Adventures of a Waterboy (35 page)

A carnival of trumpets
. Played by Roddy Lorimer, the Glaswegian trumpeter whose solos and horn work were a hallmark of the early Waterboys sound. Roddy was introduced to me by Anthony Thistlethwaite in 1983 and he features on the first five Waterboys albums, as well as
Still Burning
(1997) and
Book Of Lightning
(2007). For the solo on ‘The Whole Of The Moon’ I asked him to do for the song what the piccolo trumpet did for The Beatles’ ‘Penny Lane’, though without copying its melody, and to enter ‘like a bolt of sunlight streaming through a gap in the clouds’. Roddy began drafting a score and within an hour had recorded a four-part solo, in a cleverly structured series of heraldic fanfares, which did the job beautifully.

Candy-flavoured ‘la-la’ backing vocals
. Sung by Liz Wilcox, an Australian friend of Anthony Thistlethwaite’s. At the time of ‘The Whole Of The Moon’ she was calling herself Max Edie.

Chapter 6: Don’t Forget To Get On The Bus

My record company bosses, Nigel and Chris
. As well as partnering Nigel Grainge at Ensign Records, Chris Hill was and still is a top British soul and funk DJ. The third member of the Ensign team was Doreen Loader, who ran the company business. Doreen was the background hero of The Waterboys’ first incarnation and handled our day-to-day affairs for many years. She remained a good friend after I left Ensign.

The Fellow Who Fiddles
. Steve’s pre-Waterboys activities, other than playing with In Tua Nua and Sinead O’Connor, included playing fiddle on U2’s ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ and guesting with them on a 1982 Irish tour.

He’d met Steve when In Tua Nua had played support to him in Ireland a year earlier
. Slane Castle, July 1984. Steve guested on Bob’s encore, playing fiddle on ‘Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat’.

Top Of The Pops
. A weekly BBC show that ran from 1964 until 2006. It’s often said that I refused to appear on
Top Of The Pops
with ‘The Whole Of The Moon’. I’d loved watching
Top Of The Pops
in the sixties and early seventies, but by the eighties the show had degenerated into a garish celebration of everything I liked least about pop, and was a filter through which I felt it was impossible to convey authentic energies of rock’n’roll, power, inspiration, or even an attitude. An appearance on
Top Of The Pops
could increase a band’s audience but at the cost of being tamed, and I agreed with The Clash, who throughout their lifespan refused to appear on the show. I even discussed it with Joe Strummer after a Clash show in Edinburgh in 1980, during my Another Pretty Face days. We exchanged baleful views on the programme, and though my band hadn’t yet had a sniff of a hit I zealously told Joe, ‘We won’t do
Top Of The Pops
either!’ ‘That makes two of us,’ he replied, sealing the deal. Five years later, when ‘The Whole Of The Moon’ reached the charts, the offer came for The Waterboys to do
Top Of The Pops
, thus testing both my conviction and my fealty to Chairman Joe. But we were playing Boston on the night of the TV filming, midway through an American tour, and I chose not to cancel the gig and fly back and forth across the Atlantic. If we’d been in the UK I might have conquered my resistance and done it; no one will ever know. When ‘The Whole Of The Moon’ was a hit in 1991,
Top Of The Pops
broadcast the promo video. My attitude had softened by 1993 when The Waterboys finally appeared on the show with ‘Glastonbury Song’.

A young piano player, Guy Chambers
. Now a successful songwriter, best known for his work as writer/producer with Robbie Williams.

I wrote to Gary Kurfirst and split with him
. I’d signed a three-year contract with Gary and after our split the spectre of some form of legal action hung over me for several years, adding an extra frisson of stress to the making of
Fisherman’s Blues
: what would happen if the album came out while the contract was still in force? An injunction, lawsuit or other drawn-out battle seemed likely, and perhaps it was fortuitous that the music slowed me down. When the album appeared some months after the contract expired, Gary took no action. In fact, he never charged me for the nine months in 1985 when he actively managed me, for which I’m grateful. In 1991 we bumped into each other at Los Angeles airport, a cordial reunion. Gary died in 2009.

Chapter 7: You Guys Are The Whizz!

B.P. Fallon … seems to have been present, Zelig-like, at every significant moment in rock since 1965
. Including both of John Lennon’s 1970
Top Of The Pops
performances of ‘Instant Karma’, and The Rolling Stones 1969 Hyde Park concert, which he watched from a lighting scaffold above the stage. Showing me a picture of the gig twenty years later, B.P. pointed to a pair of legs at the top of the frame, the rest of their owner cut out of the shot, and said, ‘Those are my legs, man.’

A bustling dining hall with a vaulted ceiling and fantastical stained glass windows
. The windows in Bewleys Cafe, Dublin, were created by Harry Clarke (1889–1931).

I’d got to know Paul McGuinness when The Waterboys had supported U2 on some shows
. Twenty dates in the UK and North America in November and December 1984.

Nothing we could put on a record
. Three Keltner/Patitucci tracks have since been released. I returned to the tapes in 2001 and 2005, edited three extended workouts to song length and filled in the missing lead vocals. They are: ‘Blues For Your Baby’ and ‘Lonesome Old Wind’ (
Too Close To Heaven
, BMG 2001/
Fisherman’s Blues
Part Two
,
Razor & Tie
, 2002) and ‘Soon As I Get Home’ (CD2 of
Fisherman’s Blues
remaster, EMI 2006).

Chapter 8: The Power Of The Music Gives Everybody Wings

We Free Kings
. Named after a 1961 Roland Kirk album, and also the ‘Wee Frees’, the nickname of the Scottish Free Church. Joe Kingman’s band played round Britain and Ireland from 1985 to 1991. They released one album,
Hell On Earth And Rosy-Cross
(1988).

A crowd of several hundred had converged on the docks, including every busker in Dublin
. Among their number was a teenage Glen Hansard, later of The Frames and The Swell Season.

A Yosser Hughes moustache
. A character in the early-eighties British TV series
Boys From The Blackstuff
, Yosser was a doomed Liverpudlian hard-man who entered national folklore.

Letham Village Hall was a lonesome-looking redbrick building on a hill overlooking a tiny hamlet
. Five months before The Waterboys’ appearance at The Pictish Festival, Letham Village Hall hosted Scottish accordionist Jimmy Shand’s televised 1986
Christmas Eve Party
.

The Cibeal.
Pronounced ‘Ki-bal’. Loosely translated it means ‘hubbub’.

Chapter 9: Go Slowly And You Might See Something

Many of the tunes I’d been hearing in Dublin, I realised, were Scottish
. The majority of the trad melodies that pepper the
Fisherman’s Blues
and
Room To Roam
albums are Scottish. To compound the cultural cross-fertilisation, most of these were introduced to the proceedings by our
Irish
members, Steve Wickham and Sharon Shannon. We didn’t care where the tunes came from; we played what we liked, and anyone who says The Waterboys somehow appropriated ‘Irish’ music is talking through their hat.

In the bloom of their youth on the Isle of Mull
. Mull is one of the Scottish Hebridean Islands.

The Joshua Tree, on which I heard the spiritual seeker vision and big music of the last two Waterboys album re-calibrated
. Orthodox rock history doesn’t acknowledge any Waterboys influence on either U2 or their album
The Joshua Tree
. Even broaching the subject of a Waterboys influence on U2 is to risk appearing churlish because convention considers it unseemly for one artist to claim influence over another, and not without reason. But the evidence of my ears tells me Bono and The Edge were paying rapt attention when we supported them on tour and when they listened to
A Pagan Place
and
This Is The Sea
.

Boreens
. Irish country back roads.

Bodhrán
. Irish goatskin hand drum, pronounced ‘bow-rawn’.

The Crock Of Gold
. A novel by the Irish author James Stephens (1882–1950), published in 1912.

The locals conversed in Irish
. Also referred to in the text as Gaelic, this Celtic language is still spoken in regions of Ireland and on some of the Hebridean isles of Scotland.

I’d … work … late into the night, often till dawn
. Often, in fact, late enough to see the top of the Spiddal postman’s green minivan bobbing over the stone walls as it chugged along the country lanes delivering the morning mail. This vision had resonance for me because often, after staying up all night recording at Windmill Lane the previous year, I would wind down in the studio lounge watching early morning kids’ TV, which in those days featured
Postman Pat
, the top of whose green minivan bobbed over the stone walls as he chugged along the country lanes delivering the morning mail.

Galway was a convivial city then as now, but in 1988 it had a slow, magical character
. And a lawless streak typified by the Harbour Bar, a festering Fellini-esque dockside den with peeling flock wallpaper and sticky carpets where, due to some arcane by-law, the coastguard had jurisdiction instead of the police. This resulted in it being ‘legal’ to smoke reefers in the bar. It was demolished in the nineties.

The Islandman
. Irish title
An t-Oileánach
, first issued in 1929, currently published by Oxford Paperbacks. This is an Irish classic, a wonderful book describing the now-extinct life of the Blasket Islanders off the Kerry coast.

Irish was the same language as the Scottish Gaelic my grandmother spoke, and I was separated from it by only two generations
. The passage of the language down generations was broken when my grandmother’s family moved from Gaelic-speaking Mull to Glasgow in the early twentieth century. Her children, my mother and uncle, grew up speaking only English.

Inishmore, largest of the Aran Islands
. The three Aran Islands – Inisheer (‘eastern island’), Inishmaan (‘middle island’) and Inishmore (‘big island’) – can be reached by plane or ferry from Connemara or by boat from Doolin on the Clare coast. They are every bit as strange and rewardingly unique to visit as I’ve indicated in the text. Among the best books on Aran are Tim Robinson’s two volumes
Stones Of Aran: Pilgrimage
(Lilliput Press/Faber 1986) and
Stones Of Aran: Labyrinth
(Lilliput Press/Penguin 1995, both published in the USA by New York Review Books Classics). Also recommended:
The Aran Islands
by J.M. Synge (1907).

Kilronan, a cluster of white buildings hunched on a hill round a little harbour
. Kilronan has grown a lot since my first visit, with many new buildings, a new pier and much tourist development. When I returned in 2009 after a break of eighteen years such were the changes that I felt like a character in a movie who’s been catapulted a hundred years into the future.

Vinnie was staying in a house a few yards away
. Vinnie Kilduff was on Inishmore to record local Gaelic singers. Some of the recordings he made appeared twenty years later on a 2CD set called
The Aran Lifeboat Collection
(Aran Recordings, 2008).

Sean Watty
. His real surname was Flaherty, but Sean was known to everyone on the island as ‘Sean Watty’ because he played in Joe Watty’s Pub. Like most Irish box players, Sean played button accordion, not piano accordion. He died in Galway in the nineties.

Sean Watty and another local musician called Máirtín were waiting with accordion and banjo at the ready
. Pronounced ‘Mawr-cheen’. Twenty years later, Máirtín
told me that on that first night at the American Bar he and Sean decided to play as fast and wild as they could, in order to show up the pop musicians, but that Anto and I ‘kept up with everything we threw at ye’.

We’d become part of the local colour
. But not quite acclimatised. On the day we were due to catch the plane back to Galway, Anto and I were having such a good time we decided to stay longer. From the one phone box in Kilronan I called the island’s airfield to cancel our tickets and book some new ones. But the chap on the other end of the line, an older man with a slow island voice, wasn’t best pleased. ‘If you bought a ticket you have to take the flight,’ he said, ‘you can’t be goin’ changin’ it.’ Maybe this was how they did things in Aran, but I was used to the mainstream world where if plans change you cancel or postpone a journey, and it’s nobody’s business but your own. I argued with the fellow and stuck fast to my position despite the waves of disapproval coming at me down the phone line. The conversation ended with me, royally cheesed off, telling him to forget it, that we’d take a boat instead. In a Kilronan pub that afternoon I told Anto about the phone call. When I’d finished the story, he said, ‘The guy who runs the airline is Colie Hernon. Is that who you spoke to?’ I wasn’t sure if it was, but I’d heard of Colie Hernon all right. He was the island’s equivalent to a mayor, the man who brought the airline to Aran, who’d organised the island’s first supply of electricity in the seventies, and who ran the lifeboat. The local Big Man. Still, I thought, that didn’t give him the right to give me a row for cancelling our flight tickets like I was a naughty schoolboy. With indignation I thumped my fist on the bar and said, ‘Well, I don’t care who he is, he doesn’t have the right to speak to me like that!’ A few moments later we got up to leave. As we stepped down from the bar, sitting a few feet behind us quietly reading a newspaper was Colie Hernon. He looked up at us with a hint of mirth in his eyes, said, ‘Hello there, lads,’ in a jaunty but unmistakably matter-closed way that was impossible to reply to, and returned to his paper.