Adventures of a Waterboy (30 page)

Harebell House was a pale blue cottage on a plot of rough land under a hill four miles from Sligo. Mimicking the style of old Irish cottages it had one main room, running almost the length of the house, with a small bedchamber at each end. But there the traditional similarities ended. For stepping into Harebell House was to enter a wonderland. The walls were bright green with orange skirting, the windows were set in scarlet wooden frames, hanging from the rafters were strings of bells, bright ribbons and spider plants with heart-shaped leaves and curling tendrils. On the window ledges stood tattered piles of dictionaries, cookbooks, music folios and picture books. Cats slept on high shelves. The mantelpiece was a wooden railway sleeper Steve had found by the side of a road. A huge carved leaping hare, the totem animal of the establishment, was fixed majestically to the wall above a cheerful roaring fireplace. And at one end the room was overlooked by a minstrel’s gallery stuffed with boxes, theatre costumes and Steve’s musical instruments. It was a magical mad delightful place, the product of Steve’s and Heidi’s personalities, and the absolute opposite of the dump I’d found him in during his soul’s dark night at Rathbraughan.

Our concert was booked a week later at The Hawk’s Well Theatre in Sligo, and I was billeted in a guesthouse half a mile away on the shores of Lough Gill, opposite the island where Steve had been a ‘ghost fiddler’. Each day he picked me up in his ancient banger of a car which shunted and chuntered (often giving up till Steve performed some unknown rustic alchemy on it) back to Harebell House where we rehearsed. Or tried to. For it was tough pinning Steve down to rehearsal. Every time we started work we’d get an hour of playing done before he would lay down his fiddle and announce he had to go into Sligo to see a man about a dog, or some other dubious business, leaving me to gaze at the bright walls of Harebell House or moulder in my B&B.

After three days of stop-start, stop-start I exploded and told Steve in exasperated tones that I was used to rehearsing professionally, that it was arrogant of him to attend to all this other business on my time when I’d come from London to work with him, and that he couldn’t ‘just keep walking out’. ‘If you don’t work a bit fucking harder,’ I said furiously, ‘we’ll be shite on stage on Thursday night.’ All of which, while pertinent to the work in hand, was also a coded way of saying
I’m still mad that you fucked off and left me in the shit with a world tour to play back in 1990!

As if opening a floodgate, my outburst had the effect of unleashing a wild reciprocal rant from Steve containing all manner of long-buttoned-down grievances, real and fantastical, climaxing in his passionate assertions that I’d forced him out of The Waterboys ten years before and that my royal arrogance quite equalled his own, with particularly emotive reference being made to my insistence that he sing no songs at our upcoming gig and leave all the vocals to me. With a sudden jolt to my guts I realised I’d muscled back into the role of Steve’s boss instead of being his colleague and partner, and that I must have done this so many times in the past that it was an old, acute wound for my friend.

I was stunned into silence. Both sets of words hung lividly in the air above our heads … and then evaporated. For while the eruption had exposed the unspoken undertows of our past, it had another more profound effect. As we sat facing each other, scoured and unburdened of our baggage, a deep recognition passed between us. Steve’s jet black eyes glittered at me and I knew who we were: two musical soulmates. And none of the other stuff – the who did what to who back when – mattered a jot. What mattered was the deep feeling of old comradeship and something that felt a lot like love. And the love was flowing both ways. Quietly and humbly we hugged each other and set about the business of rehearsing properly, with no more men to see about dogs, and a couple of Steve’s vocals included in the set.

The show was on Thursday 7 October, and as we soundchecked at the Hawk’s Well Steve was more nervous than I’d ever seen him, and not with excitement. The man was terrified. But when we walked out on stage in front of a packed audience his old performing nature kicked in, and though it took him a couple of songs to settle into his groove soon he was playing eloquently with a restrained version of the power and flair of old. We did songs from several Waterboys albums, mostly those Steve had played on, plus a version of ‘Bring ’Em All In’ with a local string quartet he’d assembled. We sweated, cruised, played off each other, negotiated a few tight musical corners and broke through to some high, power-driven uplands, and ninety minutes later it was all over. Or rather, it was beginning. The Fellow Who Fiddles and I had reclaimed our musical brotherhood from the wreckage of the past, and the fire was burning again.

Chapter 19: Hoop Dancing

On a summer’s evening in the early nineties I’m at a theatre on Seventh Avenue, watching a troupe of Native Americans perform a modern take on traditional American Indian dance. Towards the end a young man in feathered costume and headband walks onto the stage alone, carrying a set of thin white wooden hoops, which he lays at his feet.

As the music begins he flicks one of the hoops into the air with a movement of his foot. He catches it deftly and begins to dance, twirling the hoop, slipping inside it, spinning it around his hips and shoulders. Then he gathers another, then another and another, integrating each successive hoop in an increasingly complex dance, forming them into the shapes of wings, tails and perfect spheres. He adds hoops until he’s dancing with thirty of them in a dizzying, blurred myriad of patterns, never falling out of graceful movement and symmetry. The performance is visually stunning, but has a deeper significance: the hoops symbolise the different parts of the dancer’s life and culture, the threads of his world, and the dance is a celebration of his having learned to move between them with balance and mastery. As the Hoop Dancer spins he is demonstrating not only his power over the tools of the dance, but his mastery of himself. Watching from my balcony seat, I want this mastery too.

Finding myself in suburban Kew in the spring of 1998 felt like a banishment, as if I’d been spat out by the machinery of pop and left to fester in a snoozy hinterland. To my mind Kew was a way station, nothing more, an impression heightened by the railway line at the end of the garden and by our location directly under the Heathrow flight paths. Planes flew over the street every forty-five seconds, while Concorde, loudest of all created beings, went by twice daily, renting the fabric of reality with an ear and earth-splitting roar.

This was not a landscape designed to hold me, and within weeks of arriving in Kew I felt the familiar wanderlust. As if on cue an old haunt soon beckoned. That May I returned to Spiddal to film a performance for Irish television, and was stirred all over again by the beauty and wild charm of the place. On the three days of my visit the Connemara coast was windless and sun-sharpened, its crazy fields and rocky slopes shining silver green in the Atlantic light, appearing to my hungry eyes like nothing less than the primordial paradise of the philosophers’ golden age. What’s more, though I was yesterday’s man on the British rock scene, I was a folk legend in the West of Ireland. Everywhere I went people I didn’t know said hello to me, nodded or said things like, ‘I was at The Waterboys’ show in Ennistymon in 1989, ’twas mighty!’ And when the television filming was completed everyone went to Hughes’s bar, where I was feted like the long-lost prodigal son and a giant music session ensued. I flew back to Kew ready to up sticks and move once and for all to County Galway, and cajoled Janette to come with me on a fortnight’s exploratory trip.

We rented the same rural bungalow I’d stayed in during the making of
Room To Roam
, but while Janette liked the place for a visit and could see why I adored it she didn’t want to live in Spiddal. I had to decide between two of the great loves of my life: my wife and the west of Ireland. No contest. I sacrificed the dream of moving to Spiddal and we returned to Kew. But after every sacrifice comes a gift of grace, and Kew had some unexpected gifts in store for me, starting with a revelation. For twenty years I’d moved from place to place, immersing myself in the atmosphere and character of each new location. Edinburgh, Notting Hill, Dublin, Spiddal, New York and Findhorn had all impacted on my imagination, my music, and my sense of identity. But somewhere along the line I’d fooled myself into believing that where I was defined me and my work. Now, exiled amid the strait-laced terraces of Kew in a location that said little to my soul, this illusion was unravelled. For instead of finding inspiration in my physical or cultural surroundings I had to find it inside myself. As I prowled Kew’s leafy streets that first year I heard the music in my head still rolling, unfurling itself into new shapes and forms, and I became aware of an internal battery located in my guts, a kind of growling Mike-Scott-ness like the steady roar of an engine, still full of drive and ambition. Denuded of a magical environment in which to dream, I dreamed anyway and finally learned how to embody a line in one of my old songs:
Home is in me wherever I roam
.

In this state of mind I began making the music that would get me back in the game. And because my stock was so low it had be spectacularly good if I was going to get people listening to me again. I had a crop of new songs, harder numbers than I’d written for years, with cut-glass guitar grooves and titles like ‘The Charlatan’s Lament’ and ‘Dumbing Down The World’, each an autobiographical snapshot exploring the ebb and flow of my emotions and how alien I felt in the crazy London I’d returned to. As I rotated them on the radio of my imagination they crackled with a psychedelic, elemental roar. This would be the sound I recorded with, but I had to bring myself up to speed with rock’n’roll first; I’d been out of sync with rock for so long I’d stopped being creatively removed from it and become simply out of touch. If I wanted to make people pay attention to me I needed to absorb, master, and subvert the sonic fashions of the day. So I spent a year filling my head with Radiohead’s
OK Computer
, Mercury Rev’s exquisite
Deserter’s Songs
, Beck, The Wu-Tang Clan, Death In Vegas, Cornershop and a hundred other late-nineties luminaries.

In the process I rediscovered the thrill of following the creative edge of rock. I decided to approach every instrument, voice and sound on my new record in a spirit of invention; to use the recording process itself as a form of creativity – like the artists I was listening to and as I’d done myself on early Waterboys albums – rather than just a physical space to capture performances in, which was what the studio had become for me since
Fisherman’s Blues
. To achieve this I needed a new arsenal of sounds, so for several months I haunted Denmark Street, London’s historic Tin Pan Alley where the city’s musical instrument shops were clustered in a brightly coloured row, and sought out the effects and gizmos that would enable me to produce the sound in my head. I loved Denmark Street. It was the scuzzy heart of British rock’n’roll and as I tramped its Dickensian pavement I could sense the ghosts of London’s musical past; song sellers, bandleaders, sharkskin-suited agents, teddy boys and skifflers, early sixties folkies just off the bus from Glasgow or Newcastle, the spectral figure of Jimi Hendrix strutting past in his brocaded guardsman’s jacket, Elton John and David Bowie hustling for breaks at the dawn of the seventies, the Sex Pistols loitering with intent five years later, fighting, fornicating and writing ‘I’m A Lazy Sod’ in a dingy basement eighteen months before the revolution they unleashed caught fire.

I was walking in all their footsteps, jostling for my own corner once more in the landscape of rock, mining for the means of expression that would help me stake my claim. And I found what I needed. My sonic plunder included a metal device called a Micro Synthesizer, which turned guitars into snakes and made
suckk!
and
ffooopp!
noises; vintage phase and tremolo pedals that wired in tandem resulted in fizzling psychedelic paint-wheels of sound; a royal selection of fuzz, muff, crunch and distortion machines; a splendid scarlet-painted Theremin (a hollow box with an aerial that emitted rubbery-sounding electronic wails when I carved shapes in the air around it with my hands) and a blues harp microphone, which made my voice jagged and grotesque.

In search of additional cultural ballast I went back to vintage gospel music, a passion from the
Fisherman’s Blues
days. I bought forty or fifty CDs of recordings from the twenties and scoured them for samples, lyric ideas and song titles, one of which I paraphrased for my album’s title
A Rock In The Weary Land
. Next I stashed up on all the BBC and movie sound effects I could find on CD or vinyl and even recorded my own, an absorbing pursuit that found me trudging the streets of Kew holding a microphone under an umbrella to capture the crackling sound of rain on fabric, or sitting on a tube train recording its rattling rhythm and fragments of people’s conversation. Finally I went to an Indian music shop in Southall where I picked up a Hindu beat-box, several weird-shaped tambourines that made bright
shrashy
sounds and, mightiest of all, two sweet-sounding harmoniums with inscrutable eastern drones and a button the turbaned dude in the shop called ‘the trembler’, which triggered a fast
drrrrrrrrr
sound like a musical pneumatic drill. Thus was I armed, equipped, suited and booted with the tools I needed to transfer the roaring music in the cave of my skull onto the miracle of magnetic tape, but before I could begin, destiny interrupted with some long-unfinished personal business. Tracking down my dad.

I hadn’t seen my father since Christmas 1970. I remembered him from my childhood as a handsome moustached fellow who worked in an Edinburgh music shop and spent his spare time sculpting and painting in his study. His name was Allan and though he wasn’t a musician several of my clearest memories of him were musical: leading me and my mum in sing-songs in the family car, giving me my first guitar, telling me how exciting he thought the Stones’ ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ was.

When he left he did so gradually: after he moved out of the house, he came round ever more rarely before finally disappearing altogether. He didn’t take me aside and explain what was happening, nor did he stay in touch once he’d left Edinburgh. And because children don’t know how to process such things, like most abandoned kids I felt I was to blame and that I must be wrong or unlovable in some way. But these feelings got buried over time and my father’s disappearance from my life became my normal. As I grew older I pictured him as a wanderer, a free spirit moving from scene to scene from whom I inherited the same tendency. I often wondered where he was and what would happen if I bumped into him; surely he was aware of my life as a musician and must have seen me on TV or read about me in the press.

I’d never tried to find him but as I approached forty something shifted. I’d always imagined our meeting would trigger an awkward process of reconciliation or some form of rejection, and the fact of my lost father had grown in my mind until he occupied a large shadowy corner of my psyche, a domain better left undisturbed. But as I discussed him one day with Janette in the kitchen at Kew I realised I no longer cared about these forebodings. I didn’t, as the Glaswegians say,
gie a shite
. What I suddenly understood was that not knowing him was holding me back, stunting me. I needed to find the old man, discover who the hell he was, and most important of all reclaim authority over my own destiny. I needed to say to him: you may have walked out of my life but you can’t
stay
out of my life.

The only information I had was that he’d moved to the South of England in 1971. So Janette and I went to the Family Records Office in Islington and spent several afternoons looking for any record of his having remarried. And finally, in one of the huge, medieval-sized volumes of records, we found his name on a marriage certificate for 1972. Bingo! Then, cross-referencing Allan’s name and that of his wife, we found details of the births of two children, a half-brother and sister I didn’t even know I had! There was an address too, near Birmingham, but it was for 1984 and I figured that after fourteen years they’d surely have moved elsewhere. But when we checked the voters’ rolls for the district, to my amazement there he was, the old fucker, still at the same address.

Rather than tip him off in advance and risk denial or some other form of brush-off, I decided to go and knock on his door. So on a sharp, windy December day, a week before my fortieth birthday, Janette and I took a train to a town on the outskirts of Birmingham and walked the mile to my dad’s house, the longest mile of my life.

I had the address on a piece of paper and counted down the houses. The Scotts’ was the last but one house on a suburban terrace, next to a bare little park. I knocked on the door and a teenage boy answered it – my half-brother, with a question-mark face and blond hair. To my surprise he didn’t show any recognition when he saw me. I asked if his father was there and the lad replied warily that his dad would be back in half an hour. I asked if we could come in and wait. But this was Middle England and bohemian outlanders in colourful clothes who come asking questions don’t get asked in to wait. Junior held his ground, like the good lad he was, and said no. The boy closed the door but he must have been alarmed because a neighbour woman, roused by telephone, quickly materialised from the opposite house. She bustled up to us and with concern and suspicion in her voice asked us what we wanted. I told her my business and she was immediately mollified but all she said was, ‘Oh, well, he’ll be here soon’ and hurried back indoors.

And so we stood like tinkers on the pavement, feeling extremely out of place. My heart beat like a sledgehammer in my chest and Janette held my arm, a steadying rock until, somewhat earlier than the mooted half-hour, a car approached.

I saw his face through the windscreen but couldn’t recognise him. It had been too long. But I knew it was him. He pulled up at the house and stepped out, reaching in his pockets for his key. As we walked towards him I tried to match the man in front of me with the memory traces in my mind. He turned and looked quizzically at us. I searched for the right words but after all these years, having arrived at the moment so long awaited, so often imagined, I couldn’t speak. Janette, seeing my difficulty, did it for me.