and as I played my set – a mix of new songs and numbers from Waterboys albums – the mood in the Hall was strangely restrained. I played for seventy-five minutes in a pin-drop atmosphere, the songs punctuated by polite, quickly dissipating smatterings of applause. I had no idea what the audience was thinking until, as the last chord of the last song faded away, the place erupted into a blaze of applause, whoops and stomping feet. The show was a stupendous success! In the basement dressing room post-encore, with the Findhornians still stomping upstairs as wildly as any rock audience, I knew I’d struck on a new way of performing and that soon I’d take it out into the world.

After this my star shone brightly in the Findhorn firmament and I found myself called on to sing at holidays, funerals, weddings and, most of all, charity shows. For as soon as it became clear I could pull an audience, I got asked to do every benefit gig going. Everyone at Findhorn seemed to have a pet project. I played for the Nepal Trust (providing health care for families in the Himalayas), Ecologia (housing orphans in the former USSR), the local Steiner School (educating the community kids, perpetually short of funds), and even for the restoration of the Hall’s grand piano. But my one-man show had another quite unexpected side effect: a local paper got wind of the performance and before you could say ‘codswaddle’ a national tabloid sent a muck-raking journalist and sidekick snapper-stooge to dig up the dirt on the rock star who’d given it all up and joined a commune. I’d just moved into a little fisherman’s cottage by Findhorn Bay, my three-month residency in Cluny having come to its end, when these two characters knocked on the door and asked me all kinds of questions with a dubious relationship to reality.

The story appeared as a double-page spread in the following week’s Scottish
Sunday Mail
(with a spin-off feature making it to the front page of the now-defunct
News Of The World
), and was an imaginative work of fiction wonderfully titled ‘Cult Saves Rock Star From Drinks Hell’. The writer had read an old interview in which I’d talked about giving up drink some years earlier and wove this into the article, making it look like I’d come to Findhorn to dry out, as if the community were some kind of new-age rehab centre. To support this premise, the article carried a decade-old photo that showed me sitting with a glass of water, mischievously captioned to suggest I’d been putting away multiple neat vodkas. The only thing the tabloid journos got right was the mention of a ‘mysterious barefoot lady’ who opened the door of my cottage. For there was a new love in my life. Janette was a Findhorn member, originally from Glasgow, who facilitated workshops and led dance classes. At first I’d admired her from afar across the Cluny dining room or caught my breath as I passed her in the corridors. In stolen glimpses during the daily life of the community, Janette impinged on my consciousness little by little and, without ever knowing it, took over my heart. I was convinced Janette was the one, my future ally, collaborator, lover and best friend, the partner-woman of my life. I’d been wrong about such things before, but this time I was deeply certain. I could feel it in my guts as sure as breathing. I asked my kitchen colleague Anita what the community protocol was when a man wanted to meet a woman. She told me to leave Janette a message on the noticeboard asking for a chat, then simply tell her how I felt. This was a few million degrees more upfront than I was used to being, but I did it, gingerly sticking my little folded-up scrap of paper on the ‘J’ space of the Cluny noticeboard late one Friday night.

Next morning I was making lentil soup in the kitchen when Janette walked in holding the note and asked if it was from me. I said yes and, though mystified, she agreed to go for a drink with me that evening. We met in the Cluny lobby and walked through the woods to the bar of a nearby hotel. As soon as we sat down I declared myself. She was amazed. Far from expecting a suitor, she’d imagined she must have done something to offend this man she hardly knew, and that I wanted to tell her so; a logical supposition in the community culture, where ‘giving feedback’ was a common occurrence. She told me she felt flattered but that she ‘hadn’t thought of me that way’. It was a courteous refusal and after a pleasant conversation we walked back to Cluny, said goodbye in the lobby, and each headed off to our different parts of the building. I was deeply embarrassed to realise that all my romantic certainties must have been mistaken. How could I have been so sure and yet so wrong? In order to avoid Janette I didn’t go to the dining room for several days. Then one morning I bumped into her on the stairs. She stopped me and said she’d like to meet up again. Reluctantly, and thinking she was just being sorry for me, I agreed to meet her that night.

When the hour came it was my turn to be amazed. She was dressed for a date, glamorous and elegant in flowing clothes, a symphony in brown, green and gold. As we strolled down the Cluny Hill driveway she took my arm and this time when we got to the pub
she
declared herself to me, saying that since our previous outing she’d found my face constantly appearing in her mind’s eye and that she wanted to give us a try. My declaration had worked! We conducted a magical courtship in Cluny, holding hands under the table at breakfast and lunch, kissing discreetly in the corridors, spending nights in Janette’s room, and bumping into each other with delight several times each day. In March we flew off for a dreamlike week in that most romantic of all cities, Venice, where we stayed in a sea-green room overlooking the lagoon, loved ardently, went for endless walks, first began to call each other ‘Darling’, and told each other our life stories in waterfront cafes.

In April we moved into a cottage on Findhorn Bay and set up home. We had a front parlour overlooking the water, a tiny kitchen, and a bedroom with a window onto a whitewashed lane leading to the centre of the old village of Findhorn. There we witnessed our new love maturing into deep partnership. I’d been right after all: Janette
was
the one.

In the cottage’s attic space, too low-ceilinged for me to even stand up straight, I created my smallest-ever music room and started writing songs articulating the experiences I’d had at Findhorn: ‘Bring ’Em All In’, ‘Long Way To The Light’, ‘Wonderful Disguise’. Soon I was ready to record an album that would tell the story of what I’d found.

The previous year I’d met a recording engineer in New York called Niko Bolas, a handsome Greek-American with a skinful of attitude whose name I’d seen on a couple of Neil Young album covers. I hired Niko to record my B-sides for the singles off
Dream Harder
and it turned out to be a momentous session. He was a terrific catalyst: a no-nonsense bullshit-busting cheerleader. In a couple of days, with a raunchy pick-up band and Niko at the controls, I laid down ten cracking tracks, which had all the power and passion
Dream Harder
itself lacked. I wanted more of the same. But in keeping with the nature of my new songs I decided to play every instrument myself and record not in a big city studio but in the charged air of Findhorn. And amazingly the community had its own studio, a magical grotto in the basement of Universal Hall, built in the seventies. It was rarely used and its gear was prehistoric so we brought our own. Niko flew in from Los Angeles, having just fired himself from a Rod Stewart session (‘he asked me to do everything I hated’).

Niko and Findhorn shouldn’t have gone well together but they did. Extroverted and stupendously tactless, Niko’s native repartee included bon mots such as, ‘It ain’t knockin’ my dick in the dirt’ (when something didn’t sufficiently impress him) and his customary greeting to, say, a fellow recording engineer was along the lines of, ‘Yo, man! That your mix playing? Sounds like a piece of shit!’ But he took to his new circumstances like a champ, cycling to Universal Hall each morning, attending meditations in the sanctuary, mucking in behind the bar at the hotel where he was berthed, and even going to a community lecture by a visiting Tibetan lama.

Niko also made friends with the most unlikely people, including a local RAF crew who flew him illicitly across Scotland in a transport plane, making him spectacularly sick by doing loops and rolls over the Cairngorms. And a Swedish community member, a bearded intellectual called Stefan who noticed Niko’s fidgeting, antsy demeanour one morning and said to him, ‘So. Who
was
it?’

‘Who was
what
?’ retorted a bemused Niko.

‘Who drove you relentlessly as a boy’, replied Stefan, ‘to always excel, and turned you into the self-criticising, nervous lunatic I see before me now?’

Niko stood stunned for a second, all the colour draining from his cheeks, then a smile cracked open his face and he broke out laughing.

‘Shit! That was my dad!’

Niko was outrageously direct in the studio. He could tell me when a song didn’t quite make it (‘OK, now play me something with a chorus’) or indicate when I wasn’t nailing a performance (‘You suck today, man’). There was none of the let’s-mollycoddle-the-artist’s-feelings crap so many people in the music business deploy because they’re afraid of causing offence. And he had a cute, understated way of letting me know when I’d got it right. ‘You’re in the wrong room!’ he’d call cheerfully through the intercom while waving me through to the control booth. Best of all Niko recorded me as simply and directly as he communicated and the result was a clear, natural sound which absolutely suited the music.

The experiment of recording in the community worked too. I was happy singing the songs in the atmosphere that had begot them, and something of the Findhornian aura found its way onto tape. There were drawbacks, however. The studio was sufficiently soundproofed to keep out the sounds of the planes taking off and landing at the neighbouring airbase, but not the sounds from the Hall auditorium above. These included Sacred Dance on Wednesday evenings with its familiar Balkan folksy burblings, Five Rhythms on a Monday (spacey new age dance grooves and clattering feet), and loudest of all the Dance Drama room on the other side of the studio wall, which hosted everything from aerobics to acting classes (shouts, mock-fights and very convincing screams). This was a far cry from the big city studios we were used to, where any distraction would be swiftly nuked by a phone call to the studio manager, but there was nothing we could do about it, and we accepted the mosaic of noise as the price of recording in a living, breathing community theatre.