Adventures of a Waterboy (28 page)

Two weeks later I went on tour. The shows were good but Dave Jaymes and I had started to argue about anything and everything: which interviews to do (Dave wanted me to do them all, I wanted to be selective to keep my currency high), the length of my one-man shows (Dave’s view: if I played shorter gigs I’d have more energy for interviews), touring costs, and how to deal with the new order at EMI. And when records aren’t selling the scope for disagreement between artist and manager expands exponentially. A particularly fractious issue was the question of whether to release singles in multiple formats. I’d always resisted this music business ploy, designed to get fans to buy the same record several times and so give a single an inflated chart entry. The scam worked by offering different tracks on the B-sides of the various editions, all of which the diehards would feel compelled to buy. It was scuzzy of record companies and artists to take advantage of this degree of fandom, a kind of bullshit tax on the devoted. But after the single of ‘Bring ’Em All In’ sank I came under intense pressure from J.F. Cecillon and his minions to issue the follow-up, ‘Building The City Of Light’, in two CDs and a seven-inch single, each with differing bonus tracks. Dave agreed with them.

I was still holding out when one day, as Diane and I stepped into a hotel lift together, she suggested I should take Dave’s opinion seriously because ‘he’s got lots of experience of having hit singles’. ‘What do you mean?’ I asked as the lift whirred upwards. ‘Oh,’ she replied, ‘he was in Modern Romance. They had seven top-ten hits, you know.’ The lift stopped, but I felt as if someone had opened my skull and the contents of my brain were still ascending into some abominable ether-land.
I was being managed by the bass player from Modern Romance!
This distressing revelation didn’t help my relationship with Dave, for now whenever I looked at him I saw the spectre of the blonde-bobbed geezer preening away on
Top Of The Pops
like a mocking shade. Our days were numbered.

Nevertheless I caved in and let Chrysalis have their ‘formats’ for ‘Building The City Of Light’. But it availed us nothing; the single bombed and I felt I’d compromised myself, the fans and the music. Nor did we have any more luck in North America, where the album was dead in the water. Having disappeared not just once, but twice (in 1986 and again in 1993) I was seen in the States as someone who’d passed up his chances, and the US rock media had no further use for me. Even worse: by sodding off to Findhorn it looked like I’d spurned success to pursue spirituality instead, thus defying the prime credo of fame at the fag-end of the twentieth century:
thou shalt have no other gods than me
.

Then John Kennedy called to tell me, almost tearfully, that he was giving up his lawyer’s practice to become head of Polygram Records. I was glad for John, but gutted for me. My ally of a decade, the artful big brother who’d been my consigliore, fixer and protector, was gone. So soon were Dave and Diane. Whatever the nature of the alchemy at that first meeting, it hadn’t translated into a successful working relationship, and shortly after the end of the
Bring ’Em All In
tour I let them go. Their place as my advisers was now taken by Alan McGee, who emerged as an unexpected friend and mentor. I asked Alan to listen to the demos for my next album,
Still Burning
, and after hearing them and pronouncing himself excited he offered to be A&R man for the record and oversee the recording process from start to finish. This was highly irregular considering I wasn’t on his label, but working with a man like McGee, who lived and breathed rock’n’roll, was more attractive than running my songs by the new guard at Chrysalis.

Alan became a regular visitor to the house on Lansdowne Road, where I played him my songs and listened to his comments. And it was a lot of listening, because McGee was one of the world’s great talkers. A gregarious Scottish skinhead invariably dressed in a checked shirt, Alan would hold forth in Glaswegian tones for twenty, thirty, forty minutes non-stop, while I sat on the edge of my chair trying to find a gap to get a word in. He had a cunning, honest-but-flattering way of giving musical criticism. ‘That song’s no as guid as some o’ yer ithers,’ he’d say tactfully when underwhelmed by a demo. And when he liked something he was spectacularly positive. ‘It’s a thing o’ genius, man,’ he’d coo. ‘Beau’iful, beau’iful.’ At that precise moment in rock history McGee was king of the castle, having discovered the era’s totemic band, Oasis. This wasn’t a big deal to me; what mattered was that he understood Mike Scott/Waterboys music. But the fact he was championing me, waxing lyrical about my new songs and old records in newspapers and on radio, was a boon. McGee’s word carried weight in the music media and if anything could buy me a hip ticket and restore my commercial and critical fortunes, it was his patronage.

EMI, meanwhile, were perplexed. Here was the famous boss of a rival label advising their artist, stealing the A&R cap from under their noses. But though I’d lost leverage at EMI due to the failure of
Bring ’Em All In
and the firing of the men who signed me, I still had some layer of mystery, a cultivated fog of professional distance between me and the company. I deployed it now, staying out of range and phone contact till my creative relationship with McGee was established and the direction of the album was set. Then one morning McGee and I went to see J.F. Cecillon’s new label manager at Chrysalis, a chubby boy called Mark Collen who was still getting used to the dizzy novelty of finding himself in charge of a major label. Deploying our best diplomacy we sold Mark on our song selection and reassured him I wasn’t about to do a bunk to Creation Records. To my amazement he agreed to everything we asked for. As we left the EMI building, McGee, impressed by our smooth passage through what we’d expected to be hostile territory, trilled, ‘Ye’re wi’ the right record company, man. They luvv yew in there, they luvv yew!’ They wouldn’t for long.

Now the wheels clicked into gear. Chrysalis booked recording time and I flew Niko Bolas over as co-producer. Niko and I put together a top-notch studio band: Jim Keltner, whose drumming on the Waterboys San Francisco sessions in 1986 I’d never forgotten; Chris Bruce, the ace lead guitarist I’d met in New York; and Pino Palladino, a tall, gangly bassist mate of Niko’s, best known, rather unjustly, for his slithery ‘pyoing, yoing’ fretless playing on hits by British singer Paul Young a decade earlier. I was especially thrilled to be on the cusp of working with Keltner again. In the weeks before the sessions I listened over and over to his playing on John Lennon’s ‘Jealous Guy’, George Harrison’s
Concert For Bangladesh
, and the 1986 Waterboys tapes. When the first day of recording came I couldn’t quite believe he was really in London, but my crew manager Malcolm confirmed that yes, Jim had already checked into the hotel and was waiting for me at Olympic Studios. I walked in and there was the old god standing by his drum kit wearing what looked like the same shades and leather waistcoat he’d worn all those years before in Fantasy Studios. He addressed me as ‘Michael’, smiled like a million dollars through his scrubby buffalo beard, and held out to me a sure, steady hand with long wizard-like fingers.

When we played Keltner was as great as I remembered, driving the music with a profound combination of power and sensitivity. And I could see why Pino was known in music circles as one of the world’s best bassists: every economic note was in the right place, the fabled
sweet spot
, for maximum funk and groovability. Chris Bruce was no slouch either: a fashion-conscious black dandy and switchblade-sharp guitar player who invented all his own parts, choc-full of hooks, and never needed a word of guidance. But working with a hired one-off band and a set of structured songs was very different from blowing free improvised music the way Keltner and The Waterboys did in those far-off days in San Francisco. This band didn’t have the telepathic familiarity I’d enjoyed with Steve and Anto, and the sound we made devolved to the area of crossover between our various skills and styles – a kind of classic-but-conservative rock meets soul hybrid. Working Nashville style (me showing the guys a new song each morning then spending the next six or seven hours recording it), we cut ten tracks in as many days including at least one potential hit. ‘Love Anyway’ was a mid-paced rocker with a hustling Keltner groove and a hazy, chiming guitar figure, which both McGee and EMI, in their different ways, pronounced a winner. ‘It’s fuckin’ beau’iful genius, man!’ said McGee like the Glasgow punk rocker he was. ‘It eez ze beezness.’ said J.F. Cecillon, purring like the crafty fat cat he was.

The playback for Chrysalis was held in the Olympic control room. I’d always found playbacks excruciating and preferred label executives to listen to my new records without me there, so they didn’t feel they had to feign enthusiasm or dance round my feelings. But the maintenance of good relations required I bite the bullet this time and invite J.F. and Mark Collen to the studio; after all, they’d played more than fair by indulging my work with McGee. To my surprise, they were remarkably well behaved. Properly house-trained, they didn’t make the usual record company faux-pas of getting song titles wrong, nor did they mark the tracks out of five like Geffen’s Tom Zutaut had done once (but only once). The playback was a success and the only jarring note was Niko’s unwitting insistence on addressing J.F. as ‘Jeff’ throughout, which the Frenchman admirably contrived not to notice.

J.F. and Mark were sufficiently enthused to pay for the recording band to reassemble for a one-off show at the EMI conference, a three-day junket in a motorway hotel somewhere outside Birmingham. Keltner, Pino, Chris and I descended on this wasteland and in a garish neon-lit conference suite one lunchtime we romped through two songs for the gathered executives – possibly the strangest gig I’d ever played, right up there with the Maybole Orange Lodge and Burns Night in Findhorn. But it worked. EMI and Chrysalis were ‘motivated’, I was suddenly popular at my record company (a welcome if unfamiliar feeling), and ‘Love Anyway’ was proclaimed by one and all to be a ‘smash’.

Before I could get back to the happy land of chart success, however, I had to find new management. My first choice was Alan McGee but he refused, saying, ‘Ah dinnae want tae take yer money, man.’ Instead he suggested a then-successful English fellow called Osbert Prince who, Alan claimed, ‘got the big picture.’ Osbert was a well-tailored fellow who knew his way round a wine list and a tour schedule, but Alan undercut his recommendation by warning me, ‘Dinnae trust him wi’ yer money’, which didn’t exactly sell me on the guy. Next I beat a path to a selection of London’s greatest living managers, including Dire Straits’ veteran gatekeeper, a deliciously dodgy bon viveur called Ed Bicknell who I’d turned down when he’d courted The Waterboys in the late eighties and who now got his gentle revenge, keeping me dangling for several months before regretfully declining my overtures.

In fact all the managers I approached turned me down. I’d just had an album that stiffed and any bigshot with a grasp of arithmetic could see there wasn’t money to be made unless
Still Burning
went seriously sky-high. Even if it did I was known to be a difficult, driven customer who didn’t like making videos, argued about single formats and, for all anyone knew, would up sticks after the next tour and vanish to a commune or the rustic fringes of Ireland. After a long series of courteous refusals and unreturned phone calls – music biz refusals are almost always unreturned phone calls – I accepted defeat.

Finding a live band was easier. A combination of auditions and chance encounters produced three new confederates: a wily keyboard player called James Hallawell, a Keltneresque drummer called Jeremy Stacey, and a young Dublin guitarist, Gavin Ralston, the rock’n’rolling nephew of my old trad mucker Seamus Begley. Moonlighting on bass was Liverpudlian singer Ian McNabb. I’d met Ian in the eighties at a posh Liverpool hotel after a Waterboys show. He turned up with Mac from the Bunnymen, we had a rollicking three-way argument about politics and world peace, almost came to blows, and I never heard from either of them again till McNabb phoned me out of the blue in Findhorn in 1994. To my surprise he asked me to come and do a couple of Waterboys songs with him at the Glastonbury Festival – the appearance that turned out to be my bracing reintroduction to the British rock public.

This new ensemble was a happy band of compatible personalities and, as happens in happy bands, everyone soon had a nickname. McNabb was ‘Boots’; James, who had a penchant for impersonating English movie gangsters, was ‘Razors’; Gavin was ‘Fingers’ on account of his speedy guitar playing; and I, not unreasonably, was ‘Tonsils’. Only Jeremy had a nickname he didn’t much care for. McNabb, ribbing him unfairly for being a bread-head (a player motivated by money, not music) suggested Jeremy stick a credit-card machine on his bass drum and swipe my card every time he played a cymbal crash, a suggestion which lumbered the unfortunate drummer with the name ‘Swipe’.

A fortnight before
Still Burning
was released we played our debut shows – my first electric band concerts in an unbelievable seven years – at a grimy London rock club called the Garage. This was the brainwave of my then-agent Paul Boswell, who figured the best way to regenerate some rock cred was to play in a khazi. But the shows coincided with a monstrous pre-millennial heat wave and for five broiling nights band and audience sweltered in a maelstrom of furnace-like temperatures.

The day before the first gig the group went to Johnstons on the King’s Road to buy stage clothes. I gave each musician a budget of £500 and for an hour we plundered the shop like a bunch of kids, finally emerging with our sartorial booty. But instead of looking like a gang with a unified style, which I’d forgotten takes months or years of hanging out together to achieve, when we took the stage at the Garage the following night we were like The Five Ages Of Rock. Razors was a fifties zoot-suited thug; Fingers, with pointed sideburns and broad-shouldered pin-stripe jacket, looked like a refugee from a 1981 Ultravox video; Boots sported the maroon two-tone suit of a spivvy Berwick Street mod; Swipe was a Seattle grungemeister with goatee and camouflage jacket; and in my velvet flares and ruffled Regency shirt I was a cross between a cabaret singer and one of The Kinks circa 1967.