Adventures of a Waterboy (29 page)

By the end of the show these disparate visual identities had devolved into a single heat-smelted human mass, jackets, shirts and cool attitudes long discarded. Except for Boots McNabb. For as the last chord of our closing number, ‘Building The City Of Light’, ripped through the fetid air of the Garage, Boots was still inscrutably sharp in his two-tone suit, the sweat-drenched jacket of which he refused to remove despite the supernatural heat. But in the naked light of the dressing room the cost of Boots’ dedication to style was revealed. ‘Bloody hell!’ he exclaimed in horror, pointing at his legs. We all looked. The turn-ups of his pants hovered a full inch above his exposed ankles. Surely they hadn’t been like that when he bought them? Then he stuck his fists out and his jacket cuffs were a third of the way up his arm, revealing several inches of soaked skin above the wrists. Suddenly the penny dropped and everyone burst out laughing. The suit had shrunk on him while he’d been sweating in it!

Shrivelled suits apart, Boswell’s ploy was a success. Tickets sold out fast, reviews were encouraging, and things were even stirring for me at radio. ‘Love Anyway’ was Record Of The Week on two Radio One shows on consecutive weeks, an almost unheard-of feat. And the single sounded great on air. I’d pulled off the trick of making a record about my spiritual experiences that, unlike the acoustic ‘Bring ’Em All In’, slotted into the contemporary landscape. ‘Love Anyway’ didn’t sound out of place next to singles by Oasis or The Verve, with whose ‘Bittersweet Symphony’, then rioting up the charts, it shared a fat drum sound and a luminous string section. It looked, just
looked
, like we might actually have the hit everyone was predicting.

The reckoning that would determine our fate was the ‘midweek chart’ position of the week of release. It worked like this: records came out on a Monday and the final weeklong chart, the one the public cares about, was based on all the sales from then to the following Sunday. But a tally of Monday’s sales alone was announced within the music business on Tuesday lunchtime and called the ‘midweek chart’. And because an act’s diehard fans typically bought records on the day of release, this midweek chart tended to show newly issued singles in a higher position than their eventual placing in the real chart five days later. A strong position in the midweek was deemed essential to ensure a healthy showing in the subsequent real chart, but a bad position meant failure, and in such a case the record company would give up. For ‘Love Anyway’ to be a hit we needed a midweek position comfortably in the top thirty, preferably high in the top twenty. I was halfway through a long day of interviews in a Brussels hotel when the call came. Our midweek position was seventy-five.

That a record’s destiny could be determined by such a paltry accounting of fate as its first day’s sales was crazy but true. In the chart golden age of the fifties, sixties and early seventies, records were released into a world where anything could happen. A single might meander for weeks in lowly regions of the charts before catching on with DJs or the public. Then it would creep its way upwards and, if the winds were fair and the tune was good, become a hit. Its passage might take eight, nine weeks, sometimes more, and this ascent was an authentic log of a song’s conquest of the public’s affections. But over the years the charts had become so manipulated, so gamed by the music industry, that they were stretched out of all shape and logic. In their time, twelve-inch singles, coloured vinyl, picture discs, hyping scams and the dreaded multiple formats had each made their contributions to the ruin of the system, progressively distorting the chart, little by little, in favour of gimmicked or aggressively-marketed product until the distortions had become the system. Now a single’s fate was determined largely by the ingenuity and muscle of its marketing and by the size and dedication, or gullibility, of the act’s fan-base, and its lifespan comprised the six torturous pre-release weeks of ‘plugging’ at radio, an insane system whereby the public could hear the record for an age but not buy it. By the time a single actually came out, its orbit was almost over – even huge selling records dropped in their second week of release. The charts, once a barometer of the listening tastes of the nation, had become a sham.

I was part of this insanity too; I’d allowed Chrysalis to game the system by surrendering to their demand for formats. And now ‘Love Anyway’ was kaput, despite having been issued in two matching-sleeved CDs with four different ‘exclusive’ B-sides, plus, God help us, a limited-edition cassette single – a manifestly useless item in the late nineties. Despite all its radio play the song hadn’t caught on with the public. As soon as the damning midweek chart was announced, everyone involved accepted the record wouldn’t be a hit, including me. And because Chrysalis viewed ‘Love Anyway’ as the sole potential hit on the album, from this point onwards they treated
Still Burning
as a lost cause. Yet the whole cycle of touring, travelling and promotion still lay ahead. Fulfilling such a schedule once the bottom has fallen out of a campaign is an experience most recording artists have gone through at some time or another: a dogged, keep-smiling-through-the-wreckage trudge, and I geared up psychologically for it now.

The saving grace was the music, which flowed as always, for my new band was playing focussed, tough shows and never giving a hoot about such things as chart positions. We played a short tour of Scandinavia during which we found both our musical muscle (best gig: a barnstormer in Stavanger) and our band
esprit
(funniest moment: McNabb’s impression of a terrible Nordic Eurovision song on the tour bus without his realising the Norwegian EMI rep was sitting in front of him). The only blip was the firing of the luckless Jeremy Stacey, on the day of Princess Diana’s funeral, when I got wind he was planning to defect to the reformed Echo & The Bunnymen. His replacement was a pile-driving Glaswegian skin-basher called Geoff Dugmore, and thus reconstituted we worked till the end of the year, touring Britain, Europe and Japan.

For a singer/guitarist, Ian McNabb was an unexpectedly good bass player. He and Dugmore developed a visceral swagger that drove the music like a threshing machine, and their empathy extended offstage, Dugmore becoming the foil for McNabb’s non-stop comedic horseplay. Ian’s speciality was a deadpan impression of Rolf Harris singing Prince’s ‘Sign ‘O’ The Times’, wobble-board sounds and all, which he’d break into at artfully chosen moments, destroying everyone within a twenty-foot radius.

Fingers was funny too, though not always intentionally. A handsome, extremely tall Irishman, possibly of giant stock, he used wonderfully meaningless Father Dougal-esque phrases such as ‘in fairness, now’, and his moment-to-moment consciousness bubbled from an inexhaustible store of speedy enthusiasm and boyish good nature. He also wore pomade in his hair and on stage in Wolverhampton he got it on his hands and thus onto the neck of his guitar, which made playing difficult. During ‘Rare, Precious And Gone’, a song with a three-second break of silence at the end of a verse, Fingers calculated he had time to grab a towel off his amp, wipe down the guitar neck, and still hit the first chord of the next verse on cue. His prognostications were correct, but he forgot to turn his volume down, and the three-second break was filled by an unholy skittering sound as Fingers frantically rubbed the towel up and down the neck.

It was a bit like being in one of my teenage bands, only with better gear. During the boogie shuffle ‘Blues Is My Business’, Boots and I did Chuck Berry duckwalks from opposite ends of the stage. In Japan we all bought half-size guitars with fuzzy built-in speakers that enabled us to jam loudly wherever we liked. But fun times and a good band wasn’t all I’d signed up for, and between concerts I had plenty time to think about what had happened since my return to London. My commercial standing was at an all-time low and at the end of the campaign I’d be dropped by the record company for the first time in my career, of that I was sure. The last vestiges of the aura that had surrounded me and The Waterboys for ten or twelve years were gone like so much smoke and vapour. I was nowhere, man.

I’d turned my Findhorn experiences into songs and forged ’em onto records, figuring there was a world out there of people hungry for the things I’d found. But either there wasn’t, or I’d failed to do it in a way that reached them. Or perhaps my timing was wrong and in this cockeyed era people only wanted entertainment, not some fucker philosophising or questing. Or maybe the tunes simply weren’t good enough. Whatever, I’d offered up my wares and the buffs weren’t buying. There was a kind of grief involved. I felt scoured and empty, insubstantial, as if I wasn’t fully in the world anymore. After Findhorn the mainstream world didn’t appear quite real to me, and I wondered now if
I
didn’t seem quite real to
it
. The community and its blue northern skies hung on the horizon of my mind like a towering backdrop, a life I could step back into in a heartbeat. Should I retreat there and immerse myself again in the mystery school?

But no. In December, two days after the last show of the tour, Janette and I were married in Chelsea Registry Office, and that Christmas my heart and my wife told me to stay in the game, that there was some drama yet to play out. And I still had an eye on the glimmer of a new recording home. After a London show in October Alan McGee had said, ‘It’s inevi’able ye’ll come tae Creation, man.’ I was eager to join my benefactor there and counted down the weeks till the expiry of my Chrysalis contract.

The great day arrived in March 1998. The confirmation of my release from Chrysalis came through and I sat down to call McGee. I hadn’t heard from Alan in a couple of months, which was kind of odd, but I figured he must be busy and we’d had spells of not being in touch before. I dialled his office. His secretary answered and said he wasn’t available so I left a message: ‘Would Alan call me please. Mike Scott. He knows the number.’ After a few days I hadn’t heard anything so I called again and got the same answer. I left another message. A few days later I called a third time. McGee picked up the phone. ‘Alan, I’m free from Chrysalis!’ I told him, and there was an awkward silence, four or five seconds which told me all I needed to know.

Not signing to Alan meant the end of our creative relationship, though not, in time, of our friendship. Meanwhile, with no more touring, the band dissolved. Boots returned to the ’Pool and Fingers to Dublin, Razors and Dugmore to the life of the London session musician. I would work with them all again, but for the moment and for as far as I could see I was on my own. Unable to afford the house on Lansdowne Road anymore, Janette and I rented a semi-detached on a suburban street in Kew, on the western edges of London, and I began to begin all over again.

Chapter 18: A Man With A Fiddle And A Dog At Number 12a

The taxi drives down the main street of Sligo and I look out the window scouring the pavements for a glimpse of Steve Wickham. I haven’t seen Steve since he moved here a few years ago but I’ve heard he’s been kicked out by his second wife, might even be sleeping rough, and I’ve come here on something of a mercy mission. But there’s no sign of my old friend on the streets, so I stop the taxi at the best place to begin a search for a fiddler: the town’s music pub, a colourful hole in the wall called Shoot The Crows. The pub has just opened, and there’s an intoxicating smell of beer and old wood. Shafts of sun fall through the window and the ghost of a breeze blows from an open door somewhere at the back. A young barman pops up from under the counter and I can tell by his double take that he recognises me. ‘Do you know where I’ll find Steve Wickham?’ I ask, and he replies, ‘Oh, he’s staying out in Rathbraughan. He’ll be glad to see you, I can tell you that.’ There’s an understated edge to his voice which confirms my information that Steve’s in some kind of trouble. A few more questions establish that Rathbraughan is a modern housing estate at the butt-end of town but the barman doesn’t have an address for my friend or even a street name. All I can do is go and knock on doors.

I get back in the taxi and five minutes later, after a slalom through the higgledy-piggledy streets of Sligo’s Northside, the cabbie drops me off at the entrance to a depressed estate. I stand on the roadside and register the scene: identical terraced houses in every direction, bleak December fields in the semi-distance. I’m wondering where to start when I see a woman coming out of a house. ‘Excuse me,’ I say, ‘do you know where Steve Wickham the fiddle player lives?’ She looks back at me and in a no-nonsense country accent says, ‘Well now, I’ve heard there’s a man with a fiddle and a dog at number 12a’ and points up the street. I walk in the direction indicated and after fifty yards I find number 12a, a shabby house with an unkempt garden. I stand on the pavement trying to imagine my friend in this unlikely place, then stride up the path and knock on the door. Through the frosted glass I make out the dark shape of a man approaching and the door opens to divulge a dodgy-looking bloke with a thick beard and suspicious deep-sunk eyes. I’m thinking it might be the wrong house when to my amazement I notice the bloke’s wearing Steve’s old stage waistcoat, a once-fabulous black, red and gold embroidered garment worn at a hundred shows from Hammersmith to Hollywood, now faded and torn, hanging dolefully from this guy’s slightly hunched cadaverous frame. My mind grasps for explanations. Maybe Steve’s so broke he’s had to sell his old stage gear; maybe this weirdo’s done some deal with Steve, giving him room and board in return for getting to wear his clothes. All this flits through my mind in one surreal slow-motion second before the scrambled picture comes suddenly, shockingly into focus and I realise the stranger
is
Steve.

What had happened to The Fellow Who Fiddles? When he left The Waterboys in August 1990, Steve hitched up with some old Dublin mates in a country & western band called The Texas Kellys, playing show band-type gigs up and down Ireland. This was a mystery to me and to a lot of other people too. I’d expected Steve to walk into another top band or form his own; a psychedelic folk-rave combo, perhaps, or a neo-trad ensemble pushing the boundaries of Celtic music. But no, he dropped down several divisions of the rock’n’roll league to join a semi-pro band of Dublin journeymen going nowhere. Had the black night of the soul that followed the breakup of his marriage scuppered Steve’s image of himself as a musical force? Or did he just not want the pressure anymore?

Steve stuck with The Texas Kellys for a couple of years and played on their only record, an EP called
Stay All Night
. The cover showed the band wearing cowboy hats and sitting on the edge of what looked like a slagheap, with Steve spaced off a little way to the side as if he couldn’t make up his mind whether he was in the band or out. The Kellys played well but their world was a far cry from the professional one Steve had inhabited with The Waterboys. Their modus operandi was to drive five or six hours to the gig, pick up a couple of girls in the audience and persuade them to let the band crash on their floor. If this gambit didn’t work, their roadie would drive the band back to Dublin through the night, struggling to stay awake, a crash only a moment’s slumber away.

All musicians take this risk at least once in their early careers, and the traditional way of avoiding disaster is for a band member to sit up front with the driver and keep him talking, and therefore conscious. I remember it myself, Johnny Waller dozing at the wheel on the way back from a 1979 gig in Aberdeen, the van veering alarmingly close to the barrier as we crossed the Forth Road Bridge at five in the morning. Most bands, wishing to stay alive, evolve swiftly past this state of affairs and develop the habit of booking hotels. Not so The Texas Kellys, still riding their luck after years on the road.

Steve may have given up on stardom but he still valued his skin. After one too many hair-raising drives he laid down the law: a hotel or guesthouse on the next trip or he was out. Halfway to the next show he asked the bandleader, a banjo-bothering Dublin cowboy called Jimmy Kelly, where they’d be staying that night. ‘Ah, don’t worry,’ said Jim, ‘sure, we’ll sort somethin’ out!’ ‘Stop the van!’ retorted Steve, and when it wheezed to a halt on the outskirts of a midlands town he jumped out with a parting shot of ‘Call yourselves cowboys? You couldn’t even catch an Indian!’ and hitched a lift back to Dublin. And that was the end of Mr Wickham’s career as a Texas Kelly.

Next Steve moved to Sligo, an old market town eighty miles north of Galway, where he lived with his second wife Annie and their baby daughter in a Methodist church hall Annie had inherited from her grandmother. The building was under the shadow of Ben Bulben, the strange flat mountain that looms over Sligo and provides the dramatic backdrop to several weighty W.B. Yeats poems. And now Ben Bulben formed the backdrop to the unravelling drama of Steve’s life. For when the marriage came unstuck in late 1993, Annie changed the locks and Steve found himself out on his ear, walking the roads of the world.

Steve and I sat at the kitchen table, his little dog scurrying and snapping at our ankles, and I got the story. He had indeed been kicked out by his wife, for reasons too arcane to untangle, but the accounts of him sleeping rough were an Irish exaggeration. Steve was in fact working mornings at a local youth club, teaching kids to play football, and just about keeping body and soul together. Well, body anyway. It was alarming to see my old friend so wounded. Looking into his once-merry face was like intruding on a private tragedy. He was like one of those characters in a comic strip with a personal black raincloud following them around. I tried to get him to open up about what had happened to him, and what he could do about it, but it was like trying to draw water from a stone. Steve was deeply troubled, close to his personal rock bottom. Only time and love might cure what ailed him.

We wandered the fringes of Sligo together, rambled by the seashore and poked around country lanes, and even played a few old Hank Williams songs together back at the house. But Steve’s fiddle had a curdled sound to it, as if it had been in the fridge too long, and Steve played like what he was, a distressed man lost in a thicket he couldn’t yet find a way out of. Still, I perceived something gnarly at work in him, some instinctive self-preservation under the surface that would have its say in his destiny, and I got the feeling that the next time I saw him he’d be in better shape. And he was. On an August day eight months later he turned up out of the blue, on a bicycle, at the bay-side cottage in Findhorn where I was now living with Janette.

Janette answered the door and called me. ‘It’s Steve, the friend you told me all about.’ And as I greeted him I felt like Dean Moriarty in
On The Road
, the time Sal Paradise visits him, and Dean, gobsmacked, says, ‘Sal! You’ve finally come to
me
!’

Steve had cycled across Ireland and up the whole length of Scotland to find me. He was still bearded, somewhat hunched at the shoulders, and the eye contact wasn’t great, but otherwise he was fit and sharp, with the faintest hint of his old humour about him. We spent the day walking the shoreline of Findhorn Bay, among the pine trees and eco-houses of the community. The conversation was clear and open, our friendship intact, and I knew my friend was on the mend. I saw him a few more times over the next couple of years and every time he was a little more returned to his old self: clearer-eyed, clean-shaven, standing more upright. In the spring of 1995 he came to my one-man show in Galway and hung out backstage. Six months later his new folk trio, The Connacht Ramblers, supported me at Dublin’s Olympia Theatre; and in 1997 he made a brief visit to London for a Ramblers’ gig and stayed with Janette and me in the pink house on Lansdowne Road.

The Connacht Ramblers, like the Texas Kellys, played around the pubs and shebeens of Ireland. They flourished, after a fashion, from 1994 to 1998, playing a repertoire of Woody Guthrie covers, fiddly instrumentals and quirky original songs. The vocals were by Steve or his mate, an Irish poet/guitarist called Peter Brabazon. I asked Steve about their life on the road, and he regaled me with woeful but funny tales of mildewed boarding houses and crooked rustic pub-owners, the indignities of being upstaged in Killarney by a magician who puked up live fish, or being misbooked to play in a rebel bar in front of an audience of hardcore Irish republicans. The diehards, unimpressed by the Ramblers’ cheery fare, requested throughout that they ‘Play a fuckin’ rebel song, boys!’ and when Steve declined with a spirited, if inadvisable, riposte of ‘Rebel songs are shite!’ someone punched him in the face, knocking him out cold.

Or the time they were booked to play at Puck Fair, a semi-medieval travellers’ shindig in a hilly crossroads town called Killorglin. Atop a narrow twenty-foot-high platform in the village square a wild Billy goat, captured a few days earlier in the local mountains, and with a metal crown stuck rudely on his hairy head, presides over the festivities. This is King Puck, after whom the fair is named. Steve and his mates played on a makeshift stage on the square during the afternoon, and at one point Steve thought it had started raining. He could feel the drips going down his neck, yet when he looked at the audience it didn’t seem to be raining on
them
. He looked up and with horror realised he was standing under King Puck, who was majestically relieving himself.

At their London gig I saw the Ramblers for myself. The show was at the Weavers, a folk music bar with photos from ancient gigs lining the walls and a proper stage in the back room. A perfect setting, therefore, except no one turned up and the band had to play their two sets to an audience of seven. This they did with a dogged, self-deprecating resilience which suggested they were used to this kind of occurrence. Steve had invited me to join them on stage but sensing disaster, and with the moral rectitude of a rat on a doomed ship, I declined and let the Ramblers die their own death of a thousand silences. They battled gallantly and Steve was a cheerful frontman, making hopelessly bad jokes and giving charming explanations of the songs, but he was no lead singer and nor was Peter Brabazon. It was nearly amateur – not the worst gig I’d ever seen, but not by any stretch worthy of Wickham’s talent.

Nor were the various summer jobs Steve told me about, which he got via the Sligo Tourist Board to make some cash when gigs were scarce. Yet there was a certain magic about the thought of him being a ‘fiddling tour guide’ at a local castle, or a ‘ghost fiddler’ hiding on an island on picturesque Lough Gill and playing tunes from the trees as tourists took their lunch in a ruined abbey, or acting the part of W.B. Yeats’s ‘Fiddler Of Dooney’ at a fair in the town of Dooney Rock while people danced, as the poem said, ‘like the wave of the sea’. And there was something noble about it too – a man doing work beneath his station in order to feed a family. For as well as providing for daughter Amy, who lived with his estranged second wife, Steve had married again and he and third wife Heidi now had a baby son.

In the summer of 1998 I played a solo show at the Galway Arts Festival. Steve and Anto Thistlethwaite were in the audience and joined me for the encore, and I heard the old magic in Steve’s playing. In fact, it was as if he
wanted
me to hear it. On ‘Fisherman’s Blues’ and Hank Williams’s ‘Honky Tonkin’’ he reprised all my favourite Fellow Who Fiddles tricks: dizzying harmonic swirls, bright bursts of happy melody, lazy country double stops. It was as if I was being musically seduced.

By now I was living in Kew, gathering my wits after the crash and burn of my solo career, busy writing my next album. It was shaping up to be a fuzz-driven psychedelic rock record, and after the way Steve played with me in Galway I tried to imagine his fiddle in its sonic mix, but no matter how I approached it, fiddle didn’t fit. Sometime in the future, I figured, perhaps when I finished the unreleased
Fisherman’s Blues
music and stuck it out as an album, a project I’d been planning for years, I’d ask him to come on board.

As things turned out, Steve came to me first. In the autumn of 1999 he rang me out of the blue and said, ‘How about doin’ a gig in Sligo? I’ll put together a band to back you.’ I thought for a few seconds then replied, ‘Forget the band – let’s do a two-man show, just you and me together.’ And so it was that in the last weeks of the twentieth century I returned to the west of Ireland to restore my creative partnership with The Fellow Who Fiddles. Steve was well recovered by now from his Rathbraughan doldrums. Time and the self-healing power of the human heart had done their work. But when I arrived in Sligo and visited him at his new house I began to see there was another reason: new wife Heidi, a bustling, no-nonsense blonde English dynamo. Heidi ran the place, boxed Steve’s ears, looked after three-year-old Tom, designed stage sets for local theatrical events, and produced countless paintings of inquisitive ducks which festooned the walls of their home, Harebell House, which Steve and she had built a few years earlier.