Adventures of a Waterboy (8 page)

Yet my affair with Kate wasn’t compromising my work: the music was flourishing. I may have been feeling gauche and inadequate in the relationship but she dug my music and that meant a lot, and when Kate wanted to be, she was a great encourager. What’s more, having a New York heavyweight like Kate as my girlfriend did a lot for my artistic confidence. Being in her life felt like entering a higher, quickened echelon of popular culture. I stood a few inches taller when I strapped on my guitar.

And the songs were coming too. In the first flush of love I’d written several romantic numbers with titles like ‘Higher In Time’ and ‘Born To Be Together’. And even now, as things became more difficult, a stream of edgy, perplexed songs like ‘We Will Not Be Lovers’ were tumbling out of my head. Even a doomed love affair was healthy for the muse. In September
This Is The Sea
came out, its songs indeed crackling across the American airwaves though not yet in enough volume for the breakthrough everybody wanted. I started to come under pressure to sign extensions to my recording and publishing deals, for as the prospect of success grew closer, the investors – Nigel and Chris’s label Ensign and their paymasters Island – wanted to ensure that if things went sky high they got the maximum payback. But different parties wanted different things and as the one person whose signature on a piece of paper determined how matters would resolve, I was caught in the crossfire. Gary Kurfirst would advise me one way, while Nigel and Chris would advise the opposite. I was constantly pulled, each camp trying to sour my view of the other. To Nigel and Chris, Gary Kurfirst was a shark, an opportunistic Johnny-come-lately who hadn’t done any of the hard work building up the Waterboys, while Gary thought Nigel and Chris were ‘small-time guys’, ‘scumbags’ without a classy idea in their heads.

The murk deepened when I learned Island wouldn’t fund a proper advertising campaign in America unless Ensign guaranteed them more than the two further albums on my contract. I was loath to sign away more; I was fond of Nigel and Chris and appreciated all they’d done for me, but they were like a suit that had grown too small. I didn’t want to be making records with them five or seven years down the line. A solution was to move directly to Island but, close to a commercial breakthrough after years of financing, there was no way Ensign would let me go. The arguments ran for months. And because people in the music business usually tell artists no more than what they want them to hear, I probably knew only the half of it. Yet what all this meant was that there was little prospect of a major campaign with the cash support for extended touring that would give
This Is The Sea
its shot at success. If my instincts had been attuned to the pursuit of success at all costs, I’d have signed whatever I needed to guarantee the push for my record, and hang the consequences. But my instincts were for the courses of action that would let me keep making the music I chose, to continue following my ‘instructions’. That’s what I trusted and Faustian bargains weren’t on the menu.

There was conflict around the choice of singles too. Everyone knew ‘The Whole Of The Moon’ was the potential hit on the album. But this was a demanding song and the lyric was crucial to people’s appreciation of it. The Waterboys weren’t yet an established band and we couldn’t expect our singles to automatically chart, so I suggested we release a rocker like ‘Don’t Bang The Drum’ or ‘Medicine Bow’ first, then follow up with ‘Moon’ when the public’s attention was aroused. But no one agreed. ‘Moon’ was thrown away sacrificially as the first single and sputtered like a damp squib. I’d made the right record but almost as soon as it was out, it seemed, its stars were crossed. All I could do was hope the pieces would somehow shift themselves on the chess table and set off into the maelstrom of our three-month concert tour of Britain, America and Europe.

On stage, at least, the music was exploding. The addition of Steve Wickham was as great as I’d hoped: a one-man artillery battalion. He played rock and blues on his fiddle, all bendy notes and gravity-defying harmonics, and these were the product of his fingers, not added effects. But he had effects too: echo, fuzz, and a gizmo that made his fiddle sound like three or four Steves playing at once. He linked up with the Human Saxophone, Anthony, whom he nicknamed ‘Anto’ after the Irish fashion, to create a two-man orchestral section that made a monumental banshee roar. And best of all Steve was the perfect onstage foil for me, dancing across the stage with rubber legs in baggy trousers, a good-natured Elvis sneer on his lips and strands of gypsy-black hair sticking out through the top of his holey hat, star quality bursting from him like a thousand sparks of lightning.

After the summer auditions we’d settled on a bass and drum combo, Sara Lee, lately of the British post-punk band Gang Of Four, who would have been the first Watergirl, and a drummer called Mike Osborne. But at the last minute they threatened to walk out unless they got higher wages and were fired, not unreasonably, by Gary Kurfirst. Coming on the eve of the tour, though, this was a disaster. So doleful drummer Chris Whitten was recalled, while Kate Lovecraft suggested a bassist from New York. Marco Sin was a gentle-hearted, roly-poly man, and the best bass player I’d ever worked with. He was also an alcoholic and former heroin addict, which, if she knew, Kate neglected to tell me, with near fatal consequences a few months later.

As well as suggesting musicians, Kate had inevitably begun to advise me about my career. This advice, usually opposite to the counsel of my manager, was given with a dramatic spin of, ‘If you don’t do what I suggest, you’re insulting me and choosing Gary Kurfirst over me.’ This pressure did nothing to foster my ability to discern whether Kate was giving good advice or bad, and several times I went to Gary and robustly told him that Kate had suggested such-and-such and that I agreed with her. He would be pissed off, his street-fighter’s nose knocked out of joint, and the wheel of our artist-manager relationship would slip a few degrees further into the mud. I’d stumbled into a classic rock’n’roll trap: the powerful girlfriend who countermands the influence of the manager and so comes between manager and artist. At one point Gary’s assistant Andrea phoned me and said, ‘This is an important time for you. What are you
doing
with her? She’s a neurotic New York nut!’ This, of course, only made me more stubbornly loyal to Kate.

Meanwhile the tectonic plates were shifting under the band. Karl Wallinger had grown resentful of my leadership and, perhaps, the attention I was getting. This came to a head at a soundcheck in Birmingham when I noticed Karl’s keyboards taking up approximately half the stage front, relegating poor Marco Sin to a shadowy rear corner. When I suggested we move his gear a few degrees westwards Karl erupted, accusing me bitterly of thinking I was Bruce Fucking Springsteen and that the musicians were my personal E Street Band. I may not have wanted to be Bruce, but this was my group and the vehicle for my songs, and if Karl, the veteran of one and a half albums, couldn’t deal with it, that was for him to work out. But I didn’t want one musician’s personal drama causing the stage to mutate into a fiefdom, and the keyboards were moved. I resisted the temptation to emulate Z’s right hook and Karl contained his impatience until after the show in Detroit, three weeks later, when he announced his departure to the rest of the band in a motel bedroom.

Karl and I had been friends, often hanging out smoking reefers, listening to music and talking till dawn. He’d brought a lot to Waterboys recordings, especially
This Is The Sea
, but dealing with him in the daily life of the band had become a burden. Every time we came off the road I swore to myself I’d never tour with him again, but because he was such a good player – and because in a corner of my heart I loved the guy – I didn’t follow the promise through. Now Karl had made the decision for me and his news came as a mighty relief. That night I went for a long walk with Steve Wickham through the moonlit Detroit suburbs, past flat-roofed houses and the churches that stand like sentries on every corner of that city, enthusing about what we’d do with The Waterboys from here on in. For the way was clear for Steve, myself, and Anto to emerge as the three-man soul of the band.

Karl stayed on till our final American concert in New York a week later, but as we burned the miles the vibes in the band were weird. Everything was splintered. Some people on their way in, others on the way out. Karl wasn’t the only one splitting: Chris Whitten would be leaving after New York too. When we returned to London we’d have to audition and rehearse new players all over again for the next leg of the tour starting ten days later. Between Chicago and Detroit we fired our tour manager, a hapless ex-pat Englishman called Biff, Kurfirst’s man, whose levels of ineptitude were matched only by his good nature. Biff was demoted to humble roadie, a position in which he seemed far happier, and our usual roadie, a taciturn Brixtonian called Jim Chapman, was elevated to tour manager. Kurfirst didn’t like it but, trying to keep my ramshackle tour rolling somewhere in the freezing Midwest of America, I was past caring whether my manager blew his top in the comfort of his Broadway office.

In mid November we flew from the Midwestern snows into the mellow balm of California and in L.A. we stayed in a motel where oily-furred rats scurried round the bottom of a dried-up swimming pool. At night we played two sets at the famous Roxy club, a funky, dark neon-crusted shebeen of a shithole on Sunset Strip. The guest list was a roll call of L.A. scene-makers and punk rock aristocracy; someone told us Bob Dylan was coming and there was a seriously buzzing atmosphere in the joint. Our trumpet player, Roddy Lorimer, a wire-haired Glaswegian with the purest, most soaring sound in rock, had joined the tour and somehow all seven of us fitted on the egg-box-sized stage. Dylan didn’t show but his rumoured presence added an extra edge to the performance. We would encounter him for real, soon enough.

After the show in Berkeley the band went sailing on San Francisco Bay with the crew of a Greenpeace boat, but I flew on ahead to New York, scene of our final American concert, to stay with Kate Lovecraft, a moth to the flame. Our love affair had been flickering on and off. We’d split up transatlantically a couple of times during The Waterboys’ British dates, then got back together in New York at the start of the American stint. We were ‘on’ now, but only just, and the final drama was about to play.

On the early morning of the show, lying in Kate’s bed and drowsing in the hinterland between sleep and waking, I became aware of sounds penetrating my dream. Then I heard
footsteps approaching, bare feet slapping on a wooden floor. The bedclothes were ripped off me. My skin felt the cold rush of air as Kate’s voice, in one of its high-pitched cartoon manifestations, burst on my consciousness: ‘Ha! I
found
it! I saw it in my
mind
! I knew it
psychically
and
here’s
the evidence!’ I rolled over and looked up. She was standing over the bed, an explosion, hair piled high on her head, holding something in her hand and waving it triumphantly. I squinted until the thing came into focus. A notepad.
My
notepad, from my inside jacket pocket. She started to quote from it in a singsong voice: ‘Do I love Kate or do I love Krista? I probably love neither.’

I couldn’t remember writing these words, but as she thrust the notepad an inch in front of my face I saw them there in my own once private handwriting, incontrovertible evidence of ... what? Not infidelity, certainly, but of confusion and uncertainty, yes. Guilty as charged. I felt in my guts I didn’t love Kate but my desire to please her and hold onto my illusions wouldn’t let me admit it: the incriminating words had been written in a rare moment of self-awareness. Krista was my Canadian ex-girlfriend, the one who’d asked me if it was easy to write songs, sparking the writing of ‘The Whole Of The Moon’. She’d turned up backstage at the Berkeley show and had fatefully found her way into my journal musings. Before I could respond Kate threw the notepad at me, swivelled on her heels and vanished into the bathroom, slamming the door and locking it from inside with impeccable dramatic timing. Within seconds I heard the rush of water hissing from the shower and then another sound, her voice, now blithe and carefree, singing a familiar old song, ‘I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out Of My Hair’. I sat up, horribly awake. I had a drama-queen eruption of the first order to negotiate my way through but what really worried me, what shook me to the core, was that Kate Lovecraft appeared to have clairvoyantly seen something I’d written days ago in my notepad, something I’d even forgotten I’d written. How else could she have known to look for the evidence in my pocket?

It didn’t occur to me, nor would it for some years, that she’d simply been snooping in my garments and when she found something incriminating, made up a story about being psychic in order to mask her actions. To my twenty-six-year-old self, it appeared alarmingly clear that this powerful, unpredictable woman who over the short months of our relationship had shattered every personal boundary I had, had just breached the last one.
She could see into my mind!
Kate eventually emerged from the bathroom and after apologies and self-abasements on my part we negotiated a truce. She came to the concert that night and all, briefly, was sweetness again. But I was desperate to get back to London to regroup my thoughts and emotions.

I say she had broken all of my boundaries, but before I left New York the next day she made an assault on one more.

In the late morning Kate and I went to a café on Columbus Avenue. Having seen The Waterboys perform for the first time the night before she had some feedback on the show for me. She took out a sketch pad covered with her handwriting and began reading aloud instructions regarding the songs that worked and the ones that didn’t, what I should say on stage and what I shouldn’t, the good moves I made and the bad ones, how I should have ordered my songs, and so on. She was telling me how to make my music and present it to the public. I sat and watched, as if from some great distance, as this woman pushed her way with absolute entitlement into the most intimate relationship of my life – the one between me and my music. I heard her once-devastating voice fall away like a murmur. I saw her face, pinched and sun-shrunken, and it held no more power over me. My authority over my music was one boundary she would not cross and in a moment of clear, crystalline certainty my mind and heart were made up. At last I had found the bedrock of my self-worth. There would be no scene – a phone call or letter from the removed calm of London would suffice – but Kate Lovecraft and I were indisputably over.