Adventures of a Waterboy (31 page)

‘Allan,’ she said, ‘this is your son.’ My father’s eyes and mine met, and a cocktail of confusion and recognition passed across his still-handsome face.

‘I wouldn’t have known you,’ he spluttered then added, dramatically, ‘but I always knew this day would come.’ Lost for what to say next he asked us into the house. We walked behind him and I noticed two things: my little half-brother watching us through the window, and the way my father’s hair curled round his collar at the back of his neck, exactly like I remembered it from when I was a child. He sent the lad upstairs and sat with Janette and me in the lounge, a room like a million others, with family photos on the mantelpiece, an electric fire in the hearth and a copy of the
Radio Times
under the TV. In this domesticated theatre the long-withheld questions were finally asked: Why did I never hear from you again? Where did you go? Do you understand what your disappearance meant to me?

Allan answered my questions, or tried to. He explained he’d never got in touch because he’d felt it was kinder that way. And clearly he’d done what he’d thought was best according to his wisdom, or lack of it, at the time. But though he tried to sum up what he imagined my experience must have been, it was clear Allan didn’t understand how his leaving had impacted on me. I didn’t need him to understand my reality, but I needed him to acknowledge that he didn’t, and to stop theorising about what it must be like to be the abandoned child. Though I couldn’t inch him towards such an acknowledgment now, I was determined I would in future.

It was a weird afternoon; four or five hours that expanded and compressed as the conversation swung from deep waters to commonplace banalities. Much was discovered: Allan hadn’t known I’d become a musician and had never heard of The Waterboys, and his kids hadn’t known they had an older half-brother. When Allan’s wife and daughter arrived home from shopping, the lad was retrieved from upstairs and we were all introduced, sitting together in the living room, a strange uneasy sixsome. The tough conversation continued into evening.

In the process I realised my dad and I were less similar than I’d expected. He was a real character, a cross between a straight Dirk Bogarde and an old-time stage tragedian. I liked him. And second time around he was clearly a loving, solid family man, but he wasn’t at all the figure of my imagination. All those years I’d believed I was cast in the image of my father, I’d actually been casting him in the image of
me
. The free spirit shifting from scene to scene was myself: a tendency I now understood came more from my mother, with her penchant for moving house every few years, than my old estranged dad. By learning who he was I’d learned a lot about who I was too, and when Allan drove us back to the railway station that night I’d got what I came for: a headful of answers and the right to have my father in my life.

Next day I was overwhelmed by a tidal wave of feelings. Deep shit was working itself out inside me. At some subterranean level of consciousness I was reporting back to the young Mike whose dad had walked out on him, and the new information was rearranging the framework of my emotional DNA. And there was a new feeling too, an inner buzz of wellbeing and self-honouring that told me I’d done the right thing. I’d faced down my oldest fear and jettisoned a motherlode of obsolete psychological architecture.

For the next year Allan and I corresponded by letter, an exchange that enabled us to express things still unsaid, and to establish the crucial point about his not understanding how his disappearance had impacted on me. These letters didn’t flow fast. Replies both ways took a month or more each time, a measure of the emotional depths we were plumbing, and step by step we cleared the debris of the past and emerged into the sunlight of a new and cordial relationship with each other.

The reunion with my dad didn’t lead to a stream of new songs; in fact I didn’t write anything about it, without actually intending not to. But having confronted my old shadow, when I finally began recording
A Rock In The Weary Land
in early 1999 there was a difference in the way I felt and carried myself, and I worked with a new self-confidence. I needed it, too: I was coming back from career rock bottom without a record label, with only a headful of songs and the skin I stood up in. And because this was the first album I’d ever made without record company money and I’d lost my shirt on the
Still Burning
tour, I hadn’t anything to spend. But the gods of rock’n’roll sent me two benefactors. My ex-lawyer John Kennedy lent me money and I found myself a new manager who got me cheap recording time in a decent studio.

His name was Philip Tennant and ten years earlier he’d worked as a recording engineer on
Fisherman’s Blues
. I can still picture him turning up on his first morning at Rockfield Studios, bright as a pin, to find me red-eyed and stubble-chinned, deep in late album burnout, having been up all night doing a very bad mix of ‘The Stolen Child’. Mercifully he took over and we finished
Fisherman’s Blues
together, becoming friends in the process. By the time our paths re-crossed a decade later, courtesy of a chance meeting on the ever-fateful Portobello Road, Philip had become a manager and promptly offered to represent me. As the Svengalis of rock weren’t exactly queuing up to have me on their books, and I remembered Philip as a good guy, I said yes. It would turn out to be my best managerial relationship since good old Z.

The studio Philip found for me was called Maison Rouge, a faded old joint on the Fulham Road where I’d done a couple of sessions in the early eighties. Soon I was set up with my gear and gizmos, having a serious creative experience and a whole lot of first-rate fun at the same time, just as it should be. And as the project progressed I called in some fellow explorers.

First was Thighpaulsandra, a Welsh keyboard warlock with a penchant for Mohawk haircuts and bloodcurdling prog-rock riffs. I’d seen a photo of him loitering by stone circles like a fur-clad gnome in Julian Cope’s ‘earth mysteries’ book
The Modern Antiquarian
. Expecting a lunatic genius, possibly speaking in Elvish, I was surprised to be greeted at the studio by a soft-spoken, casually dressed chap of about forty, smiling placidly behind a bank of keyboards, a cup of tea in one hand and his Mohawk grown out into a sensible crop. It was like meeting an assistant scientist or a technical boffin at the BBC. I couldn’t equate the gentle fellow before me with either his outrageous sexually charged name or his reputation as a sonic terrorist. But when the music began, someone else appeared.

Thighpaulsandra’s first contribution was on ‘Crown’, a blues-hewn fuzz-Mellotron battle charge, and as the track blasted out of the speakers, I found myself watching a wild moonstruck elf, a brilliant Gollum locked in the frame of a man, and it was the elf that was making the music! The keyboard spoke in tongues, a ferocious but disciplined torrent of sound filled with brainstorms, shards of metal, lightning-struck towers and vengeful Druid horsemen, all of which seemed to materialise in the air of the room, passing before my imagination, conjured and manifested by the exultant elf-wizard.

I’d seen such things before, trad players who morphed from shy farmers into flame-eyed centaurs the moment they stuck a tin whistle between their lips or a fiddle under their jaw, and I knew how to deal with it. I directed the music in terms of what the elf was capable of (which appeared to be anything) but I addressed myself only to the man, who stepped seamlessly back into control every time the playing stopped. Thighpaulsandra had mastered the art of allowing his inner wizard, his genius, full expression while he played, without it hijacking or overwhelming his persona. Man and daemon co-existed in dynamic harmony.

My next playmate was a teenage drum programmer called Rowan who lived in a top-floor bedsit on Ladbroke Grove, where I spent three days listening while he prepared rhythm tracks for me. Rowan’s sampling gear was state of the art, all shiny effects racks and wall-sized speakers meticulously assembled, and clearly meant more to him than life itself. But everything else in the bedsit was squalid and scum-encrusted, especially a vast pile of dirty dishes, not unlike the one in the opening scene of
Withnail And I
, that teetered round the filthy sink, abuzz with flies, and had been there long enough to become a culture. This tower of grime emitted a thin, curdled, somehow
satisfied
smell that haunted the room, though Rowan, like any teenager in his own mess, was oblivious and quite immune to it. I sat amidst the sordid scene till I could stand it no more, whereupon I fled to a local supermarket and bought rubber gloves, scourers and a bottle of yellow washing up liquid. I heroically cleaned Rowan’s abominable crockery mountain while he sat unperturbed on the far side of the room, sampling the drummers on ancient jazz records and turning fragments of their playing into slick, cunning grooves as pristine as his flat was vile.

I had my own history in the teenage mess department. When I was seventeen my mother went off to teach at summer school for a fortnight, leaving me a set of keys, a list of instructions and a huge fresh chicken on the sideboard, which I absently picked at for a week. One morning I heard a strange sound of distant munching as if an army was gobbling food several miles away. To my horror I saw the chicken had metamorphosed into a vibrating mass of maggots the size of a rugby ball. I sprang into action and did what any sensible teenager left on his own in a house would do: ran and got the woman next door. Neighbour Maggie took one look and whisked my unplanned nature project into a dustbin outside the back door, plate and all, then poured a kettleful of boiling water after it.

Fortunately there was nothing alive in Rowan’s pile of dishes; I’d got to it in time. And his work was brilliant, well worth the price of three days’ purgatory. Using a young creative spirit added a hip freshness to the music, but I needed older heads too. Anthony Thistlethwaite played fuzz mandolin on several sessions; Kevin Wilkinson, veteran of the first Waterboys shows, Dave Ruffian from the 1986 band and Jeremy ‘Swipe’ Stacey all drummed. Palestinian jazz sax-man Gilad Atzmon, The London Community Gospel Choir and a procession of backing singers, including ‘Bjorn’ from the Abba tribute band Bjorn Again, all added their notes. By the summer of 1999 the album’s style was established and my songs nestled in a glittering beautiful-cum-grotesque psychedelic soundscape.

Then midway through the assemblage of this sonic architecture Kew imparted its next revelation. Whenever I’d moved in the previous two decades I’d put my stuff in storage, and by the late nineties I had container-loads of tea chests and boxes stashed in several different cities. In the summer of 1999 Janette and I moved to a house with a large attic, and for the first time I had space to store them all myself – and to go through them.

There were boxes from teenage Ayr, punk-wars Edinburgh, eighties London, Dublin and Spiddal, nineties New York and Findhorn, each a memory capsule with a power to immediately transport me back in time and place, and put me in touch with how I’d felt at all the stages of my long strange road. I found over a thousand books dating from as early as childhood; stacks of music weeklies from 1969 onwards; colourful piles of superhero and underground comics; reams of ancient fan mail and press cuttings documenting the rise of The Waterboys; over a hundred lyric notebooks; my teenage record collection; photo albums of my first bands; cassettes of early Waterboys music I hadn’t listened to in ten years; old clothes; shoeboxes full of personal letters, maps, tour itineraries, promo pictures, menus from restaurants in Jerusalem and Skibbereen, notebooks, scrawled addresses and sets of playing cards.

Lots of things made me cringe – early lyrics, lists of grandiose plans for records and tours that had come to naught, reminders of friends lost or neglected when I’d moved on. And some curious mysteries were explained; for example, why Simon Le Bon of Duran Duran had been weird and standoffish every time I’d passed him in Maison Rouge Studios that spring. An old press cutting I found revealed the answer: in an early eighties interview I’d gratuitously slagged off Duran Duran, and it would appear that Simon remembered. I made a mental note to apologise to him next time our paths crossed.

But the process was inspiring too: my old lyric books enabled me to re-inhabit the Mike Scott of my twenties, a bracing experience like standing on a cliff top in a fierce wind. That young guy had been so wildly on fire, so drunk on wonder, that it was a wonder all over again just to make his acquaintance. Similar glimpses allowed me to re-engage with my teenage dreamer, my west of Ireland trad explorer, my Findhorn seeker, and so on, and to discover that all these characters were still inside me like a set of wavelengths, and that if I chose to I could re-think myself into each one of them.

I’d always wanted to be the kind of artist who could draw on every strand of his music and personality at will, but I hadn’t known how. If I played a rock’n’roll tour I wasn’t able to weave acoustic or Celtic music into it, and vice versa. Now, for the first time, all my past selves and the inspirations they’d worked with were accessible. The discovery reminded me of the concert I’d attended once in New York by The Native American Dance Theatre, the highlight of which was the Hoop Dancer. I’d wanted then what the Hoop Dancer had, the ability to balance my worlds within me and move between them with ease. Seven years later in an attic in Kew, with the contents of two-dozen tea chests strewn around the floor, I’d found the key.

At a one-off solo show that summer I flung songs from all my eras into the set and tried on their different personas like stage costumes. It worked. I could move between them like a shape-shifter, maintaining contact with the original streams of inspiration that had driven each stage of the music. I was the sum of my parts at last. Getting my fire burning again with Steve Wickham, for our two-man Sligo concert occurred shortly after, dovetailed with this process. My partnership with The Fellow Who Fiddles was another wavelength I could tune into, and now it had a future, not just history. But for now the music said ‘wait’
and so I finished
A Rock In The Weary Land
without Steve.